China

Neil Coyle Excerpts

Wednesday 15th May 2024 Westminster Hall

[Bob Seely (Isle of Wight) (Con)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered Government policy on China.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Rees. I am here to look at Government policy on China, but also to argue for a more coherent version of that policy, notwithstanding the very considerable progress that, to be fair to them, the Government have been making.

I will start by outlining a few ideas. For me, the 21st century will mark a struggle between two visions for humanity: between open and closed societies; between states that are the servants of their people and states that are the masters of their people; and whether the great scientific discoveries of this century—artificial intelligence, big data—will be used to help humanity or to enslave it.

Opposing the policies of the Chinese Communist party and the direction that it has sadly embarked on for the past 10 to 15 years does not mean being anti-Chinese. Many Chinese oppose the Chinese Communist party, as indeed do many tens of thousands of brave Hong Kong activists in our own country.

I am delighted that the Deputy Foreign Secretary is present to respond to this debate on behalf of Government. I fully accept that the relationship we have with China is significantly more complex than the relationship we had with the USSR; we have a much deeper trading relationship with communist China, and we need to work together on climate and the environment, although that should not be used as an excuse for the status quo. China presents the need for a more complex set of alliances and more complex containment, but there is a greater urgency because, in many ways, China is more powerful than the Soviet Union was. We need to change the dynamic. It is quite clear that shutting off the global economy, which the west still heavily influences, but no longer controls, is not an option.

For me, the direction of travel is clear. Just this week, what have we had? Chinese vessels encroach daily on Taiwanese territorial waters, with conventional military tensions increasing. In the UK, the head of GCHQ warns that China represents a growing and genuine threat, not only to the UK but to the internet as a whole. Three men, including a Border Force officer, are arrested on spying charges. The US announces that it will raise the tariff on Chinese electric vehicles to 100%, citing “unfair practices”.

We are in the middle of what the Government have called an “epoch-defining challenge”; some Members on the Government Benches, and perhaps indeed those on other Benches, see it as a more significantly adversarial relationship. I accept that there are elements of both, and that just focusing on the words to define this issue—be they “adversarial”, “enemy” or “challenge”—is not necessarily the most helpful thing. What is important is that our policies become less piecemeal.

As I say, I do not want to underestimate the journey that the Government have been on. Much has changed since the failed golden era. It is clear that the hope held by the UK, the US and other partners—that normalising trade relations with China would lead to greater security on all sides—has not materialised. Indeed, quite the opposite is true: what China and arguably Russia have done is trash the system from the inside. However, with respect, I think that our policies are still a little too piecemeal. Although we have had sensible decisions on Huawei, spurred by myself, my right hon. Friend the Member for Chingford and Woodford Green (Sir Iain Duncan Smith) and others, and the passing of the National Security Act 2023 and a significant number of measures, I still think we need to go further.

I am looking at trying to develop a coherent set of ideas, not only in this speech but with the think-tank Civitas, with whom I hope to publish stuff next month. I pay tribute to and thank people such as Charlie Parton, the former diplomat who has done a lot of great work advising Members of Parliament on both sides of the House on China strategy, highlighting what the Chinese Communist party has been saying to itself about the west; Ben Rogers and others at Hong Kong Watch; and Luke de Pulford at the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China for the work that they have all done.

[Neil Coyle (Bermondsey and Old Southwark) (Lab)]

I thank the hon. Member for securing this debate. Given the arrests this week and the issues that he has outlined, does he agree that the issue here is the pace at which we are assessing the situation, and the need for a cross-Government audit of the Chinese Communist party’s attempts to influence UK politicians and Government, and also individuals, which we saw this week with the arrests of individuals attempting to intimidate and harass Hong Kong democracy activists in the UK?

