An update to the UK’s strategic foreign and defence policy blueprint states has stated that the United Kingdom views China as representing an ‘epoch-defining challenge’ to the world order and sees the UK and Europe’s security tied to Russia’s unsuccessful prosecution of its war on Ukraine.
In a ‘refresh’ to the Integrated Review (IR) policy paper, the UK highlights the challenges posed by China and its deepening partnership with Russia, as well as Moscow’s growing cooperation with Iran. The 63-page report unveiled on Monday toughens the UK’s language and positioning towards Beijing and Moscow and stresses the systematic and existential threat that both countries pose to the UK, Europe, and the wider rules-based world order.
Meanwhile, Chinese state media responded to the UK report on Tuesday with warnings that London’s ‘continuous hype’ of China as a threat would have negative consequences for relations between the two countries.
While the UK review for 2021 had already identified Russia as the ‘most acute threat to the UK’s security’, the latest review notes that the collective security of the UK and Europe is now bound up with the outcome of Moscow’s war on Ukraine and “denying Russia any strategic benefit from its invasion’.
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‘Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine, weaponisation of energy and food supplies, and irresponsible nuclear rhetoric, combined with China’s more aggressive stance in the South China Sea and the Taiwan Strait, are threatening to create a world defined by danger, disorder, and division,’ UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak wrote in the foreword to the review.
Sunak said that ‘the pace of the geopolitical change and the extent of its impact on the UK and our people’ could not have been foreseen even as recently as 2021, when the last review was published.
The review notes that the UK’s provision of 2.3 billion pounds ($2.8bn) in military and humanitarian aid to Kyiv, as well as hundreds of targeted sanctions in coordination with allies, had “already weakened the Russian war machine … and set in motion international justice for Moscow’s egregious war crimes”.
‘The UK’s objective will be to contain and challenge Russia’s ability and intent to disrupt the security of the UK, the Euro-Atlantic and the wider international order,’ the review states.
Africa Today News, New York reports that the earnings about the threats posed by China were equally stark.
‘China under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) poses an epoch-defining and systemic challenge with implications for almost every area of government policy and the everyday lives of British people,” the review states.
Troubling for the UK is that Beijing has chosen to continue to strengthen its relationship with Russia despite Moscow’s aggression towards Ukraine, and that Beijing also continues to ignore international commitments on human rights in Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet.
China’s ‘new multilateralism’ was also posing a challenge to the protection of human rights and guarantees of freedoms under the United Nations system, as Beijing also engaged in “rapid and opaque military modernisation’, and maintained its position that force could be used to unite Taiwan with mainland China.
Unlike with Moscow, there was hope for relations with Beijing as the ‘UK does not accept that China’s relationship with the UK or its impact on the international system are set on a predetermined course’, the review adds.
China’s state-run Global Times newspaper cited academic Liu Zuokui, a research fellow on European studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, stating that it had become ‘routine’ for the UK to make provocative statements against China, and that London was compensating for diminished stature on the world stage by adopting a ‘tough attitude towards China’.