The first time I walked into Jean-Marie Le Pen’s office, it was in Brussels. Having spent months trying to secure a meeting with him in Paris, I realized that it would be a lot easier to set this up at the European Parliament – where no one wanted anything to do with him.

Countless letters to the Front National’s then head of press had created a tenuous connection with her: we had moved from “who are you exactly?” (a PhD student studying the FN), to “in principle, yes” (“but not now”), and finally to a relationship, of sorts, in which I donned the mantel of supplicant on a weekly basis and she magnanimously showed increasing amounts of calendar flexibility. We reached the high-point of our calendar courtship when she finally revealed the name and phone number of the woman who handled “le Chef’s” appointments in Brussels and the specific dates on which I was most likely to clinch an interview.

This was summer 1996. I had a studious, academic, detailed knowledge of Jean-Marie Le Pen and his party. And I had scoured countless interviews, watched him on French television and listened to him on French radio. I had read multiple accounts of populism, in Europe and elsewhere (from the nineteenth-century Russians to the emerging Europeans, via the twentieth-century Latin Americans), examined the geography of votes, the historical lineage, the Poujade references and the links to fascism and authoritarianism. And though all of it was crucial, these strands did not manage to come together to explain the increasing amount of traction that the FN exercised over French politics, the French party system and the French, tout-court.

The one thing I had not done was interact with Le Pen. So, I did not know what to expect but I expected something. I expected something to fall into place that would provide me with the insight that would bring the rest together. It took years before that crucial insight finally came into focus.

In 2017, I had the privilege to travel around the world, speaking about China in places as far afield as Vancouver, Sao Paolo, Manila, Kuala Lumpa, Queenstown and Singapore. In Europe I went to Riga, Athens, Belgrade, Rome, Copenhagen, Brussels, Berlin and Dublin, and in China to Tianjin, Shanghai, Beijing and Hong Kong. Across 20 countries, over four continents, I had a unique insight at a particular moment into how China was starting to impact on the wider world.

In each of these places there was one thing in common: China mattered. The question was one of degree. In Manila, speaking with the local Ministry of Foreign Affairs, it was about how to balance the Philippines’ long, deep and extensive relationship with the United States with the need, despite having limited capacity, to gain more from the commercial relationship with their huge regional neighbour, only a few hundred kilometres across the South China Sea. For Singapore, at a major conference on the Belt and Road Initiative, it was a question of how best to continue being close to both Washington and Beijing – particularly in view of the increasing pressure on the city state by the country that claimed to be the ancestral origin of most of its population. In New Zealand, in the almost impossibly natural beauty of the Southern Islands, the anxiety was palpable at a meeting of business and government figures who were experiencing the attentions of the People’s Republic as never before. Malaysia was still dealing with the impact of the missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, on which many Chinese tourists were travelling, which had simply vanished in 2014. Feelings towards China were more ambiguous there.

If Asia is the frontline of hard thinking about China’s emerging power at a time when the United States has started to retreat, then Europe and North America were a fairly febrile second front. In Vancouver – often called a Chinese paradise because of the combination of excellent Chinese food, great weather, and a large émigré population – at a business conference where the usual discourse would have been warm platitudes and friendly words, the young, newly arrived Chinese ambassador berated the audience of Canadians for sticking by outmoded, old fashioned ideas about his country.

According to the Office for National Statistics (ONS), China is not the UK’s largest trading partner, as is the case for many other countries in the world. In terms of UK imports, China ranks after the European Union and the United States. In terms of UK exports, China comes fourth after the EU, the United States and what is described as “Residual Gulf Arabian countries”. In 2017, in terms of overall flows of trade, China exported to the UK approximately twice what it imported. When services as a component of this are remoted, then the figure becomes more like 2.5 times. Compared to the amounts between the UK and the EU, however, China shrinks dramatically. In 2017, the UK exported £235 billion in goods and services to the other 27 member states of the Union, and imported £318 billion. The EU therefore accounts for about nine times the amount of the overall trade with the People’s Republic.