[Bob Seely]

I agree very much with the points that the hon. Gentleman makes. We need to increase our pace, which is one of things that I would like to argue today. What the Chinese Communist party wants is no secret. It does not want to live in harmony with the west; it wants to dominate it. Western nations are viewed in CCP literature as hostile foreign forces intent on damaging Beijing. In Document No. 9, for example, the CCP describes democracy as one of nine false ideological trends. The full list includes: promoting western constitutional democracy; promoting universal values, which would be an attempt to weaken the theoretical foundations of the party’s leadership; promoting civil society, to dismantle the ruling party’s social foundations; promoting neoliberalism, which would challenge China’s basic economic system; promoting the western ideal of free journalism, which would challenge the communist party’s grip on power; promoting historical nihilism, or rather a different interpretation of the communist party’s history; and questioning the socialist nature of socialism with Chinese characteristics. All those things are seen as false historical trends, and there are many other documents, which I will not go into.

The challenges—I use the Government word, “challenges”—from this potentially adversarial state are arising on many fronts. On cyber, just this week GCHQ has said that there is an increased threat; indeed, I was one of the unfortunate servicemen and women whose details were found potentially not to be as secure as we would have liked. I think it was last week when we were told that our details had been stolen or were potentially vulnerable to theft. Trade dumping is an absolutely critical element of this. China’s developing country status at the World Trade Organisation means that the rules on dumping do not apply to it. As we are slow off the mark here, and because the Americans have put a 100% tariff on electric vehicles, on which the European Union may follow suit, I worry that we will become a dumping ground for Chinese goods. That is not an accident. The destruction of our own industries is not happening because the Chinese are necessarily good at them—although some are and, in a free state, arguably more would be. It is a deliberate state policy of intellectual property theft that is happening now, but which was also happening 10 to 20 years ago.

Then there is the long-term planning to buy up resources, the super-cheap communist state loans, the over-production as a matter of policy, and the dumping of goods on international markets to bankrupt western firms. Huawei was an instructional lesson on that. It originally partnered with Nortel, a Canadian company that suddenly found its intellectual property in Beijing. Nortel then collapsed and its place was taken by Huawei, whose state agenda was to undercut western firms and dominate the 5G market. That creation of dependence is one of the things that is most dangerous—I will explain why in a couple of minutes.

There is also the transitional repression—the spying on and intimidation of not only China’s own people abroad, but Hong Kong activists, which is a growing problem that we seem reluctant to tackle robustly. Then there is the question of covid and its origins. If covid had come out of a laboratory in France or the United Kingdom, or the United States especially, we would never have heard the end of it from political parties in this country or the media; and yet I am staggered by the lack of interest shown in the likelihood that covid came out of the Wuhan virus laboratory. I am also staggered at the lack of interest in whether it had been genetically altered before it was, presumably, accidentally leaked. As Lord Ridley said:

“The UK security and scientific establishment refused to look at the evidence for a lab leak.”

That is an extraordinary claim from somebody who is a considerable expert on that. If nothing else, it is astonishing that we seem to be so uninterested in biosecurity standards in other countries, given the potential hazard not only to ourselves but to humanity.

The united front, the malign influence of which we have potentially seen in Parliament, is a long-term, whole-of-state strategy used by the Chinese Communist Party to further its interests within and outside China through multiple organs of the Chinese state and a range of activities—overt and covert; legal and illegal. It encompasses not only espionage but forms of malign influence that are sometimes overt, but sometimes covert. We know from our Intelligence and Security Committee that the united front has “achieved low-level penetration” across “most sectors of UK business and civil society”. What does the Deputy Foreign Secretary have to say about that? Is he concerned about that penetration across most sectors of UK business and civil society by the united front?

I will spend a couple of minutes on the domination of DNA research and on cellular modules, which are so little known, but potentially so important. China believes that its own biomedical data is a

“foundational strategic state resource.”

Yet, at the same time, it is hoovering up DNA data and genomic data from around the world. Western security officials, including those identified in the ISC report, see DNA biotech as another major concern. The Pentagon in the United States listed the BGI group, otherwise known as the Beijing Genomics Institute, as a Chinese military company, and the US Government have twice blacklisted the group’s subsidiaries for their role in the collection and analysis of DNA that has enabled China’s repression of its own ethnic minorities.

