UK-China in 2019: How can diplomacy rise to the challenges of the 21st century
On Monday 25 February 2019, HM Ambassador to China, Dame Barbara Woodward made a speech at the University of Manchester.
Thank you for that kind introduction and for the opportunity to speak.
This month marks four years since I arrived in Beijing as Ambassador. In my appointment, the UK rose to one of the challenges of the 21st century and appointed the UK’s first female Ambassador to China. An appointment, my colleagues occasionally remind me, that Lord Killearn, formerly a diplomat at the British Embassy in Beijing and latterly Ambassador to Cairo, in 1933 ruled out as ‘”unsuitable and highly inadvisable’’. I am now one of about 50 female British Ambassadors around the world, which is about 25%.
Although I see women breaking through glass ceilings as part of the solution, to some of the challenges of the 21st century, they are not about me alone.
The challenges are relevant to all of us in this room, and beyond. Because if we are serious about solving them, we are serious about building a truly innovative diplomacy which will help build a world fit for purpose in the 21st century. What students, professors, citizens in Manchester- and others like them in the UK and China – do is as crucial as what Ambassadors and diplomats will do.
The challenges I see are significant, they are interconnected and they are all relevant to China.
None will, I suspect, come as a surprise.
The first is primarily at the national level. It is the challenge governments face meeting the needs of their people. For freedom and security. This is not new.
But expectations are changing and frustrations are increasing. The failure of governments to respond effectively has led to new fractures.
Much of the media focus – not least because of our free press – has been on the manifestation of these trends in the United States, in countries across the European Union and, indeed, even here at home.
The same challenges exist, of course, in China. Air pollution, food safety, income inequality, social welfare, access to healthcare, opportunity of education, house prices – these are the touchstones by which Chinese citizens judge the performance of their government.
And wherever we are, there are questions about how governments protect people from transnational threats- terrorism, disease, climate change, child abuse- often and especially those driven by non-state actors.
The second challenge is a shift of power between nations. The idea that China is on the cusp of supplanting the West is both unhelpful and wrong. We may indeed be giving our political models the mother of all stress tests – but it’s important also to remember that by and large the liberal democracies are passing them.
That said, it is undeniable that the next decades will see the continuation of rebalancing economic, demographic and potentially military power towards Asia. By 2030, the economies of India and China combined will likely exceed those of the G7 combined.
The third challenge is global. Climate change. Plastics. Anti-microbial resistance. Pandemics. Migration. Ageing populations. These are not business as usual problems. They are existential.
Again, China is to be found at the centre. Simply by force of numbers China is the largest emitter of GHG emissions, the largest user, producer and importer of energy. It is the world’s largest consumer of antibiotics. By 2030 there will be more Chinese over the age of 60 than US citizens of any age.
China is also adding 30% a year to the world’s GDP growth- equivalent to G20 economy every year, even when slowing. And of course, without China’s extraordinary achievement of lifting 800m people out of poverty, we would not have come close to meeting the MDGs.
So a series of challenges, all of which deeply involve China. All require fresh, innovative thinking and action.
So I am concerned that the current discussion on China is often framed between the theories of a 5th Century BC Athenian historian – Thucydides and his Chinese near- contemporaries, Confucius and Sun Tzu. And beyond that, that some of the rhetoric, analysis and actions hark back to might-is-right, great power and the ‘cold war’.
Is that really helpful in 2019?
A fracturing of the rules based international system, a balkanisation of global science, a bifurcation of the world into competing spheres of influence would be a disaster. It would solve none of the challenges I have set out.
It will not help governments meet the legitimate needs of their people.
It will not help us safely navigate a shifting geopolitical landscape.
It will not protect our global goods or solve global crises.
The world has trodden the path of nationalism and populism before. And it has always ended in the same way. That is why times call for a new diplomacy.
That, of course, means innovation in our bilateral relations. And it means innovation in multilateralism.
Let me take those in turn.
First, the bilateral relationship.
