Will China replace the US on the world stage?

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:07Today, China comes in from the cold.

0:19Xi Jinping had a very busy January, entertaining a cavalcade of world leaders in Beijing. First came the Irish Taoiseach, Michael Martin. The visit by the Taoiseach is an attempt to expand on trade ties. And on that front, successful groundwork was laid. Then it was Mark Carney's turn. It has been eight years since a Canadian prime minister touched down in the capital of China. But given the way the world has changed, it seems like a century ago. There followed the Finnish prime minister, the Uruguayan president, and then, last week, Kirsten Armer. Kirsten Armer has told Xi Jinping he wants a more sophisticated relationship with China as he met the president at the Great Hall of People on the first full day of his trip.

1:01The prime minister said China was a vital player on the global stage. It was the first visit by a British PM since Theresa May eight years ago. A sign of just how strained relations have been over Covid. Not to mention allegations of Chinese spying, cyber hacking and the suppression of Hong Kong exiles on British soil. Starmer presented his visit as the beginning of a different kind of relationship with China. We inherited a policy from the previous government, not of engagement with China, but hiding away and sticking their heads in the sand. While our allies developed a more sophisticated approach, they let the UK fall behind.

1:43We became an outlier. And he emerged clutching a trade deal, of sorts, that paved the way for a chain of boo stores in the UK, as well as slightly cheaper single malts for Chinese whiskey drinkers.

2:02But are Starmer and others courting Xi simply because Trump has become such an unreliable ally? Or is there a belated recognition that China is the future? From The Guardian, I'm Helen Pitt. Today in Focus, the risks and rewards of getting into bed with China.

2:24Tanya Branigan, welcome back to Today in Focus. Thank you for having me back. So you're a leader writer at The Guardian and have been following China for years. You lived there as a foreign correspondent and you've written extensively on the country, including in your book, Red Memory, which is about the lasting legacy of Chairman Mao's cultural revolution. So you're perfectly placed to explore with me today what it means that these so-called middle powers, a term we're hearing a lot at the moment, including the UK, seem to be shifting allegiance away from the US and towards China. And Keir Starmer has just got back from China.

2:56It was the first time a British Prime Minister has visited the country since Theresa May eight years ago. These visits tend to be very transactional, don't they? What came out of it for the UK and what do you think China is getting in return? So there's not a huge list of concrete takeaways from the trip, but there's whiskey tariffs, there's visa free travel for britains to china which is good news for china too which would quite like the tourism business and then on friday we heard that british parliamentarians will have sanctions lifted now that's because they'd addressed the horrific human rights abuses against the uyghurs in xinjiang not everybody who'd been sanctioned in the uk appears to have benefited from that lifting but at least the parliamentarians have and that was one of many issues that the British government has really needed to address in terms of human rights.

3:47You think too, for example, about the case of Jimmy Lai, and of course, the transnational repression we've seen with the harassment of Hong Kong activists here in the UK. Where Jimmy Lai, the well-known pro-democracy activist and media typhoon, has just been found guilty on all three counts of national security and sedition charges against him. Now, Jimmy Lai had already been in jail for five years on other charges and on remand. But this conviction means that he could now face the rest of his life in prison. People are not thinking this is going to be a trouble-free relationship. It's not a great embrace.

4:21It's more muted. It's more pragmatic. And it's very cautious because people really know what they're getting into and they're much more hesitant about China than they were seven or eight years ago. And how different do you think this is from the last time there was a big push from the UK government towards China? because I'm thinking back to 2014, the high point of the so-called golden age in Anglo-Chinese relations when Xi Jinping visited the UK. Good afternoon and welcome. It's an honour to welcome President Xi to Downing Street. This state visit, in which the President of China is spending almost a week here in Britain, marks a key moment in the relationship between our two countries.

5:00He had a pint with David Cameron in a pub in Oxfordshire, And I remember him coming up to Manchester with George Osborne, then the Chancellor, and he took a selfie with Sergio Aguero at Man City, even though he's apparently, we learned last week, a United fan, which is why Starmer gave G the football used in the United v Arsenal game last week. But it was all so cosy back then. How did this look to you this time round? I think this is fundamentally different. Previously, there was a certain amount of wishful thinking, I think. There was a certain amount of arrogance in the past. When you sort of looked at Western countries, there was always this feeling that, well, of course, they're going to want to buy everything we have to offer.