That is a really creepy and unpleasant policy that the CCP and the BGI group have been accused of: collecting DNA research for the repression of their own minorities. Needless to say, not only have we not done the same thing as the US, but BGI Tech Solutions was awarded a £10.8 million contract in this country for genomic testing of covid samples. Not only that, but in 2021, Reuters revealed that the company was selling prenatal tests to millions of women globally in order to collect their DNA data, using biotech methods developed with the Chinese military.

A top counter-intelligence official from the US Government has said that BGI is

“no different than Huawei…It’s this legitimate business that’s also masking intelligence gathering for nefarious purposes.”

I wonder if we are again sleepwalking dangerously and somewhat naively into another ethical crisis—the kind that we had with Huawei, and which we could now be seeing with BGI.

I have not had time to show the Minister my speech, because I only finished it about half an hour before the debate, so I will happily write to him on these questions, and perhaps he could give me a written answer. What are the Government planning to do on genomic research and protecting the United Kingdom, which does not only mean our DNA data—unless he thinks we can share it with the rest of the world; maybe we should or could be—and what do we think BGI and China are trying to do with our DNA?

I will talk a little bit about cellular modules because, again, it is an obscure, but important, topic. The internet of things refers to internet devices that talk to each other, from alarm systems, video recorders and fridges, to aeroplanes, boats and, maybe one day, nuclear weapon system launching programmes—and even the lights in our living room. Those gadgets rely on modules—groups of chips—that connect the equipment to the internet and talk to each other. China supplies the west with more than 60% of those modules. But because they are updated remotely by the manufacturer, it is practically impossible to ensure that they are not spying on us and sending back data flows to their source. If that sounds a bit paranoid, let us remember that TikTok is currently under investigation by the FBI after its parent company used the app to monitor journalists in the United States. Let us also remember that a Government car was allegedly compounded—I cannot remember if that was last year or a few months ago—because a cellular module in it might have been pinging back eavesdropped conversations. China aims to dominate the market, as it has with Huawei and BGI, for cellular modules. Do the Government have an opinion on whether that is a threat to our economy, to our people and to our national security?

I am not even going to bother touching on the military threat, because it is complex and detailed, though my fear is not only the slow domination. Sun Tzu, a great man and a philosopher of conflict, said:

“The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”

That seems to be President Xi’s aim. Arguably, it should also be our aim. That idea should inspire us that we need to defend ourselves now, and that we need to take the short-to-medium and the long-term decisions to defend ourselves, not to aggressively wave fingers at people, but to be able to defend ourselves. The reason I say that is that the most dangerous outcome is that we become so dependent on China in the next five years, for everything from vehicles to fridges to cellular modules to our DNA, that when Taiwan is attacked, if we took out sanctions on China we would effectively collapse the global economy. It would cause chaos and collapse in Europe and our own country that would make the energy crisis for the Ukraine war look like a picnic, with rioting on the streets and destabilised western societies—or we can stand by and say, “Fair enough.”

The other, potentially even greater, threat is that we break the alliance between the United States and ourselves and the United States and Europe, which is undoubtedly China’s strategic aim. That will be a catastrophe for western civilisation. We need to deepen our alliances with the US and Oz and many other states in that part of the world, including South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Indonesia.

Finally, I have two more points. On TikTok, for young people in China the algorithm is different from that in the UK. In China, it is used to promote science, education and history, including the history of China. In our countries, it makes citizens watch

“stupid dance videos with the main goal of making us imbeciles”.

That quotation is from the former chief software officer of the US Air Force and Space Force. In China, TikTok is about entertaining education; here it is just about entertainment. It is not only cyber-addiction, but real addiction, that is an issue. Do the Government have a position on the large-scale illicit supply of fentanyl by China to the United States, which I understand is now also becoming a problem in this country? I will wind up in two to three minutes; I said I would stick to 20 minutes, which I am trying to do.