These figure, it will be noted, have risen, but not dramatically, and indeed between 2013 and 2016 remained static (rather than falling, which would have been the assumption of many in view of Sino–UK tensions over this era because of Cameron’s meeting with the Dalai Lama in 2012). In terms of services, too – the target of so much effort from the UK – the rises have been incremental, and in some years there have been relapses. Ironically, the figure for exports of services from the UK to China in 2013 was the same as four years later.

In terms of the composition of this trade, the main sectors from the UK to China were cars, crude oil, medicinal and pharmaceutical products, metal ores and scrap and miscellaneous goods. From China to the UK they were telecommunications, clothing, office machinery, and miscellaneous metal manufactures. These broadly fit the global pattern about China: hungry for raw materials, and able to produce and then export manufactured goods through cheaper labour and other costs.

Investment figures are always contentious, with Chinese, British, and UNCTAD (the UN body that collects data) figures often varying, often because of the different ways in which they define direct investment.

The current situation is easy enough to summarize. As with many other countries, the UK is trying to understand a new world where a power like China with such different outlook, political values and aspirations to it is becoming increasingly important. Exceptionally, however, the UK is doing this while undertaking its own readjustment and re-evaluation of its place in the world. It is doing this amidst leaving the framework by which it related to its closest geographical and trading partners and replacing it with something new. While aiming for a closer and enhanced relationship with China, however, it has to address its own lack of deep knowledge and the right amount of networks by which to do this effectively.

Ignoring the nostalgia underpinning the Brexiteers’ vision, and the torturous path that has been travelled since the 2016 referendum, and ignoring the issue of what kind of exit deal and its aftermath might be agreed in practice over the next few years, this chapter focuses on the underlying philosophy of Brexit. If the aim is to have a greater autonomy and independence as a foreign policy actor, then it would be with a partner like China that this is most likely to be manifested. The contours of the UK’s engagement with Europe and America, and other G7 partners, are relatively well established. It is with outliers like China that the potential is greatest, because of the relatively minor level of mutual involvement currently. And here, I focus not so much on attitudes, and all the issues so problematic in the previous chapter, but simply on structural matters. What is the most desirable structure to a relationship with a new power like China for the UK? Once we have a clearer idea of that, we might have a better idea of what can, and cannot, be done. And looking at this structure is something that other powers can then learn from and study as they develop their relations with the PRC.

THE GREAT DIVERGENCE

As the mainstay of UK–China ties since the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 has been mutual economic benefit – largely ignoring the issues around values and security where there are clearly major differences of understanding and a lack of consensus – it is unsurprising that a large part of the formal relationship has been outsourced to the European Union.

Policy makers, whoever they work for, whether it is business, government, NGOs, love scenarios, and building up models for how things might work out. It is work I have done a lot of over the last few years, either from within the Foreign Office, or at Chatham House, and then as an academic in both Australia and the UK. Sometimes this work involves taking a group of inputs – economic, social or environmental ones – and then working out what happens when there is a crisis or a problem. Usually one goes from worst case to best case, with a tendency to map out the middle ground, and suggest that this is the likely direction of travel. And indeed, often that is what happens, in the short term at least, until something wholly unexpected happens. Like Mike Tyson, the boxer, once shrewdly pointed out, most strategies work fine in a fight until someone lands a fist in your face! Then it is back to the drawing board.

While in full flow, giving my “three tier” scenarios for UK–China relations some years back, one of the people I was addressing politely coughed and said that while it was all very interesting, to paraphrase: “We are not really in the business of fiction. It’s all very Goldilocks, isn’t it, setting out these good, bad, and ok options. A bit like tasting one porridge and finding it too hot, and the next and finding it too cold, and the third and saying that’s fine. Isn’t it better just to focus on structures about how things are now – at least there is evidence for that, and it lets you map out how the whole machine might go forward, and what’s possible and not possible.” That struck me as a wise suggestion. So in this chapter, having already identified the nature of the problem, I will simply map out the structure of the present, and then set parameters for what, in the new field of opportunities we call Brexit, is and isn’t possible. Once we know the limits, we can start meaningfully making plans.

