Living with the Dragon:
What does a coherent UK policy towards China look like?
Edited by Robert Seely & Robert Clark
Civitas, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-912581-58-0
Policy institutes are an intellectual fraud. When they first became prominent in the 1970s, we were led to accept them as a point of connection between men of great learning and the everyday world of politics. Scholars would write on some matter of public interest. They would bring to this a lifetime of research and thought. They would go on television and write in the newspapers to explain their recommendations. Politicians of an intellectual taste would listen and join in the discussion. The result would be an improvement in the government of the country.
The truth is wholly different. What often happens is that an underpaid drudge will turn out a scissors and paste report on waiting times for dental treatment. This will be presented at a meeting where politicians and the relevant business interests have an excuse to come together and make arrangements to their mutual benefit. That, or a policy institute will be directly commissioned by some business interest to father a report that will then give the politicians an excuse for doing what they have already been bribed to do. That, or a policy institute will be a wholly controlled megaphone for a powerful combination of state and business interests. The idea that policy institutes are there to bring engaged but dispassionate scholarship to public life is a joke. I stopped going to their events long before anyone took the trouble to ban me from them.
The Civitas report Living with the Dragon is a fair example of why the utterances of these organisations should be met with varied ridicule and indifference. Before, however, I pass to the content of the report, I will notice that one of its contributors is Malcolm Rifkind. I assume without knowledge of the truth that he wrote his chapter himself. If so, he begins:
China is becoming the most serious challenge to the West, and to the world as a whole, because of its economic growth, military strength and aggressive foreign policy as regards its territorial claims and record on human rights.
This is a man who was approached in 2015 by Daily Telegraph and Channel Four researchers posing as representatives of a fake Chinese firm. They asked him to help gain advantages for them in the British market. He is said to have assured them he could gain “useful access” to every British ambassador in the world. His fee for half a day’s work on this would be “somewhere in the region of £5,000 to £8,000.” Why he has changed his mind since then about British involvement with China is something I will let others consider. Something I will not even bother considering is why this man was not driven from public life in 2015, and why he is not shunned by Civitas today.
Now to the report itself. It is presented as a sober assessment of what options the United Kingdom may have regarding China. What it delivers is less a coherent strategy than a projection of ruling class anxieties. Written by men deeply embedded within a system that has eroded the freedoms they claim to defend, the report is filled with contradictions and omissions.
Freedom – What Freedom?
The report opens with this grand claim:
The 21st Century will mark a struggle between two visions for humanity: between open societies whose governments are the servants of their people; and between closed states whose regimes seek to master them. This century will be a contest between those that seek to use the great inventions of this age – artificial intelligence (AI) and big data – to aid humanity, or those that seek to control it. The United States (US) and its liberal democratic allies such as the United Kingdom (UK) represent the former, whilst China – in its current guise – and its authoritarian allies, the latter.
So the “open societies” of the West need to confront Chinese authoritarianism. Of course, the contributors fail to acknowledge the erosion of freedom in the United Kingdome itself – an erosion to which they have personally contributed, or watched in silence while their friends did the work of erosion. Over the past few years, British citizens have faced arbitrary lockdowns, intrusive surveillance, and widespread censorship and even violent persecution of dissenting opinions. These outrages were preceded by several generations of transformation, in which our traditional laws and freedoms were swept aside by an enlarged and greatly empowered British State. A country where protest is stifled and privacy is systematically invaded cannot convincingly champion liberty abroad.
The authors warn of use by the Chinese Government of surveillance technologies to control its population, yet the United Kingdom has some of the highest levels of surveillance in the world. According to Statista, there are over 7.5 million CCTV cameras in the United Kingdom, which is one for every eleven people. Hypocrisy undercuts the moral authority claimed by the report.
1979: The Great Offshoring Begins
The report mentions the rise of China as a geopolitical challenge but ignores how this was enabled by the British and American ruling classes. Since 1979, these ruling classes began the systematic export of manufacturing capacity to countries like China. This had little to do with cheaper production. It was a calculated strategy to dismantle industrial power at home, which was seen as a barrier to financialisation and the domination of monied interests.
