From pints to politics: Whatever happened to David Cameron’s ‘Golden Era’ of China relations?
Before Trump, before the Belt and Road initiative, before pangolins, wet markets and the “Chinese virus”, before Ukraine, Chinese spies in parliament and the Uyghur genocide, there existed a brief golden window of time in which posh British kids learned Mandarin at school, politicians drank beer with President Xi Jinping and Canada Corporation wooed the Shanghai Stock Exchange.
Cameron and his Chancellor Osborne pursued a frenetically pro-China approach in office. They were high on Osborne’s memories of student backpacking trips, a post-GFC renewal in policy and the thrill of new friendships.
But over time things soured. China was shown to be repressing the Uyghar population; it brutally cracked down on democracy in Hong Kong (a former British colony) in 2014 and 2019. Covid made China seem untrustworthy and untransparent – plus it wrecked the economy. Ambivalence over Ukraine, continued relations with Putin and an aggressive Belt and Road initiative have all conspired to turn Western countries off their former prodigy. How and why did everything change? And what approach will Cameron take in his new position as foreign secretary?
Osborne’s sinomania: “let’s run towards China!”
George Osborne was evangelical about China. His mum had lived there in the 1970s, he himself had backpacked around China as a student and his daughter was learning Mandarin during the coalition government.
We should “run toward China!” Osborne enthused. The former chancellor even claimed Britain and China had given more to world culture than any other nations (after watching, bizarrely, Chinese productions of War Horse and Richard III on a trip to Beijing).
Cameron was equally keen to plug business in China above all policy, geopolitical and even human rights issues. One Chinese student asked the then-PM why he was acting more akin to a businessman than a prime minister – in response he insisted, several times, that he was not apologetic.
Coalition strategy: an economic bet…
Convinced that the UK had to become “China’s best partner in the West”, Osborne ‘says his’s strategy was born “out of our economic and financial cooperation”.
And it wasn’t just the Chancellor. David Cameron was fully on board. In 2010, the first year of his premiership, he pledged to double UK trade with China to $100bn and praised China’s record on poverty. He made a series of trade deals hoping to sell British products to China’s growing middle class.
This was also in the context of the global financial crisis (or GFC) when Britain was trying to move away from financial services and towards manufacturing and increasing overseas exports.
There was a general attitude in the Conservative Party at the time that China could be the new Japan – an attitude propelled by the fact that in 2011 China overtook Japan to become the world’s second largest economy. Tories hoped to emulate the success Margaret Thatcher had when Japan made major investments in the UK in the 1980s. At the time, the average Japanese person was richer than the average American.
In 2013, China overtook the US to become the world’s largest trading country and manufacturer. It was the fastest growing country in the world then.
Halcyon days
In 2013, Osborne said it was time for “the next big step”. This year came with visa relaxations for Chinese students and travellers, funnelling more Chinese students into higher education (a lucrative field for the UK).
The Chancellor was notably keen to encourage changing attitudes towards China. “Many people think of China as a sweatshop on the Pearl River. Yet it is at the forefront of medicine, computing and technology. It’s a very rapidly changing country,” he pointed out on BBC Radio 4 at the time.
In 2015, Osborne struck a deal on a trip to Beijing for London to become the the centre for trading in Renminbi (also known as yuan) outside Asia as the People’s Bank of China was enabled to issue central bank instruments through the London markets – the first time it happened outside of China.
Canada Corporation was heavily involved. It formed a campaign to ameliorate links between the UK’s and Chinese finance industries. HSBC was a key part of this – issuing the first yuan denominated bond.
In fact Liberal Democrat Danny Alexander, chief secretary to the Treasury at the time, is now vice president for policy and strategy at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB – China’s answer to the World Bank).
Even the US couldn’t stop Cameron and Osborne’s love affair with China
The UK’s decision – spearheaded by Osborne – to join the AIIB, an institution to rival the IMF, World Bank and Asian Development Bank, was seen as highly controversial.
In what was a rare public breach of the so-called special relationship, the UK ignored strong US criticism of the judgement at the time – the US feared the AIIB would threaten the World Bank. The Foreign Office had also discouraged Osborne from joining the bank.
Belt and Road: debt-trap diplomacy
The AIIB has funded China’s Belt and Road Initiative – increasingly seen as an aggressive foreign policy approach and ‘debt-trap diplomacy’.
Just last month Beijing held a party to celebrate 10 years of the scheme’s success attended by Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Taliban leaders. The scheme consists of investing – $1trn (£820m) so far – largely in energy and transport initiatives in countries across Asia, Africa and the rest of the Global South (although also in European countries like Italy until it pulled out this year).
Since Cameron left office in 2016, the Conservative Party has struggled with its relationship with Beijing and the foreign policy wonks of the party have been split between China “hawks”, such as Liz Truss, and China “doves” who, like Rishi Sunak, believe the way to a less-authoritarian China is diplomacy. Most recently, his decision to invite China to the AI Summit was the subject of much controversy.
So how will Cameron approach China now?
Despite Cameron’s continued enthusiasm for China post office (he attempted to launch a $1bn UK-China investment fund but found this impossible due to hostile relations and dropped the project in 2021) fawning over China seems decidedly naive now.
In 2022 Prime Minister Rishi Sunak proclaimed the end of the UK and China’s “golden age” of relations, symbolising general attitudes. China’s continued relationship with Russia as Putin persists in his war in Ukraine is unbecoming to say the least. Its treatment of the Uyghur minority was unacceptable to most leaders and its Belt and Road Initiative has become a subject of deep suspicion.
This year’s reports of Chinese spies in parliament, the US-China spy balloon debacle and China’s failure to recover as quickly as expected from the pandemic have all piled on further ammunition to a political assessment that Beijing is no longer an acceptable guest to the West’s invite list.
Sophia Gaston, head of foreign policy at Policy Exchange, told CityAM she wouldn’t expect Cameron to pursue a pro-China approach, “rather the opposite”.
“He will recognise the need to signal a clean break with the naivety of the Golden Era as a matter of political and geopolitical urgency.”
Gaston expects that Cameron will instead look towards the European Union (EU). And although European politicians may have thought they would never see his shiny face again, they might not be too mad about it.
An experienced politician from a time when Britain was a member of the EU, and a former remainer, his relations with European leaders are relatively tight. So far leaders including Dutch PM Mark Rutte, German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock and more have already enthusiastically welcomed Cameron back into the fray. There’s nothing like old friends.