The mission was simple. Get the cavalcade of limousines and the associated bus-loads of officials, diplomats and assistants up the road to the traditional pub and have a pint and some fish and chips. But things were never going to be that straightforward. The first problem was the road – a narrow country lane, which could barely accommodate a large car, let alone a fleet of buses. The second was the pub – a pretty but modest venue, which meant only a few people would actually get to go inside when the delegation finally arrived. The third was the demand that a few realistic-looking local punters be sprinkled around the place to make it appear vaguely natural for the photographers and journalists when they snapped their photos.

The lead participants in this mini-drama were the British Prime Minister David Cameron, and the visiting dignitary he was entertaining – Xi Jinping. It was September 2015, and the event was the first state visit by a leader of the People’s Republic of China to the UK for a decade. The specific location was Cameron’s Oxfordshire constituency, at a pub he liked near one of his homes. There were other reasons to make a fuss about this event. From July 2012 to late 2013, relations between the two countries had hit a particularly rocky patch – relations that were never that straightforward given the disruptive role of the British Empire, at its peak in Chinese affairs for the century after the First Opium War (1839–41), and the prickly history over Hong Kong leading up to 1997. In May 2012, Cameron had met with the exiled Tibetan religious leader, the Dalai Lama, despite vehement protestations from Beijing. He had done so, on the pretext that the Dalai Lama was a spiritual personage, during a ceremony to confer a prize on the Tibetan at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. He may also have calculated that as London would later that year host the Olympics, after the Beijing games in 2008, the Chinese would refrain from any major response.

It was one of those large public debating festivals held usually during the warm months in Britain. A packed schedule of events over two days, addressing issues from the US election to the impact of artificial intelligence – a smorgasbord of argumentation and intellectual manoeuvring by speakers and their audiences. Panels with invited experts on specific themes spoke for a few minutes each and then there were moderated question and answer sessions with the audience. I was glad to have been invited just as an academic attendee. Academics were at least spared the full onslaught of public indignation and rage because we were regarded as experts present to give balance. Polemicists, controversialists, politicians, and self-publicisers were not so lucky. But then, in an odd way, brutal treatment by their audiences seemed to be what they were there for. They had Nietzsche’s famous dictum engraved on their hearts: what didn’t kill them was going to make them stronger; they seemed to be there to survive and then get more powerful.

Academics are supposedly custodians of neutrality. That is our claim about ourselves at least. And these days, the title “Professor” usually gives some pause for thought and restraint on whomever you are facing publicly and grants a little bit of mercy. My session was about the impact of the rise of China. The argument I used was one that I had deployed at similar events throughout Europe and the rest of the world over the previous months and years: like it or not, China is going to be part of our global economic future and probably our geopolitical and social one. Even if we are not going to it, it is coming to us – through investment, finance, students and tourists. This is a moment of historic change. For the first time in modern history, a power with a profoundly different cultural background and a very different set of values (ones that I will spell out in more detail later) is about to take centre stage. We (and throughout this work, when I use the word “we” I am referring to constituencies in the UK) need to adjust our mindsets, revise our vocabularies, and reset our standard maps of the world.

This is the twentieth book I have written since 2006. That mostly overwhelmingly happy and positive experience has taught me that it is a worthwhile investment to set out clearly, right at the start of a work, what it is not. To do so serves two purposes. It clarifies what the reader can expect (and all too often, the reader, as Virginia Woolf pointed out in one of her magnificent essays, is neglected or even forgotten, with writers making their lives harder, not easier) and it also insures one, at least a bit, from the more zealously purist reviewers who, from the title alone, start to build a narrative which, if the book fails to address this, irritates and upsets them. I prefer not to irritate and upset readers, or reviewers, and am grateful for the attention of anyone picking up something I have written and spending their hard-won time on it. So as a courtesy, right at the start, I will say what readers will not find in this short work.

