UK foreign secretary: Don’t ‘pull the shutters down’ on China

LONDON — The U.K. should not “pull the shutters down” on China, Foreign Secretary James Cleverly warned, amid fierce debate in the governing Conservative Party about ties with Beijing.

Speaking to the Guardian newspaper, Cleverly said the U.K. would not be able to get China to “completely redefine themselves” and warned it would be “really, really, really counterproductive” for London not to engage with Beijing.

Cleverly’s boss, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, has faced intense pressure from his own backbenchers over his stance on China, with critics citing national security concerns and the treatment of the Uyghur people in the Xinjiang region to urge a harder line. Sunak’s predecessor Liz Truss warned last week that Western leaders must be “much more sceptical about what is said by China and what their promises are.”

A recent foreign policy strategy from Sunak’s government stopped short of defining China as a broad “threat,” instead pitching it as an “epoch-defining and systemic challenge.”

Cleverly told the Guardian he understood why “a number of my colleagues are hawkish.”

But he warned it is “not in their interest or my interest or anyone else’s interest to just pull the shutters down on this relationship, because China will carry on carrying on whether we engage with them or not.”

The U.K. foreign secretary said he had “no intention of throwing away what influence I do have” over China, and hit out at calls to straightforwardly define how the British government views the country.

“I keep being asked to sum up the nature of the relationship in one word,” he said. “Are they competition? Are they a threat? Are they a challenge? Are they an opportunity? But we don’t distill any other bilateral relationship into one word.”

Britain should, he said, instead remain “clear-eyed, focused on what is in our national interest, and what is in the interest of the world more generally.”

Cleverly is expected to deliver a major speech next week in which he will flesh out the U.K.’s approach to China.