What are we going to do about this issue? The real aim of the immediate policy is to insulate ourselves. In no particular order, here are some ideas. Let us add science to human rights. We can DNA test where cotton comes from. Should we not be mandating that, in supply chains that go anywhere near China, we DNA test cotton so that we can see whether it comes from Xinjiang and is made by slave labour, so that we can outlaw it? That is an important thing to do for fair trade, and to help jobs not only in this country, but in Bangladesh, India and places where they do not use slave labour. It is also important for human rights: taking a consistent approach to the human rights agenda and giving it the respect it needs.

We need to diversify as a matter of urgency. As a national priority, we need to diversify our supply chains, so that if there is war in the Pacific or around Taiwan, we are not going to destroy our standard of living, economy or people’s jobs in order to put sanctions on China, or to support the United States or Taiwan.

We need longer-term planning over rare earth minerals—something I have not even brought up due to time considerations. We are beginning to act but we are two or three decades behind China.

We should tell Confucius Institute centres to stop spying on their citizens, or shut them down and kick out the people in them. The same should apply to Hong Kong economic offices, which are now also being used to intimidate Chinese people in this country.

As for the military, we need a permanent western presence in disputed waters and more money spent.

On WTO and dumping, we need to work together; we need to treat China as a developed economy, even if in WTO terms it is not.

I also suggest that we need to have faith in ourselves. There is no inevitability about China’s future victory. It is a very powerful country, but like Russia, it lacks few actual friends. Its one formal alliance is with the basket case of North Korea, although the basket case of Russia is also a pretty close ally. We have many friends and allies, as do the United States and France, and we need to be working with those allies and with our partners in the Pacific for a new, subtle but thoughtful, determined and robust containment programme. That means spending on hard power, but it also means a much more assertive defence of our interests, as well as understanding how decades of subversive conflict across culture, business, sport and science can damage our national interest and threaten our people. Whether it is the use of artificial intelligence, big data, DNA sequencing, advanced propaganda techniques or cellular modules, we need to do more to understand the modern world that we inhabit.

We are in a battle for the future of humanity, between democracies and authoritarian states. At the moment, that conflict is being lost by us. It is also being conducted in myriad subtle ways. We need to grasp the extent of it and do more to react robustly to defend ourselves.

--- Later in debate ---

[Justin Madders (Ellesmere Port and Neston) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair this afternoon, Ms Rees. I congratulate the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) on securing the debate and on his excellent, wide-ranging opening remarks. He set out the challenges we face as a country, and presented a pretty dystopian vision of the future, if we allow it to happen. I hope that we are able to collectively rise to the challenges he laid out.

The hon. Member raised a number of matters that I will touch on. I start with the refreshed integrated review, published by the Government last year, which stated:

“China…poses an epoch-defining and systemic challenge with implications for almost every area of government policy and the everyday lives of British people.”

I consider that a welcome revision to our approach. It is a pretty serious, broad statement of where we are and what we need to do. We need to recognise China’s size and influence, alongside the risks that it brings. The hon. Member for Isle of Wight made the point very eloquently that our reliance is one of those risks, alongside China’s greater aggression, its human rights record and the strengthening of its partnership with Russia; they are all potential existential threats.

In many respects, the news emerging this week on both sides of the Atlantic is a stark reminder that these challenges are here and now, and that care needs to be taken. I will take one very clear example from my own constituency, which feeds into the wider picture that has been painted today. There is a Stellantis plant in my constituency. It announced yesterday that it will be selling Chinese-made electric vehicles in Europe from the autumn, and in the UK from next year. We have a very proud history of manufacturing in this country, and indeed in Ellesmere Port, at what is commonly known as the Vauxhall motor plant, which is now owned by Stellantis. A lot of work was put in to secure the investment needed to move to electric vehicle production, which is very important for the plant, for the constituency and for the whole UK automotive sector.