This is not a comprehensive overview of UK–China relations, nor, even remotely, a history of that relationship. Strangely enough, there is, as yet, no definitive book along these lines, and although I would be tempted and would love one day to write such a book, the urgency of the subject I do intend to discuss here – the structure of UK–China relations at a time of potential great upheaval because of Brexit and what this relationship, and how it might develop, means for the wider world given the immense importance of understanding China’s new global impact – means that project is for another day. A comprehensive history of British–Chinese relations would be a huge undertaking largely because it would embrace much of the colonial history of Britain from the early nineteenth century onwards, when China first started to properly figure in its world, and the development of China from the fading years of the Qing era onwards. Scholars, such as Robert Bickers, have addressed parts of this history in their excellent studies, which are referred to in the Further Reading.

After all the razzmatazz, and high-level engagement, a relationship between countries boils down to the interaction of individual people at different levels and with different orders of complexity. Products and services between countries are traded, sold and delivered. But people sit at the core of this activity with their ideas, emotions, aspirations, attitudes, negative and positive prejudices, and above all their own motivations.

The EU and China recognize this with what is called a “people-to-people” strand of dialogue. There are formal events, memoranda of understanding and all the usual paraphernalia of diplomacy. But underneath, the main action boils down to getting people from European countries and people from China to sit on planes and travel across the world to meet and have direct interaction with each other. The more that happens, the more we can really talk about a healthy, multifaceted relationship. In the era of Maoist enclosure, Chinese people did not figure much in the daily lives of the British, nor of any other western country. Those Chinese that were in the UK largely came via Hong Kong, and were one of the smallest ethnic groups. The novelist Timothy Mo wrote in the 1980s an account of a young Chinese wife newly arrived in Britain to be with her husband, dealing with the bewilderment of coming to terms with a new bureaucratic system. The title of his work, Sour Sweet, captures one thing well: the ambiguity of the British-Chinese experience of being tolerated and yet never quite being accepted. In the UK people of Chinese ethnicity, even those born and brought up in the country have had to handle clichés and misperceptions about them in the society they call home. When I attended primary schools in Kent in the 1970s, I was taught that the Chinese are introspective and keep to themselves. The structures of the Cold War world seemed to confirm this. There were places where one might encounter Chinese – Chinese restaurants for instance, or Chinatowns in major cities – but rarely anywhere else. People of Chinese ethnicity did not appear much on television, nor in the media.

What does China want? It is a commonly asked question by business people, politicians and commentators not just in the UK, but throughout the world today as they engage with this newly emerging power. Throughout Asia, North America, Central Asia, the Middle East, and into Eastern, Central, and finally Western Europe and the rest of the world, figuring out China’s plans and desires towards itself and the outside world are of central concern. Interpreting these desires correctly, working out how to leverage them or gain benefits from them, and whether to see them as benign or more assertive and threatening – has become the work of diplomats, business people, analysts and politicians the world over.

China’s statements about its own plans and desires are not unproblematic. Under Hu Jintao, the main Chinese leader from 2002 to 2012, an increasingly heavy silence reigned. The most the world got were statements of “peaceful rise” and “harmonious co-operation”. Such soporific rhetoric was hard to work with, particularly as China’s actions – aggression in the South and East China Sea, and shrill declarations of hurt feelings when criticized over matters like Xinjiang or Tibet, which it considered domestic ones – often seemed completely at odds with its muted language when addressing international relations. Demands in the United States and elsewhere that China make a clearer statement of its intentions became unavoidable when confronted with the burgeoning size of the country’s economy. From 2002 to 2012, despite the negative impact of the world financial crisis in 2008, China quadrupled its GDP from $1.4 trillion to $8.5 trillion.1 Other economies like that of the United States managed less than double that growth. China could no longer hide its size and significance on the world stage, even if it wanted to.