The gutting of British industry was a fatal blow to the working classes. Between 1979 and 2013, manufacturing employment in the United Kingdom fell from seven million to under three million. This was not an accident; it was a choice. By outsourcing production, the ruling class weakened trade unions and ended the working class unrest that had defined British life since the 1940s. At the same time, those displaced from productive industries were pushed into low-paid service jobs or absorbed into expanding state bureaucracies, where they could be controlled through ideology rather than economic power.
China’s Unexpected Response
What the British and American ruling classes failed to anticipate was the ability of the Chinese to turn this arrangement to their own benefit. The assumption was that China would remain a low-wage sweatshop, supplying goods while control remained in the West over design, innovation, and capital. Instead, the Chinese used the flood of Western investment to spark an immense economic transformation.
China’s share of global manufacturing rose from three per cent in 1990 to nearly a third today. China has overtaken the United States. In terms of manufacturing capacity, it may have overtaken both the United States and the European Union combined. The decision to outsource production handed China not only wealth but also expertise. Technologies designed in the West were refined and improved in Chinese factories. The Chinese have begun to make innovations of their own, and may be ahead of the West in certain key technologies. As the report itself notes, “China’s industrial policies have created a vast domestic capacity across sectors from semiconductors to green energy.” This reality undermines the report’s claims that Chineses success is primarily due to state control and coercion.
Demonising China as a Distraction
The report spends much time criticising Chinese human rights abuses, its surveillance state, and its assertive foreign policy. These are real issues, but they are selectively discussed. While the Chinese Government’s actions in Xinjiang or Hong Kong are condemned, the report is silent on comparable Western failings. The British Government was complicit in the extraordinary rendition of detainees during the War on Terror. The British Government has encouraged the Zelensky regime in Kiev. The British Government has given military assistance and diplomatic cover to genocide in the Middle East. Everything the British Government touches it destabilises and ruins.
This selective outrage serves a purpose. Demonising China distracts from domestic failures and shifts blame for Western decline. The report’s focus on “economic resilience” and “supply chain security” reveals its true aim: to maintain the position of a monied ruling class, not to improve the lives of ordinary people. The proposed measures, such as decoupling from Chinese supply chains, would drive up costs for consumers and further erode the living standards of ordinary working people – and these have been in decline for at least a generation..
The Real Threat to Freedom
The report makes much of China’s “coercive diplomacy” and “state-backed espionage.” But the real danger to the lives, liberty and property of the British people comes not from Peking but from London and Washington. Successive British governments have abolished our ancestral liberties, hollowed out democratic institutions, and centralised power in ways that mirror the systems they criticise in China. They have impoverished us with their taxes and regulations. Their Net Zero policies are a blueprint for economic collapse. They keep us cold in winter. They are exhorting us to eat bugs once their agricultural policies have made us hungry enough, They have done and are doing all this to us. While the Chinese Government has used its system to lift hundreds of millions out of poverty, our own ruling class has presided over stagnation and decline.
A Path Forward?
If the authors – named and unnamed – are serious about competing with China, they must first look inward. Allowing a revival of domestic industry, investing in real infrastructure, and reducing dependence on financial speculation are essential steps. Rather than decoupling from China in a panic, the United Kingdom should seek a balanced relationship that protects its interests without resorting to Cold War hysteria.
The Civitas report does raise valid concerns about China’s growing influence. But these concerns are overshadowed by the hypocrisy and short-sightedness of its proposals. For a ruling class that has gutted its own economy to complain about China’s rise is ironic and even shameless.
Conclusion
Living with the Dragon is a flawed and self-serving document. It reflects the fears of a ruling class that has profited from globalisation but now finds itself outmanoeuvred by the very system it created – a ruling class that stands, like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, aghast at its own folly. If we are to manage our relationship with China effectively, it will need more than finger-pointing and moral posturing. It will need an honest reckoning with our own failures as a nation and a commitment to policies that benefit the many rather than the few.
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