5:42I think it's much more pragmatic now. People are much more aware of the security threats, but it's a feeling that we have to engage with them. And I think that's right, both in terms of the big issues we're facing on things like the climate crisis, but also, of course, because of Trump. So it's much more a relationship of necessity. There's much less attempt, I think, even to brand it as being something flashier or more enduring or more noble, perhaps. And I guess the balance has just shifted so much. You know, if you look back just 20 years ago, the UK economy was bigger than the Chinese economy.

6:23And now we are being completely outpaced. And of course, it's not just the UK, is it, that's cosying up more to China. Macron, the French president, has been over there. Friedrich Merz from Germany is travelling to China soon. But perhaps the most significant shift has come from Canada. Talk me through what's happened there. That has really been so striking. If you think back to why Canadian relations with China went so wrong so dramatically, Canada arrested a top executive from Huawei, a very powerful and well-connected Chinese firm, and then two Canadian citizens were suddenly picked up on national security charges.

7:04Right, and that all kicked off back in 2018. Effectively, they were being held hostage. And if you looked at what China said, it was very clear that this case was tied to that of Meng Wanzhou, the Huawei executive, and that what happened to them would be about what happened to her. Good morning. Beijing is now holding two Canadians, apparently doubling the reprisals for Canada's arrest of a rich and powerful Chinese executive and multiplying the concerns for Ottawa this morning in this deepening diplomatic dispute. That was a really shocking case that I think gave many people pause in dealing with China, made them feel much more cautious about the implications of doing business there.

7:47But of course, Canada now has a US president who's talking about it becoming the 51st state. We're in a very different world. And as Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, made so clear in that speech to Davos, people now are having to get to grips with a new sort of world. He said there can't be any nostalgia. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers. People are having to get sort of much more realistic about what's involved.

8:31And so I think the fact that Carney went to China, that he was so keen to mend relations, really speaks volumes about where we are. Canada's under no illusions about what China is, about how it operates, particularly these days. but it's also under no illusions about how the US is behaving and that's forcing it into a different space and I think that's something we're seeing sort of playing out across the world.

9:05Just how long has all of this been in the making, do you think? How far back does it go? There has been a sense of a new world order emerging for some time, particularly in terms of China's growing power or forcefulness. Xi Jinping, before he even took charge of the country, did a trip abroad. And he made this statement about how there are foreigners who've eaten their fill and have nothing better to do than point the finger at China. Yeah, before you became president in what, 2013? The tone of it was so different to anything that you've heard from the Chinese leadership, really. So for a long time, right from reform and opening after the Cultural Revolution, there was this maxim that in foreign affairs, China would sort of hide its light and bide its time and keep a much lower profile.

9:57And so it became obvious that something was shifting. And that was very much the case once Xi came to power. So you had a much more assertive China on one side. And then particularly we saw when the pandemic came along, the Chinese response in terms of the cover up at the start and then the way it just closed its doors to the world and the realization of how reliant we all were on supply chains originating in China. All of those things really made people think again. But at the same time, you then had the rise of Trump to contend with. And seeing how erratic Trump was, how bullying he was, how unreliable the US was as a partner, all things that we saw in his first term that have become massively more evident since he returned to office.

10:48And I think it's really reinforced this sense of these fundamental shifts. The end of the rules-based system. And how much do you think the way in which Trump has wielded tariffs as a form of economic leverage against countries that used to be the US's closest allies like us and most recently over Greenland, what impact do you think that that's having on the calculation of these countries that are now talking a much more conciliatory way towards China? I think there's really no more powerful illustration than what happened with India last year. So if you remember when Trump returned to power, many people thought this is going to be all about China.

11:27China is going to be the target. They're going to be the ones who are whacked with tariffs. India thought that it was in a pretty good place. What happens? India then gets hit with tariffs. And Narendra Modi then essentially embraces Xi Jinping. And within days of the tariffs being imposed, there's suddenly this new bond between two very powerful nations who have very different, often clashing interests, who have clashed with each other physically at times. So I think the speed of the shift in many ways is what's been so startling. And it's not, I should stress, that the US is being replaced by China.

12:04It's not that China is now a partner of all these nations necessarily. But these people are realising that they have to hedge their bets. And so they're not just looking to China as well. Latin America and the EU have now signed a trade deal. So there's a sense of people thinking, right, we have to start thinking about how we diversify, how we look beyond the US. China will be part of the solution, but it's not about China replacing the US. Right. And what is it about China in particular, though, that is so attractive as an alternative trading partner to the US? Well, I mean, China's obviously a huge market.

