Thread by @samdunningo

🇨🇳🇬🇧THREAD: A post by China’s former ambassador (2010-21) to the UK garnered some attention recently. Liu Xiaoming 刘晓明 is now China's Special Representative on Korean Peninsula Affairs. So who are Liu's UK friends & why is he meeting them? 1/53

Observers of Sino-British relations might recognise some of these chaps from the excellent newsletters produced by @BeijingToBrit. My special thanks to arch-observer @McWLuke for helping me ID several. Three Lords, two knights of the realm, and a professor! 2/53

NB That the Lords were happy to meet with Liu even as Liu’s successor as ambassador is barred from visiting the UK’s Parliament following China’s imposition of sanctions on British lawmakers. This rather illustrates the strange and contradictory state of UK-China relations. 3/53

Chap 1: Sir Douglas Flint. Doug is chairman of Abrdn - one of the UK’s top 20 financial services providers. He was formerly (2011-2017) chairman of no. 1, HSBC. Amongst global banks, HSBC is amongst the most closely integrated into the East Asian economy. 4/53

The company’s been in the news recently: it was reported that HSBC’s biggest shareholder is trying to force the bank to break up, dividing its HK headquarters from the main UK-headquartered bank. 5/53
theguardian.com/business/2022/…

Recent years provide some context for this. HSBC was widely criticised for its stance on the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong. The company co-operated fully with the authorities in freezing protestors’ accounts, and publicly voiced support for the National Security Law. 6/53

That’s since Flint left HSBC, but his time as Chair overlapped with the ‘golden era’ period of 🇬🇧🇨🇳 relations. No wonder Flint was made the UK's “Special Envoy for Financial & Professional Services to China's Belt and Road Initiative” (2018-pres) 7/53
mfa.gov.cn/ce/ceuk/eng/am…

Also shortly after leaving the company, Flint became a trustee of my bug-bear, the Cambridge China Development Trust, a UK charity which has spent millions of pounds (nearly £400k of it provided by HSBC) ’training’ Chinese officials. 8/53

Chap 2: Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles. C-C is a former UK diplomat (ambassador to Israel, Saudi, Afgh.) From 1994-97 he worked on Hong Kong. He's now head of public affairs at HSBC & chair of the China Britain Business Council. 9/53 (See @BelleTimsit profile qz.com/2037120/sherar… )

When the UK’s special rep. to Afghan- and Pakistan in 2010, he reportedly "clashed with senior NATO and US officials over his insistence that the military-driven counter-insurgency effort was headed for failure, & that talks with the Taliban should be prioritised.” (Wiki) 10/53

On🇨🇳, C-C told Quartz, “you need to take a practical analysis and you shouldn’t let the ideal or the dreams govern”, warning against “absolute minimum economic engagement with a people and a civilization and an economy that matters enormously to the future of the world.” 11/53

The idea that it is realistic, practical, and rational to ‘engage with China’ is a theme we’ll be returning to as we move through the chaps. 12/53

No. 3: Lord Green, another former HSBC chair, Flint’s predecessor. HSBC got in a lot of trouble while Green was chair. Later recriminations led to the following comment in 2015: "As a matter of principle I will not comment on the business of HSBC past or present” 13/53

Naturally, Green was made a Lord when he left HSBC in 2010, and became Minister of State for Trade and Investment at the Foreign Office and Department for Business, Innovation & Skills. Green did that till the end of 2013. 14/53

Amongst other things, Green is also an ordained Anglican priest. This may explain some of his more ponderous/spiritual contributions to literature on the topic of relations between the West and China. jesus.cam.ac.uk/articles/east-… 15/53

Chap 4: Lord Sassoon. The Sassoon name is a stalwart of East-West relations, going back ‘00s of years to the family’s role in the opium trade. Like Green, he too was made a Lord and entered government in 2010, serving until 2013. 16/53

Sassoon is also President of the China Britain Business Council and “a member of the International Advisory Council of China Investment Corporation.” After leaving gov’t, Sassoon became executive director of Jardine Matheson Holdings, another giant east-west conglomerate. 17/53

