What happens if Liz Truss designates China as a ‘threat’?

Early on in the Tory leadership campaign, Liz Truss was the only contender to say that she wanted to sit down with Vladimir Putin – so that she could ‘call him out’. It now seems that President Xi Jinping will be next in her firing line, after her team briefed yesterday that as PM she intends to put China on the same footing as Russia.

According to campaign sources who spoke to the Times, Truss intends to redesignate China as a ‘threat’ rather than the ‘systemic competitor’ the government described Beijing as in last year’s integrated review. In the 114-page document setting out Britain's foreign policy, the review described Russia as ‘an acute threat’ but said that ‘Open trading economies like the UK will need to engage with China and remain open to Chinese trade and investment, but they must also protect themselves against practices that have an adverse effect on prosperity and security’. The Truss camp say they will now revisit that wording.

So what would it mean to designate China a ‘threat’ rather than ‘competitor’? The announcement is light on details, raising some important questions. For one, the wording of the integrated review closely tracked the Biden administration’s language on China; in a May speech, Secretary of State Antony Blinken called China ‘the most serious long-term challenge to the international order’, reserving the word ‘threat’ for Moscow rather than Beijing. By reopening the review, is Truss intending to go further than our American allies?

If so, she will need to tread carefully. As my colleague Katy Balls has written, Truss has talked about establishing a ‘network of liberty’ (a democratic alliance to combat the world’s authoritarians). Yet there are reports that Washington diplomats are already cooling on the likely next PM, and are sceptical of her belligerence when it comes to the Northern Ireland Protocol. So she will need to be wary of freelancing on an important issue like China. She will also probably need to stop casually throwing shade toward the leaders of European countries, such as Macron, and perhaps think twice about triggering Article 16. After all, what would a trade war with Europe say about her commitment to this ‘network of liberty’?

And how differently would Truss’s government treat China-the-threat versus China-the-competitor? ‘There will be no more economic partnerships. That was all meant to be suspended after Hong Kong’, her camp told the Times. Would this be a complete economic decoupling or are there still areas where Truss believes it’s still okay to trade and collaborate? (She privately says that China is a genocidal regime, so it would seem difficult to justify doing any amount of business with the country, even if it is the world’s second largest economy). Washington and Beijing have both taken steps to decouple in recent years anyway, but if the UK is to follow that path, then the very real economic costs will need to be spelled out to the country. Brits have so far not wavered in their support for Ukraine, even in the face of extortionate energy price rises. It might be that we are similarly stoic when it comes to China, but the costs will be many times greater.

Once in Downing Street, Truss will need a constructive and strategic foreign policy. On China, that means making clear what her approach would mean and the costs that come with it. As I’ve written previously, it also means building up Whitehall’s expertise on China (we've learned today that only 14 diplomats a year are being taught Mandarin) instead of pushing out experts who don’t conform with a certain worldview. So far, Truss’s approach to foreign policy has seemed more performative than substantive, but she’ll soon have to flesh out the details.