The Chinese Dream
China’s Challenge to Global Britain
David Martin Jones and M.L.R. Smith argue the UK is not taking seriously the threat China poses to national security, stability and prosperity.
The Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the Party’s highest decision-making body, met for the sixth plenum of its current cycle earlier this month. Although little remarked upon in the West, the plenum passed an historic resolution, only the third such in its hundred year history. The resolution attributes China’s resurgence, power, and wealth to actions taken by Xi Jinping and the CCP. The resolution paves the way for the next party congress in 2022 to confirm Xi Jinping as the Party’s General Secretary and leader of the country ‘forever’. The Central Committee’s decision represents a significant concentration of power in the leader of this one party state.
The UK government and the mainstream media’s failure to recognize the implications of this latest stage in China’s development as a totalitarian despotism is disquieting. The CCP, and its dictatorial leader, represent a serious threat to a United Kingdom struggling to recover from the social and economic devastation wrought by Covid-19 and successive lockdowns. Unlike other threats to national security that emerge from outside or within the UK, China directly challenges both the UK’s internal security and its interest in securing a rule-governed, international post-pandemic order. The UK thus needs a far more coherent defence and foreign policy posture to address the threat from China.