Chap 5: Stephen Perry. Perry is an odd figure, son of one of the group of 48 businessmen who travelled to China in 1954 to promote trade between the country and the UK. In 2020, @CliveCHamilton and @MareikeOhlberg wrote of The 48 Group that Perry now chairs: 18/53

The authors noted too the group’s historical link to the China-Britain Business Council, & the access Stephen Perry has to senior CCP and PRC figures. Perry threatened to sue but, I think, no case has been brought. This and much else has been reported in the UK press. 19/53

Perry can barely write proper sentences in English [see link]. He regurgitates Chinese propaganda【一鼻孔出氣！】He is taken seriously by scarcely anyone in the UK. So why does he enjoy such access? Why would Xi bother meeting him? 20/53
chinaglobalimpact.com/2017/04/24/one…

A key reason is that Perry can be relied upon entirely. There is nothing China or the CCP can do to lose his support. Besides that, no price can be put on the psychological impact of the great and good of once-mighty Britain sucking up to such a stooge.
21/53

Next we have David Sayer. Sayer is the head of Global Banking at KPMG, one of the ‘Big 4’ accounting firms. He is also a board member at the China Britain Business Council and, it seems, a golf buddy of Liu’s! 22/53 alamy.com/stock-photo-lo…

By now you are probably noticing a pattern. Although they have little to do with the “Korean Peninsula Affairs” that Liu is now responsible for, the UK business elites he met whilst ambassador remain priority contacts. Why? 23/53

My answer has to do with the rhetoric these elite guys use when promoting cooperation with China: cooperation is realistic, practical, rational, necessary, future-oriented. Conversely, opposition is idealistic, impractical, irrational, unnecessary, stuck-in-the-past. 24/53

The argument is that cooperating with China will make the UK rich. ‘Why sacrifice the UK’s economy on the altar of ideology or, worse, tribalism? Better to be practical and act in our own interests and engage closely with China.’ 25/53

In the last few years, they’ve had to add an extra line ‘… our own interests, without sacrificing our values or ignoring risks.’ But the basic argument is more or less the same, and the accompanying activity is more or less proceeding unhindered. 26/53

Chap 7! This is Professor Martin Albrow. Albrow is a sociologist with little direct expertise on China. But like Green he is a ponderous/quasi-spritual, and like Perry a reliable, promoter of cooperation. See his book published a few weeks ago. 27/53 prnewswire.co.uk/news-releases/…

The book has been promoted on Chinese state media, for example in this video in which Albrow praises Xi, Xi’s book, the BRI, the Party, its “unwillingness to accept defeat”, etc. 28/53

Chap 8: Lord O’Neill. O’Neill is an economist, known for coining the term BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, China) to talk about those particular ‘emerging’ economies. O’Neill was formerly chairman of Goldman Sachs’ asset management division. 29/53

O’Neill was commercial secretary to the Treasury in the midst of the ‘golden era’, working on the Northern Powerhouse concept (a previous version of the current ‘Levelling Up’ project to regenerate the UK outside of London/the South) and China. 30/53

O’Neill is more of a ‘true economist’ than the other business figures here, but no less a critic of the current wave of skepticism about cooperation with China. Take his contribution to this debate ukncc.org/debates 31/53

O’Neill correctly identifies that the Prime Minister is naturally (or wants to be) much more in favour of trade and engagement with China than the hawks in the Tory party (or elsewhere) or the national security brigade in the state. 32/53

O'Neill thinks we are over-emphasising security, listening too much to the spooks & the Americans. As for British regions & 'levelling up', he compares it to China’s drive westward & says, “The Chinese get the Northern Powerhouse concept more than our own government”. Ok… 33/53

Unlike the others, our eighth chap David Marsh is a writer/journalist and finance expert. I don’t know much about him; nor about whether my generalisations about the others really apply to him. 34/53

Finally, Vince Cable. He is the former (2017-19) leader of the Liberal Democrats, the UK’s ‘third party’. From 2010-15 he served as minister for Business, Innovation and Skills. In more recent years, his pro-CCP views have become an embarrassment for his party. 35/53

