Alison Copus

This is very real. Britain has a serious intellectual and policy China weakness. This is especially a problem in the Foreign Office. Beyond summitry and crisis management which the office does well, the institution remains excellent at our traditional friends (G7, Canada, Australia) and our traditional enemy (Russia) but with the exception of India is very weak on countries that fall in between. Shockingly to me that includes China where the overall intellectual and policy quality in King Charles Street is sadly very low. There is nothing like what Jake Sullivan built up in DC: a network of experts and new capacity that are not China-country experts per se but expert on the intersection between China and global trends from tech to supply lines and specific nodes of manufacturing. There is also nothing like China House which Tony Blinken built up in the State Department: a China expert hub that built up this up in house and exposed the Secretary of State to debates and challenges stemming from China’s global impact not uniquely in the bilateral frame. What I found myself being served up was China, not every day, but China occasionally, effectively as it came up in bilateral ties. However this is rare as we don’t have a richly summited relationship with Beijing like with our other essential relationships. The viewpoint in house felt very much “Hong Kong 2010” and totally disconnected from European, Indian and American policy debates about China. This isn’t entirely the FCDO’s fault. It reflects a British weakness. The London China analysis scene and China debate is thin, siloed and small. It doesn’t infuse the national debate. This is in sharp contrast to the British Russia debate, which is deep and rich and enriches Parliament and the media with real knowledge about Russia. Head and shoulders above France or Germany by far. This isn’t going to solve itself on its own. It’s also not something I think government can fix on its own. What we need is a group of major philanthropists to come together with government to build our China knowledge infrastructure for the 21st century. And no, this isn’t the kind of suggestion the Cabinet Office will come up with like “hire 12 Mandarin speakers on SCS3 level.” This should be a generational project with Victorian ambition about it to enable the country to read this new world based off a significant university-scale endowment. We should be building up our China intellectual infrastructure like we did with Russian Studies at the start of the Cold War. What we need at a minimum is a highly funded and prestigious, densely connected network made up of serious think tanks, university programs, numerous fellowships, extensive school and university language programs, libraries, diplomatic and wider civil service career streams, exchanges, cultural initiatives, changes and new requirements for the BBC and public funded broadcasting and translation services. We need to know as a country, in our national debate, both what policies individual Chinese cities, universities and companies are doing well on engineering, science, tech and AI deployment we might want to adopt and also what the huge risks are to our economy and security. Given China is ahead across most scientific-engineering domains and engaging in the largest military build up in human history, we have no choice. Now the alternative, of course, unless we build this, is sub-contracting our China thinking to our American or European allies who are doing this with quite different interests or overly relying on Chinese and Hong Kong diasporas now established in London, again with a particular slant.