I had hoped that we could lead the way in the sale of new electric vehicles, as the plan was always to expand from where we are now—from the production of vans into the domestic car market—so it is a concern that the owners are already turning to cheaper Chinese electric vehicles. It is too soon to understand the impact of that on domestic production, but surely it is not going to help. That is not to say that I want to insulate the UK from competition, but there has to be fair competition, and there has to be one eye on the future.

There is no doubt that the move to an all-electric vehicle country is going to be expensive and we should be looking at how we keep costs down, but if major manufacturers are already concluding that the best way for them to meet that challenge is to turn to Chinese imports, we are never going to have the domestic manufacturing capacity to meet domestic demand, never mind being able to continue to be the proud exporter to the rest of the world that we have always been.

As we have heard, yesterday President Biden announced he was introducing a 100% tariff on electric vehicles made in China, as well as tariffs on lithium batteries, critical minerals and semiconductors. That is a move designed to prevent cheap, subsidised Chinese goods from entering the US market. The decision was taken after a four-year review, and there are similar moves across the EU to assess the impact of Chinese imports. Since October, the EU has been investigating whether local subsidies have been helping Chinese car manufacturers undercut European-made vehicles. The investigation is due to report shortly.

I am not aware of a similar review being undertaken here. It was reported in February that the Government were contemplating commissioning the Trade Remedies Authority to undertake an investigation into subsidies, but three months on we have silence. Is the Minister able to confirm whether the Government are still looking into that and whether they will look at what the EU says if conclusive evidence of subsidies is found? We risk putting ourselves in a very exposed position. Our manufacturing capacity would be reduced, probably permanently, and we would be kidding ourselves about the race to net zero if we were reliant on Chinese imports.

Cars are just one example of our potential exposure; steel, energy, fibre optics, semiconductors, rare elements or any number of parts of our infrastructure are part of this discussion. We cannot allow ourselves to be at the mercy of one country, especially not one like China, which has what I would consider to be a ruthless focus on economic dominance. As we have heard from the hon. Member for Isle of Wight, that could lead us into a very dark place indeed.

Clearly, we benefit from Chinese investment in this country. Life sciences is a sector that it is investing in heavily. After what the hon. Member has said, that needs to be looked at very carefully as well. The fact is that I could go down any street in this country and see things that have Chinese ownership: pubs, shops, restaurants, cinemas. That is probably fair enough in a global economy, but what about water companies, energy companies and nuclear power plants? I wonder how we have managed to get to the point at which our critical infrastructure is so open to influence by Chinese investors. How have we got to the point where China is a part owner in Thames Water and has significant debts to at least two Chinese state-owned banks? I think we can all see where that might lead us if international tensions rise.

Away from manufacturing, as the hon. Member mentioned, issues in cyber-security have been well documented. Indeed, there was a debate here yesterday on the dangers of social media. I absolutely agree with what the hon. Member said about the differences between TikTok and its Chinese equivalent, Douyin. From a child’s perspective, in China it certainly has a lot more educational content. In 2021 the Chinese Government enacted a law that called for the

“creation and broadcast of online content conducive to the healthy growth of minors”.

That can of course be seen as part of the wider attitude to free speech in China, but it is of interest that they obviously see that some of the content on these channels might have a detrimental effect on a child’s development, but they are more than happy for that stuff to be pumped on to our own children’s screens.

[Neil Coyle]

When my hon. Friend says “they”, he is talking about the Chinese Government. Does he welcome the distinction that the hon. Member for Isle of Wight (Bob Seely) made at the start of the debate between the Government of China and the people? As someone who lived in China for two years, may I make a personal statement?

(The Member continued in Mandarin.)

For those who do not know any Mandarin—I appreciate that mine is rusty—that translates as: “I like the country and I like the people. It is the Government who have caused the concerns that are the focus of the debate today. It is the politicians and the political leadership of China that is the challenge.”