Why? Because Vince has repeatedly done down the horrors faced by Uyghurs and other groups in Xinjiang, describing the campaign of sterilisations there as “not genocide or anything remotely like it.” 36/53

I was present at that debate and Cable was unimpressive. Whether misnaming Christine/ ‘Elizabeth’ Lee or grossly exaggerating the difference in GDP/capita between🇨🇳 & Romania, Vince is not well-informed & hardly worth listening to, let alone reading. 37/53

So why is Liu meeting these guys? Although it is unlikely any of them has much to contribute towards peace on the Korean peninsular, I submit that Liu knows them as the vanguard of elite pro-CCP rhetoric in the UK. 38/53

These are the ‘opinion leaders’ encouraging UK businesses to invest in China / receive investment from China. These are the guys lobbying against restrictions on trade and investment, quietly suggesting we ignore American attempts to cut us off from China. 39/53

These are the guys arguing that we learn from China and even from the CCP, that China’s rise in unstoppable and inevitable, and so on. Now, I do not suggest they are wrong in all those things, or mere tools of the CCP. 40/53

But are they right? Is their rhetoric fair? Is it irrational or not in Britain’s interests to disengage from China or to challenge the CCP? And why do elite opinion leaders such as this remain targets for CCP friendship work? I’ll try to be brief in giving my thoughts. 41/53

At present, the UK is *very* exposed to shocks in the Chinese economy, including any future political events that might rupture economic relations. We have seen how we are becoming dependent on Chinese imports in many areas (post 25). 42/53

But we are also *very* exposed in the finance industry - one of the key pillars of the UK’s services-oriented economy. HSBC accounts for a lot of this, which is why current shenanigans about splitting the bank matter. 43/53

And then there is Chinese investment in the UK. Chinese companies such as CK Hutchison own vast slices of the UK’s critical national infrastructure: from telecom company Three to giants like UK Power Networks and Northumbrian Water. 44/53

I’ve not gone into detail on supply chain dependence on China in UK manufacturing. Nor mentioned our higher education sector’s growing dependence on fees paid by Chinese students. 45/53

The problem is this: what happens to the UK’s economy if China invades Taiwan, or if something else leads to strong US sanctions against China? Then we will be in one hell of a pickle and those ‘rational’ lobbyists will look rather silly. 46/53

What are the chances of this? Well, Xi told the whole PRC population at the biggest state occasion in years that “realizing China’s complete reunification” is the “unshakable commitment of the Communist Party of China”. This is worth preparing for… 47/53 cfr.org/blog/what-xi-j…

Currently, we are drifting towards a very tangled situation. Whilst China’s ambassador is banned from the Houses of Parliament, a clutch of lawmakers from those Houses go and do their best to out-brownnose the ridiculous Stephen Perry. 48/53
facebook.com/watch/?v=90540…

Parliament passes a new National Security and Investment Act to protect Britain’s critical national infrastructure, only for the government fail to use its powers to prevent a Chinese company buying out one of our last *semiconductor* factories. 49/53
eetimes.eu/uk-gives-nod-t…

MI5 exposes ‘Chinese agent’ Christine Lee but others who’ve worked with the United Front Work Department that Lee was coordinating with are still attending Conservative party events, sponsoring projects at universities, and engaged in all kinds of commercial activity. 50/53

Perhaps there are some particularly ‘risky’ forms of cooperation that took place during the ‘golden era’ which will certainly not happen again. But how well can we learn from our mistakes if, as @Dominic2306 claims, quite what went on remains “secret for now”? 51/53

The public’s negative feelings towards the PRC solidify. But, quietly, not very much is done to reduce Britain’s dependence on the country. The ‘Lords via HSBC’ crowd can insert their ‘whilst mitigating risks’ caveat and keep grifting. 52/53

So, Liu keeps hobnobbing the commercial elites. He knows the attitude they encourage and the processes it supports are pulling Britain in one direction - whilst the public mood, new security strategy & our most important ally pull us in the opposite! 53/53