Britain has surrendered its ability to call China an enemy

Would you allow an enemy state to generate your electricity? What if your universities were proudly and boisterously co-operating with this adversary to develop new technologies with military uses? How about letting your foe acquire a stake in a nuclear power station?

You might think it obvious that no government with any awareness of national security could possibly permit such things. Surely not! How could you imagine otherwise?

Yet the reality is that one British government after another has allowed the People’s Republic of China to do all of the above and a lot more besides here in the United Kingdom.

That means our rulers could not publicly describe China as an “enemy” state – even if it were true. Because if it were, we would be on the road to placing our economy and society at the mercy of this enemy. Which obviously we wouldn’t do. Except that we probably are doing it.

This intellectual tangle is the best explanation for the Government’s decision, first reported in The Telegraph, to refrain from calling China an “enemy” in court even at the price of scuppering the prosecution of two parliamentary researchers for allegedly spying for Beijing.

Suddenly, this case has exposed the naivety, folly and sheer incoherence of many years of British policy towards China.

When Xi Jinping assumed supreme office in 2012, it was still just possible to believe that China might emerge as a benign status-quo power, like a giant Singapore, focused on becoming rich rather than dominating the world.

British policy under David Cameron and George Osborne was determined to assume a best case scenario. The idea was to ease Xi down the path of making China a responsible pillar of the global order, while also benefiting the UK economy. Turning Britain into the Western country most open to Chinese trade and investment was supposed to achieve both goals.

So our universities were encouraged to admit Chinese students. London became the centre for international transactions in China’s currency, the Renminbi. Then, in 2015, the government allowed China General Nuclear Power, a state-owned company, to acquire a 33.5 per cent stake in Hinkley Point C, the nuclear power station still under construction in Somerset.

If Xi had become an emollient reformer, content with China’s place in the international system, then this policy might have succeeded. If, on the other hand, the man who had spent decades fighting his way to the apex of the world’s most ruthless political movement turned out, by some amazing chance, to be a belligerent autocrat, determined to overthrow the world order, then Britain would be in grave peril.

After all, there was no way back. Once you had allowed Beijing to invest in critical infrastructure like nuclear power – and permitted a university like Manchester to admit fully 20 per cent of its students from China – these decisions would be almost impossible to reverse.

And because China swiftly became so deeply embedded in Britain’s economy and institutions, it was easy to let this process go even further. Theresa May’s government duly authorised Huawei, a Chinese company, to build the UK’s 5G network. Meanwhile, some universities publicly revelled in their joint research with Chinese counterparts, apparently ignorant of the reality that every Chinese entity is subordinate to the Communist Party and must, in the end, serve state policy.

So Manchester University breathlessly announced: “Chances of hypersonic travel heat up with new materials discovery.” The breakthrough in question was a special ceramic coating, capable of resisting the intense heat generated by an aircraft travelling at hypersonic speeds of Mach 5 or above. Manchester was proud to say that it had been achieved “in collaboration” with Central South University in Hunan province, China.

As for the uses of this new material, Manchester declared that it could “revolutionise hypersonic travel for air, space and defence purposes”. At least the university made no attempt to hide the possible military purpose of its great achievement hand-in-glove with China.

In fairness, that was in 2017 and Manchester might be less naive today. Some excesses of the “golden era” of openness have been expensively and partially rolled back. China will not be involved in future nuclear power stations; Huawei is being removed from the 5G network.