The Golden Era – or Comprehensive Global Strategic Partnership- we announced in 2015, during President Xi’s visit to the UK, to London and Manchester, was designed to do that.
It reflected the importance of a closer bilateral relationship and a growing complementarity between our respective economic, cultural and scientific bases.
It provided for high-level political set-piece dialogues and interactions between governments, providing the framework for on-the-ground collaborations to thrive.
When we opened Ambassadorial relations with China in 1972, there were seven UK diplomats in Beijing. The China network now covers 5 offices and over 1500 staff.
But that’s a fraction of the interaction between our countries. The breadth of the China relationship no longer fits into the corridors of Whitehall, let alone the corridors of the FCO- and nor should it!
And here I want to pay tribute to Manchester:
To Manchester University: your partnership with CETC on Square Kilometre Array. Your collaborations on graphene. Your joint research with Peking University on genetics. To Manchester United: the biggest Premier League team in China. To Manchester City: the first Premier League team to buy a Chinese team, earlier this month.
To Manchester businesses: who, in the Manchester China Business Forum, have developed a model that others are now emulating.
And to the regional leadership: who have forged a relationship with Wuhan city and who will be the first city in the UK to develop a soft power strategy.
So engaging the experts in this room – and the many more outside of it – freely in the diplomatic effort of building a constructive relationship with China is essential.
For two reasons.
First precisely because that relationship is messy, it is complex and it is evolving. There is no handbook!
But the thoughtful, considered engagement of the centre ground, especially a shifting centre ground, needs genuine expertise. The answers will need to come both from government that can advise on the political and security risk and from the scientists, academics, businessmen and young people who – to put in bluntly – actually know how these things work and see the opportunity.
The second reason why broadening out our understanding of diplomatic outreach to China is important is because the Communist Party is not China and China is not the Communist Party. I have always characterised our bilateral relationship as a Ding – you may recognise the three-legged bronze urn of Chinese antiquity. Three legs: Government, Business and People – the last of which includes our education and innovation exchanges. When and if any one of the legs looks a little rickety, it is those other two legs that keep it standing.
So, the role of the China network I lead is to build the frameworks that allow collaboration on the ground to thrive.
In Science and Innovation, Research, educational, a visa service that brought 700,000 Chinese people to Britain last year. Improving the business environment and removing market access barriers. Protecting our children from online harms; intercepting fentanyl before it can kill people in Britain. Encouraging and supporting 80,000 young British people to go and experience China for themselves through the Generation UK programme.
Diplomacy abhors a vacuum. The UK and China will both benefit from getting the high-level dialogues back on track. Otherwise we are losing the space which should be there for constructive discussion. And none of us will gain from that. There has been an active debate in China over the past year about how best to manage the country’s foreign relationships. Especially the US. I think open and candid dialogue at the highest levels is a vital part of the answer.
It’s important to get those back on track.
Not least because the UK-China relationship is of global significance. We are both Permanent Members of the Security Council, both top 5 economies, both heavily involved across the world with wide and deep bilateral ties and multilateral influence.
So the test for the UK-China relationship now is not just to lead solutions to challenges of unprecedented scale, scope and speed but also to lead the systemic changes that will make the global order and the rules and principles on which it is based more resilient, more robust and more effective in the 21st century.
How can diplomacy and the UK and China rise to this challenge?
A,B,C: Adapt, Build, Create.
In some areas we will need to adapt existing structures. We have a system of international organisations, with the UN at its core, which shares and upholds- as best it can- key principles including the rights of the individual, the role of the national state, free trade and the rule of law and provides fora for arbitrating disputes. Whether a country is large or small, developed or developing, might is not right. The UN Charter opens: “We the people of the United Nations determined to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war…”. There are tragic exceptions, in Syria, Yemen and North Korea, but by and large, they have done that.
This system has benefited everyone, not least China. It is fair to say that the world immediately after World War 2 was a very different one. Where China has a legitimate call to be better integrated, we should facilitate and adapt. We have (finally) done that, for example, with voting rights in the World Bank and IMF.
