Rishi Sunak has been accused of “drifting into appeasement” after hastily arranging last-minute face-to-face talks with Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the G20 summit.
The meeting on the margins of the leaders’ gathering in Indonesia on Wednesday was organised after Mr Sunak signalled he was softening his position on China, describing the Far Eastern giant as a “challenge” rather than a “threat” to UK national security. Their encounter comes a day after meetings between Mr Xi and both Joe Biden and Emmanuel Macron.
Downing Street insisted the prime minister will be “clear-eyed” in his interactions with Mr Xi and continues to view Beijing as an economic threat to the UK.
But they said he recognised that China’s prominent global position in the modern world means a “frank and constructive” relationship was needed on issues ranging from global warming to the war in Ukraine and global health.
Mr Sunak’s decision to meet Mr Xi sparked alarm from Conservative China hawk Sir Iain Duncan Smith, who is one of seven parliamentarians subject to sanctions from Beijing because of their outspoken condemnations of its actions in Xinjiang and Hong Kong.
The former Tory leader said: “I am worried that the present prime minister, when he meets Xi Jinping, will be perceived as weak because it now looks like we’re drifting into appeasement with China, which is a disaster as it was in the 1930s and so it will be now.”
“They only understand strength and strength of purpose. Xi Jinping will see him as a weak leader and that’s how Xi Jinping behaves.”
Tory member of the Commons foreign affairs committee Bob Seely said: “Of course we need to be talking, but we cannot normalise relations.
“First, China is being more aggressive towards Taiwan, not less. Second, we are becoming dangerously over-dependent on China for our economic supply chains, and third, their human rights abuses are not improving.”
Campaigner Luke de Pulford of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China warned: “Xi Jinping’s government is genocidal, tears up international treaties and refuses to play by trading rules. For decades we have fed the beast, which has now become a monster so powerful that it may be too late to stop.
“The prime minister cannot allow Xi Jinping to think he has got away with it, signalling business as usual. All eyes now on Rishi Sunak. He needs to stand up for Britain, international standards and human rights and deliver an unequivocal defence of our values, sticking to the plan he laid out on the campaign trail.”
Britain’s relations with China have sunk into the deep freeze since Theresa May was the last prime minister to meet with Mr Xi, on a visit to Beijing in 2018.
London and Beijing are at loggerheads over the mistreatment of the Muslim Uyghurs, the crackdown on protest in former colony Hong Kong and the UK’s exclusion of Chinese companies from sensitive nuclear and communications contracts.
During the summer’s Conservative leadership contest, Mr Sunak named China as “the biggest long-term threat to Britain and the world’s economic and national security” and pledged a range of measures to counter its influence.
But on arrival in Indonesia, he significantly dialed down his rhetoric, saying that China was “undoubtedly the biggest state-based threat to our economic security”, but that in national security terms it was a “systemic challenge” rather than a “threat”.
His comments brought the UK into alignment with a recent US assessment, and made clear that Mr Sunak will not pursue predecessor Liz Truss’s plan to upgrade China to a “threat”, alongside Russia, in Britain’s official Integrated Review on security, defence and foreign policy priorities.
But shadow foreign secretary David Lammy said: “The government’s failure to produce its long-promised China strategy, after years of different Conservative prime ministers flip-flopping between talking tough and acting soft, leaves Sunak in a weak position in his meeting with President Xi.
“Labour would complete a full audit of the UK-China relationship. We would make no compromises on Britain’s national security, raise human rights concerns and China’s failure to condemn Putin’s illegal war, while engaging on climate change, trade and global health.”
Mr Sunak’s efforts to dial down tensions with Beijing echoed the stance of Joe Biden in his first in-person talks as president with Mr Xi on Monday, in which he attempted to position the relationship between their two superpowers as one of competition, not conflict.
Speaking to reporters travelling with him to the summit venue of Bali, the prime minister at one point used the phrase “systemic threat” to describe China, but swiftly corrected himself to “systemic challenge” and used that terminology for the remainder of his comments.
“My view is that China poses a systemic challenge to our values and interests and it represents the biggest state-based threat to our economic security,” said Mr Sunak. “I think that view, by the way, is highly aligned with our allies.”
But he added: “I also think that China is an indisputable fact of the global economy and we’re not going to be able to resolve shared global challenges like climate change, or public health, or indeed actually dealing with Russia and Ukraine, without having a dialogue with them.”
The apparent bid to de-escalate tensions came as Mr Biden took a conciliatory tone in his eve-of-summit meeting with Mr Xi in a luxury Bali hotel.
After talks stretching more than three hours, Mr Biden said there need not be a “new Cold War” with China and said he did not believe that Beijing had imminent plans to invade Taiwan.
For his part Mr Xi – travelling abroad for only the second time since the start of the Covid crisis – said that China-US relations “should not be a zero-sum game in which you rise and I fall”.
In a welcome diplomatic breakthrough for the West, Mr Xi took a notably tougher stance on Russia, joining Mr Biden in condemning Moscow’s nuclear threats against Ukraine.
Downing Street said that Mr Sunak was ready to raise human rights issues with Mr Xi, and said he was confident that voters would recognise that relations with foreign powers were inevitably “complex and nuanced”.
“The challenges posed by China are systemic, they’re long term, and it’s a country fundamentally different with fundamentally different values to ours,” said the PM’s official spokesperson. “But equally, none of the issues that we are discussing at the G20 – be it the global economy, Ukraine, climate change, global health – none of them can be addressed without coordinated action by the world’s major economies and of course that includes China.”
Another of the sanctioned MPs, Conservative Tim Loughton, said the PM should put the removal of measures against them “top of his agenda” in talks with Mr Xi.
“China may be a long way off being our ally but it helps no one if they carry on acting as an enemy of the West,” said Mr Loughton. “There is much that the prime minister needs to discuss with China but it must be done in a completely frank and honest way.
“And that starts with China understanding that it cannot use the tactics it deploys to suppress its own people in China against those who speak out in the West.
“It cannot carry on buying malign influence in infrastructure projects, boardrooms and university campuses in such an underhand way and the PM needs to call Xi to account for this. ”
The chair of the Commons foreign affairs committee Alicia Kearns, a Tory MP and member of the China Research Group, welcomed Sunak’s meeting with Mr Xi.
“It is important they meet to prevent miscalculations,” she said. “We cannot simply cut off China, we must work to create the space for dialogue, challenge and cooperation.”
