The visit of David Cameron and Xi Jinping to the Plough Inn at Cadsden, Buckinghamshire in 2015 has come to be seen as defining moment of the ‘Golden Era’ of UK-China relations. The scene suggests a sense of normality; two men arrive in a pub, and one of them – ostensibly the local – orders them both a drink. They wear dark suits, and their ties are both off, as if they are colleagues having just finished work. They sit side-by-side at the bar, exchanging observations about (you imagine) the world at large.
However, things are not quite as normal as they seem. For a start, there are actually three men, one of whom is an interpreter, because the men don’t speak the same language. One of them – the non-local – slightly rushes his pint, not waiting for it to settle. The body language is awkward, almost forced.
However, what is really abnormal about this exercise is not the setting, but the fact that these men are the leaders of Britain and China. This outing therefore represents the closest interaction by people in their position in more than 400 years. In fact, it is only the third state visit by a Chinese leader ever, the first one having taken place in 1999.
The sheer abnormality of Britain and China actually talking to each other is beautifully brought out in ‘The Great Reversal’, the new book by Professor Kerry Brown, Director of the Lau China Institute. Professor Brown has turned his attention to this relationship now because he feels that the UK lacks a national narrative about its relationship with China. This assertion is amply illustrated throughout his highly readable book, in which monumental involvements in each country’s history unfold with barely any interest or acknowledgment by the British public.
I was primarily intrigued by what this book might reveal about the history of dialogue between the two countries. Wilton Park is a dialogue-focused organisation, and we have our own history of dialogue with China, as well as ambitious plans for the future. However, as a nation, we find ourselves at what feels like a low point in our exchanges with China. Protests in Hong Kong, Brexit, COVID-19, and the changing cast of UK Prime Ministers, have all contributed to major channels of interaction falling away. Bilateral Economic and Financial dialogues, People to People dialogues, High Level Strategic dialogues, and a host of schemes to promote joint development and prosperity have almost all lapsed. What Professor Brown’s book tells us is that this is not a historic nadir, but more like a reversion to the mean.
There are three primary take-aways from this book when it comes to UK-China dialogue. The first is that trade has always led the way. Elizabeth I, facing a squeeze on trade routes in Europe due to competition with Spain, initially dispatched missions eastwards in the 1650s, bearing letters for the Chinese Emperor (unfortunately none was delivered, despite four attempts). The motivation for opening contact between the two nations was explicitly commercial, seeking trade ‘which consisteth in the transporting outward of such things where of we have plenty, and in bringing in such things as we stand in need of’.
This original ‘growth mission’ was to inform countless subsequent embassies, delegations and incursions into Chinese territory. Despite the infamous failure of the McCartney embassy in 1793, the East India Company and ambitious independent traders such as Jardine and Matheson gradually assumed a controlling position over China’s trade, and therefore its engagement with the world. This led initially to the addiction of the British to Chinese tea, before featuring some of the least edifying episodes mercantilism on British history, when exports of opium to China eventually gave rise to two hopelessly one-sided conflicts (or ‘Opium Wars’) in the nineteenth century.
Only after literally hundreds of years did this trade-based contact broaden into anything diplomatic or cultural (although military and missionary adventures feature in the middle pages of the book). The Chinese initially declined a diplomatic presence in the UK, before settling in Portland Place in 1877. Only after the collapse of the Qing dynasty, the invasion of the Japanese, the conclusion of the Second World War and a civil war between Chinese Nationalists and Communists, did national leaders come close to actually talking to each other. Ambassadorial-level relations were initiated in 1972, and the leader of the opposition Edward Heath met Mao Zedong in Beijing two years later; Queen Elizabeth became the first British sovereign to visit China in 1986 (shortly before Wham!).
Now, as then, the rationale for Britain and China’s interaction is primarily economic, even if it contains many additional components. As Sir Keir Starmer and David Lammy make plans for visits and dialogues as part of their own growth mission, we can expect commercial relations to be uppermost in their minds.
The second lesson is that diplomacy is hard. There are numerous tragi-comic examples in the book of British consuls and diplomats trying and failing to make a connection with their opposite numbers. In one passage, Brown describes how, of the consular officials who learned the fiendishly-difficult Chinese language and travelled to engage late-Qing China from 1855, 11 had died, 9 had returned home on sick leave, while several remained at their posts in a precarious state of health; of the 90 arrivals between 1897 and 1920, five committed suicide and many suffered a nervous breakdown or serious physical ailment. Those diplomats that did manage to keep body and soul together had to endure the resentment and aloofness of their Chinese counterparts, and constant accusations from the British trading community that they were accommodating the Chinese. It is therefore not a surprise that a China-focused career in the Diplomatic Service is not high among the ambitions of British undergraduates (judging by the tiny numbers of those studying Mandarin).
The third lesson is that relations between the two countries have always been asymmetric. In fact, the historical period during which Britain and China could legitimately see eye-to-eye was vanishingly brief. Brown identifies the 1997 Hong Kong handover as the point at which the balance of power changed, or perhaps the true turning point was China’s accession to the World Trade Organisation in 2001; either way, the tables turned frighteningly quickly. The UK and China had economies of equal size in 2005, but by the time Cameron and Xi visited the Plough Inn, the Chinese was already two-and-a-half times larger.
What really struck me about this story is the contrast between the perennial failure of UK-China dialogue and the normality of British contact with other major powers. British leaders have exchanged state visits to certain European capitals for the best part of a thousand years. Many European royal families are not only familiar, they are actually family, having intermarried regularly through the centuries. In recent history, the British have fought and died alongside American and Commonwealth (and particularly ‘Five Eyes’) partners, bonding our people closely. Shared language, culture, and philosophy continues to sustain interactions with our closest European, Atlantic and Antipodean partners – meanwhile, there has never been a British Prime Minister or monarch who spoke Chinese (former Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd is the closest we have had).
This barren history of dialogue puts Cameron and Xi’s visit to the pub in a very different light. He was, as Professor Brown’s book shows, far more ambitious than any of his predecessors (or indeed successors). If Britain is to grow a tradition of ‘normal’ dialogue with the Chinese, it will therefore have to be almost from scratch. We will have to be patient, wrestle with the language, work within economic realities, and risk being driven ever-so-slightly mad. But in a world which is changing so quickly, establishing a sense of normality would be both an advantage and a significant accomplishment.