The growing role of the G-20, which represents 85% of the world GDP and 2/3 of the world’s population is another good example of that adaptation.
And with China, as fellow members of the UNSC, we can offer our strong support to UN Secretary General Guterres’ UN reform programme;
In some areas we will need to Build.
I think it is impossible not to be touched today by the individual stories of migrants and their numbers coming to Europe. There are around 3000 in the migrant caravan moving towards Mexico. There are around 700,0000 Rohingyas now in Bangladesh. And about 1.3m Afghan refugees in Pakistan. The international migration frameworks that we have today are struggling with a situation never envisaged by their architects.
Just as the WTO is struggling to preserve free trade across a global economy which did not have e-commerce or services when it was set up.
And, third, in some areas we will need to create new rules and bodies.
China’s rhetoric around the Belt and Road Initiative, its input into the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, its creation of a new ministry for international development, some of its approaches to addressing the absence of security architecture in the Asia-Pacific– signal that it understands that it benefits as much from a stable international system as the rest of us.
The UK has welcomed China’s active role. We were the first major western economy to join the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank.
And now we need new ethical and regulatory frameworks to deal with Artificial Intelligence. We need to keep space and cyberspace from becoming virtual and actual battlegrounds.
There is of course a narrative that any idea that the UK and China can work together to achieve this is naïve. But I challenge that narrative: look at our existing collaboration with China on international development – not just where we spend but how and why. Our partnership on climate and green energy. Our joint discovery of new medicines and treatments. The work we have done together with the Chinese telecommunications company Huawei. And, of course, the way Professor Sir Kostya Novoselov has translated graphene from its Nobel prize roots here in Manchester, to China.
But the proof of the pudding will be in the eating. And a pudding without a recipe or ingredients, like the current slogans of a “community of common destiny” or “shared future of mankind”, rightly gives us pause.
So too do attempts to weaken the international order where it suits narrow national interest: perhaps most notably, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea or the recent return to hostage diplomacy. The prevalence of cyber-attacks and the use of chemical weapons, last year in the UK.
And if new architecture is to work effectively, to be resilient, robust and effective, it will need to be founded on the principles and values which have proved their worth and rules which apply to all.
Conclusion
Sometime in the next decade the world’s largest economy will probably be non-western, non-democratic and non-English-speaking. And it will probably be China.
We are in a season of anniversaries. Some China wants to mark – 40 years of opening up and reform, 70 years since the founding of the People’s Republic. Others – 30 years since Tiananmen – it will not.
Perhaps the anniversary least noticed here but with the deepest ideological resonance will be the centenary of the May 4th movement.
The Treaty of Versailles was indeed a lost opportunity for diplomatic innovation, to integrate China -and others- into the global system as it emerged from imperialism and at a historical moment when it was open to western political thought and science as never before. Students took to the streets under the banners of “Mr Science and Mr Democracy”.
The cost of this failure has been China turning its back on western democracy in the 1920s and the creation of a historical narrative in support of nationalism and exceptionalism that, along with 19th century colonialism, has become a pillar of the Chinese Communist Party’s legitimacy.
A hundred years later, we are at a similar turning point. How will we respond?
Faced with genuine disagreements, will we focus only on the values that divide us rather than the interests that should unite us?
In an era of increasing competition, will we allow voices in China and the West to present binary choices – to demand that we pick sides – when the solution to our shared problems is joint action?
Challenged by our populations, will we take the easy path back to jingoism rather than the more difficult one forward that sees us working together to meet their legitimate expectations?
And confronted by global problems will we retreat into isolationism or will we forge new partnerships?
These are difficult questions. There is an old Chinese saying: “一问三不知，神仙怪不得” – even the Gods cannot blame you if you keep answering “No Idea”. But I believe we can and should do better than that today. We have the foundations and the will for a new diplomacy, to build new partnerships and to work together to achieve it.