With Xi Jinping, from 2012, there was a major corrective. He asked his fellow politburo members to tell the China story. He also asked his diplomats to be proactive. The Belt and Road Initiative was amongst the most important of these new statements of intent: the grand geopolitical idea first articulated by Xi in 2013 as “The New Silk Road” and attempting to map out a Chinese vision of how it engages with the world around it on balanced, mutually beneficial ways.

Not many years ago, a visiting politician made an important speech in Paris. His words are worth recalling:

The man who uttered those words was Xi Jinping, the president of China.

I can’t think of any British business or political leader who could visit China and demonstrate the same level of understanding – or even interest – in the Chinese civilization. And yet this detailed level of knowledge about Western culture is not unusual for a Chinese politician. When Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, came to visit David Cameron, he brought a copy of a book by Adam Smith. But he did not bring Smith’s Enquiry into the Wealth of Nations, where he famously likened the market to an “invisible hand” determining prices. Instead, Wen brought The Theory of Moral Sentiments – much less well known in the West – which suggests proper limits on the market, and he quoted from it at length. Wen’s first request was to visit Stratford-upon-Avon where he asked to see a performance of King Lear: “I read and re-read many of Shakespeare’s plays as a young man,” he said, “such as Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello and King Lear. His works were not to be read only once or even ten times. They must be read up to a hundred times to be fully understood.” The Wall Street Journal thought that Wen was making a wider point, when it reported:

The fundamental, long neglected matters of Government and Opposition in the Union are not easily resolved. Nor was that my intention; this book is not a manifesto. I did, however, after a decade of improvisation, want to offer a new perspective on ways of addressing these issues. The events-politics that the Union is learning to engage in under the pressure of crises takes it a long way from its origins in rules-politics. The realization has dawned that the new Europe needs to be in a position to act. Only then can it step into the future with self-confidence and show itself on the world stage. As long as executive power in the Union is continuing to develop – and in light of historical necessity and political determination there is every sign that it is – the Opposition too will find new and, we can hope, better ways of effectively making its voice heard. We have seen an unexpectedly large number of lines of thought along which public dissent can be ascertained and organized. Opposition can contribute to the Union’s set-up of the vital functions of balance, changeover, vigilance and dissent, with the result that the public experiences “Europe” not just as driven by technocratic necessity but ultimately as an outcome of choices freely made.

Europe’s new politics cannot exist without new openness. The contrary voices and loud mouths of recent years have an important part to play: they make tough political choices and dilemmas visible to the European public that has poured in en masse, to all those people who to their own surprise suddenly find themselves in the public gallery of the political theatre. In doing so they break through the sometimes dispiriting logic of depoliticization. The public battle of words enables viewers and voters to see the present-day freedom in which we are creating our future.

Here lies a special task for the media, too, indispensable as they are in giving shape to that public realm, in connecting politics and people.

Checks and balances

The fact that for decades it was impossible to point to a Brussels government of the EU had an important but hitherto neglected consequence: no organized opposition could take shape. Oppositional forces could not be directed to an obvious forum, and so they found expression through other, uncontrollable sites.

For a governing party, the absence of a recognizable opposition – people who make your life a misery, sabotage your plans and aim to get you out of office as soon as possible – may sound attractive, but for a political system as a whole it is catastrophic. Political opposition fulfils vital functions. Here are four of them:

• 1. Balance. The presence of an opposition strengthens a political system’s “checks and balances”. It puts a brake on abuse of power by governments and civil servants, thereby enhancing the quality of governance and the rule of law. This works best when the opposition has a base in parliament, since from there it can make the executive aware of its potential supremacy. It is the existence of an opposition that gives Montesquieu’s separation of powers its full protective and dynamic effect.