12:43It's an absolutely massive market. It's been a great source of all kinds of cheap goods in terms of things like wind power technologies, renewable technologies, as we heard Trump complaining about at great length in his rather rambling Davos speech. But you also, I think generally you have a China that feels a bit more like the future. So certainly when we saw the sort of the success of DeepSeek, that sort of looked like the tip of the iceberg. This is the old sort of Chinese version of ChatGPT. January 27th, 2025 may go down in history as DeepSeek Day. DeepSeek shaking up global tech. NVIDIA losing nearly$600 billion in market cap today alone.

13:27Just seeing the Chinese advances in AI and looking at the kind of focus that has been put on its technology, its innovation. It is now innovating. It is producing these things. It's producing them vastly cheaper than other places can do. Now, there are lots of reasons for that and a lot of them aren't good. Forced labour. So there are certainly many things people are concerned about, but there are real opportunities that people see in China. And at a point where the US looks so erratic, so hostile to people who have traditionally been among its staunchest allies, there is a sense that it just makes sense.

14:11I think it's so interesting you describing China as the future. Previously, people used to go to America to get a glimpse of what the future could be like, or Japan potentially in the 1990s. And I just think about my own thinking on China, how rapidly it shifted actually, even in the past year. I must admit, I previously probably held a slightly stereotypical view of China. It's where we get all our cheap tat from. And now I just don't think that way at all. I was watching a report from China the other day and it was showing how the electric car market there has just completely stormed ahead. And they were showing these recharging stations.

14:47And it's not like in the UK where you have to find a place and then you just sit there for potentially hours at a time waiting for your car to recharge. They had these like battery switching stations and you drive into the station, a robot would take out the old battery, put a new one in, it all takes three minutes and you're back out on the road. It really feels like China is, as you say, the future. I think if you look at Trump, even the sort of the vision he offers, which is this sort of 19th century imperialism, even talking about reshoring manufacturing and things, to be honest, mass manufacturing is not going to come back to the US at any really significant level.

15:22Not unless people want to pay vastly higher prices for their goods. Those days have gone. Now, if you look at polling on China, China is still generally much less popular than the US in most parts of the world. But it's really starting to gain traction again. Its record on human rights and so forth is as grim as ever. But the US is not even pretending to offer moral leadership at this point. That's sort of out of the window. And China has always been a diverse, vibrant, extraordinary, wonderful place in so many ways. It's wonderful that people can see that. But we can also see, of course, that it's in the interests of the Communist Party to present a particularly glossy, desirable image.

16:15and I think it can be quite easy for people to buy into that, particularly if they go perhaps on a short visa-free visit. You know, you go to the nice big cities, it's flashy, everything's working really well. It was a bit like you always used to sort of see people coming into China when I was there. They were constantly building airports. They built sort of 100 airports in some staggeringly short time. And people would fly in from the US where the airports are notoriously terrible and just say, wow, it's sparkling, it's clean, it's all working well. But of course, that's not really the measure of a good society.

16:46So I think it can be easy for people to be sort of dazzled by what they see. But it does feel overall, nonetheless, the US looks increasingly like an empire in decline. And China looks as if it has more dynamism, more energy, more ambition, not a player that people think of as being more benevolent, or even more aligned with their interests, but possibly. more predictable perhaps. Well possibly and we'll come on to talk about that a bit more shortly but let's talk about how Starmer has framed this the resetting of the relationship. He said he's asked for a more sophisticated relationship with China.

17:28What do you think that actually means? Well that's a good question isn't it? I mean I think it's helpful to get away from the framing of should we talk to China or should we not talk to China. We're clearly going to engage with them and it's right that we do. I think that those kinds of formulations are often code for trying to gloss over the trickier bits in their relationship, whether they be security or on human rights, frankly, sort of turning a blind eye. And Kemi Badenock has explicitly said that she would not do what Starmer is doing. She opposed the so-called mega embassy being built for China in London, which Starmer's government gave planning permission to late last month.

18:10I would like to hear very clearly exactly why it is safe to have this mega embassy with all of the concerns that have been raised, with all of the concerns that we do have with China, whether it's spying, disrupting a lot of our services, issues with trade, the harassment of British nationals with connections to China, the harassment of the people of Hong Kong. There is so much that we are considering. But, you know, let's be honest, the British have been remarkably supine on a sort of a host of human rights issues, far, far predating this government. We think of George Osborne. He went on a trip to Xinjiang, which was, of course, a sort of public relations coup.