[Justin Madders]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention. He makes a very important point—the bits of it that I actually understood. He must have seen my speech because I am about to make the very important distinction—

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Coyle]

In Mandarin?

[Justin Madders]

Not in Mandarin, no—in English. There is a very important distinction that we would all make between the Chinese people and the CCP. There is no doubt that the CCP is the malign influence in all this.

On the question of social media, there is a concern that there may be an imbalance between what we see in this country and what is seen in China, and there may be deliberate reasons for that. We should certainly look at that and at the dangerous anti-western, conspiracy theory, democracy-undermining stuff that comes out from all around the world, and in particular from China.

I echo the comments made by the director general of MI5 in 2022. He said that it would be wrong for us to cut ourselves off from one fifth of the world’s population, and that we should continue to engage and work with China in a way that is consistent with our national security. But I do not think we have the balance right. As the hon. Member for Isle of Wight said, that balance will be consistently and constantly reviewed. We need greater international resilience to international incidents. The analogy with what happened in Russia is very important, because that is a real threat that we could face in the next few years, and we do not want to leave ourselves overexposed.

As has been said, many western countries have begun to understand the risks that we face, have taken action against firms such as Huawei, and have limited the use of such technologies in sensitive and critical infrastructure. In that context, questions must now be raised about our reliance on supply chains that are controlled by China and have such a huge impact on our infrastructure.

It is clear that China holds a dominant position over global supply chains that are critical to the net zero transition. It controls a significant proportion of the rare metals necessary for lithium-ion batteries, wind turbines and solar photovoltaic modules. On the lithium-ion battery chains, China is responsible for 80% of the supply of spherical graphite, refined manganese, anodes and electrolytes, so we clearly need a co-ordinated response to that.

It feels as though we are at a very important point in global politics. We must work across the globe to deal with the many challenges that the planet faces, while at the same time protecting our national security and long-term economic interests. Taking a cautious and proactive approach to risks is central to protecting our country and its citizens. I believe that the way we approach China will be a central feature of our lives for many years to come. On every occasion that we deal with it, the question of security, economic or otherwise, must be the very first thing we ask.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mark Logan]

I am not here to defend TikTok. I do use TikTok, as do many of our colleagues, including some high-profile Ministers in the Cabinet. That is not what this is about. Some of this has to do with education as well, and I look to my hon. Friend the Member for Isle of Wight. Again, I was based in China. I have a daughter in the education system and, going into primary school level in China, there is a lot in the education system that is focused on the harder aspects of education: learning the sciences, mathematics and physics. I think that that can be reflected in the social media that is used there, by the case of Douyin.

[Neil Coyle]

I intervene not to discuss mutual family that we have still living in the People’s Republic of China, but on the hon. Gentleman’s point about polling, can he focus a little on what the punishment might be for someone suggesting that they are dissatisfied with where the Chinese Government are at? I also mention the corruption and local-level issues. But fundamentally, a much more important issue for us here, where we still have responsibility, is polling within Hong Kong specifically and the Government’s responsibility to Hong Kong nationals and those seeking British national overseas status. Might we see further measures to support those people in the face of article 23 extensions of the diminution of rights in Hong Kong?

[Mark Logan]

The hon. Member raises a fantastic point explicitly on Hong Kong. What has happened in Hong Kong in recent years is unfortunate. I think it is a strategic mistake in terms of the governance of Hong Kong, so I hope the Deputy Foreign Secretary comes to that.

I will finish by saying that for us, it is about the whole idea of soul searching and asking what the UK’s role in the world is and how we can slightly push back against the tone. We do not want to push China into the arms of the axis of authoritarian regimes, as we talked about, because there are many things the Chinese people care about that show their values are very similar to ours. It is not just the paranoia of 200,000 Chinese students in the UK who are all doing these bad things; actually, it shows a society that is striving to do better, and those are values that we share and hold dearly in this country as well.