18:48For the Chinese, yes, because Xinjiang is where the Uyghurs are persecuted, although, if I remember rightly, Osborne glossed over that in his visit. Well, I don't think we should run away from difficult issues in our relationship with China. We raise human rights, but we do it in the context of also talking about issues like economic development, how we help kids. So the idea that the Tories can now claim the moral high ground, I mean, how little really was said in terms of the crackdown in Hong Kong and the destruction of the autonomy, which it was supposed to enjoy until 2047 under a bilateral treaty with the UK.

19:27All of these things really point to the fact that human rights, frankly, always have taken a backseat to other considerations in the relationship. So it's lamentable, but it's not surprising. And it's a bit hypocritical for conservatives to complain about Labour. This is not a new development, frankly. And I'm intrigued to hear how all of this looks from China. How does China view the UK, you know, our silly little rainy island? We must just be such small fry for them. Do they care what we think and what we want out of them? Strange, isn't it? We were the future once. A long time ago. Yeah, but I mean, we are still permanent member of the Security Council, for example.

20:10We do still have a sort of reach in terms of our sort of soft power, our cultural power. But we are definitely a junior player. We're less important since Brexit, clearly. We were sort of a bridge into Europe previously. That's now gone. So we've done ourselves a lot of damage in that regard. I think there's no doubt that China sees our place in the world pretty accurately. It's become much more forceful in foreign affairs generally.

20:51If countries are looking towards China because the US, as we've discussed, has become so unpredictable, is China really a stable partner? If you look at the Communist Party, it has had an incredible ride first to power and then hanging on to it. It's outlived its big brother, the Soviet Union. The Communist Party think a lot about the lessons from that. And so you would have to be quite brave and quite bold to bet against the party in the foreseeable future. I think where we are into new territory is that after the Cultural Revolution, because Mao had sort of run riot and caused chaos and devastation through the country.

21:35After that, the elders of the party, who included people like Xi Jinping's own father, basically decided that they would try and cage the power of the guy at the top. They would make sure that you didn't get another strongman. And so there were things like term limits. It was a more consensus driven or sort of bargaining driven system in which power was sort of institutionalized in some ways or constrained. There was a sense of some kind of guardrails. So Xi Jinping has centralized and concentrated power in an extraordinary way since he took over. He's brushed aside the term limits that existed.

22:14He's promised a new era for China, but critics of President Xi Jinping have compared him to Chairman Mao. Last month, the Chinese parliament voted to remove presidential term limits, giving Xi Jinping the right to remain in office indefinitely. So what does one man with virtually unchecked power mean for the future of China and for the rest of the world? He's got rid of people who might be potential successors. But not only has he sort of put all of his own people in place, he's also started turning on and removing the people that he appointed and promoted himself. And so the big news of recent days from China is not Keir Starmer's visit, which frankly is a footnote.

22:54It's the fact that Xi has ousted the top military figure, Zhang Yuxia, who was under him on the Central Military Commission. Now, this is the top military body. It had seven people on it. Under Xi, it's now down to Xi and one other guy. It's a sort of culmination of this campaign of purges, which has seen so many key figures kicked aside.

23:22Coming up, what is China's end goal?

23:35Starmer said before his Beijing trip that Britain would not have to choose between the US and China. And I wonder if you think that is true, because Trump did warn last week that it would be very dangerous for the UK and Canada to do business in China. But of course, Trump has also said that, you know, she's a great friend of his. Great guy. But I've always had a very good relationship with President Xi of China. He's an incredible man. He's made it clear that he's got no concerns about sort of human rights and so forth. He has been much less clear about where the US stands on Taiwan, for example, compared to Joe Biden, who actually sort of hardened the US line.

24:17Trump is in it for Trump. So he's sort of happy to do business with Xi himself. And that makes it rather harder for him to attempt to draw lines. At the same time, the US is going to do whatever it can to bolster its power. I suspect in the age of Trump, from everything we've seen so far, it will not bolster it in a particularly strategic or thought through way. If its big concern is fending off the rise of China, as we thought it might be, then you would think that the number one thing to do is to bolster relations with allies. Nurture India. Clasp Modi to your bosom. Build your relationships with Europe instead of trashing them.