The Golden Age of Sino-British Relations Is Now
November 5, 2015 | 08:15 GM
By Ian Morris
Last
week, a visit to the London School of Economics gave me the opportunity
to participate in some fascinating and important discussions on
everything from the origins of agriculture to the future of the
U.S.-Iranian relationship. And yet as the week went on, I couldn't shake
the feeling that a truly momentous shift was unfolding right in front
of me. Each morning as I walked through Soho to get to the school, I
passed under a big banner announcing, "London Welcomes President Xi
Jinping." The Chinese leader had been in town just a week earlier on a
visit that British Prime Minister David Cameron had called the beginning
of "a golden time" in Sino-British relations.
Britain's
leaders have enthusiastically embraced China. Two years ago, Chancellor
George Osborne announced that London would become the first Western hub
for trading renminbi and that Chinese banks would be allowed to open
branches there. Then in June, Britain ignored U.S. objections and signed
the Articles of Agreement of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank,
widely regarded as a Chinese rival to the International Monetary Fund,
the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. During Xi's most recent
visit in October, London announced not only that it would ease visa
restrictions on rich Chinese tourists but also that the state-owned
China General Nuclear Power Group would invest $9 billion in the new
Hinkley Point C nuclear power station, despite concerns about China
gaining access to nuclear secrets. Meanwhile, negotiations with China
continue for a $16 billion investment in High Speed 2, a high-speed rail
line linking London to northern England.
Not
everyone in Britain supports its flourishing relationship with China.
Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond came under criticism in October for
failing to challenge Xi on his authoritarianism, and British officials
arrested three prominent protesters in London during Xi's visit. I got a
taste of the anxiety myself when I drafted a column on the Hinkley
Point C negotiations for a British newspaper in 2014, only to have the
editor respond that it needed, "less history, more scary stuff about
China." But despite this pushback, a major shift seems to be underway in
Britain’s strategic posture — one that appears to be just one part of
an even bigger change taking place in the global landscape.
An Island at the Edge of the World
Since
about 6000 B.C., when melting glaciers finally raised sea levels high
enough to create the English Channel, two fundamental facts have
dominated Britain's strategic position. First, it is an island at the
edge of the European landmass; and second, it projects into the northern
Atlantic Ocean.
But
insularity has rarely equaled isolation. Both archaeology and DNA show
that by 5000 B.C., people, goods and ideas were already moving up and
down the "Atlantic facade," stretching from modern-day Spain to
Scotland. Southern England was still tightly linked to northern France
through ties of ethnicity, economics and culture when Julius Caesar
invaded in 55 B.C. However, Britain was still very much the edge of the
known world in antiquity and remained so until the 15th century A.D.
While the English Channel and North Sea were narrow enough to function
as trading highways, the Atlantic Ocean was simply too big for ancient
and medieval ships to master. Its vastness formed a barrier that cut the
islands off from the real centers of civilization, which stretched from
the Mediterranean to China.
This
band of civilization had formed the world's demographic, economic and
military core since farming began around 9500 B.C., and for millennia
Britain served as a subordinate satellite at the band's western end. In
the last few centuries B.C., northern France heavily influenced southern
England, but in the first few centuries A.D. Rome ruled the whole of
England and Wales. Then in the mid-to-late first millennium A.D.,
Germans and Scandinavians settled and plundered much of Britain, before
Norway and Normandy invaded England in 1066. By the start of the second
millennium, English monarchs (of partly French descent) began pushing
back, and for a few short years after 1422 the infant King Henry VI
nominally ruled both France and England. By 1475, though, English King
Edward IV had formally renounced all claims to France in exchange for
cash.
Technology
and, above all, the invention of ocean-going ships eventually
transformed Britain's strategic situation. By the 12th century A.D.,
Chinese shipwrights were building vessels capable of traveling thousands
of miles. Arab skippers in the Indian Ocean picked up some of their key
ideas and brought them to the Mediterranean. And by the 15th century
A.D., Portuguese caravels were nosing their way down the western coast
of Africa and across the Atlantic Ocean. In the 1490s, bigger, faster
Iberian galleons reached the Americas and passed the Cape of Good Hope
to enter the Indian Ocean. The new ships converted the Atlantic Ocean
from a barrier around Western Europe to a highway linking it to lands of
untold wealth.
Becoming the Center of Global Trade
At
first, it seemed as if the new technologies had done little to change
Britain's strategic position. Spain and Portugal, which both combined
easy access to the Atlantic with strongly centralized monarchies, were
better placed than any other country to exploit the maritime highways.
The English, along with the French and Dutch, found themselves shut out
of the rich pickings in India, South America and the Caribbean and
reduced to trading with the parts of North America that the Spaniards
did not want. If anything, Britain seemed more vulnerable than ever to
domination from the Continent in the 16th century, particularly when
Spain tried to invade it in 1588.
In
reality, though, the Atlantic economy that ocean-going ships had
created had already begun to improve Britain's fortunes. The North
Atlantic had become the Goldilocks ideal: big enough that very different
kinds of societies and ecological zones flourished around its shores,
but small enough that European ships could move quite easily around it,
trading at a profit at every turn. In this brave new world, the
relatively weak governments of England and Holland became an advantage,
because they were less able than the powerful Spanish monarchs to
expropriate traders' profits.
Throughout
the 16th century, Spanish kings treated the New World and their
merchant subjects as a kind of ATM that provided the cash needed to fund
wars and dominate Western Europe. But by 1600, they were overextended
and bankrupt. English kings, by comparison, struggled to plunder their
North American colonists and their traders. Generations of conflict
ended in 1688 with a compromise, known as the "Glorious Revolution,"
that installed a Dutch king and business-friendly institutions in
England. Holland, which did not even have kings, went even further in
this direction, and the three great wars fought between the English and
Dutch from the 1640s to the 1670s had everything to do with
intercontinental trade and nothing to do with European empires.
Meanwhile,
Britain's insularity continued to dominate its strategic thinking, but
the fact that it projected into the North Atlantic was increasingly
coming to be more important than its location near the Continent.
Understanding this, a handful of 18th-century Britons undertook one of
the most profound strategic reorientations in history. Rather than
seeing Britain as the western end of Europe and using overseas trade to
fund wars that could improve the country's position relative to the
Continental powers, they began to see Britain as the hub of an
intercontinental trade network. From this perspective, the only reason
to fight a war in Europe was to prevent any single power from dominating
the Continent, since a dominant land power might then be able to
challenge Britain at sea.
The
story of how they achieved their goals is too well known to need
retelling, but by 1815 Britain had managed to establish a balance of
power in Europe and an overseas empire on which the sun never set.
Bringing together huge concentrations of capital, precocious
industrialization, a vast merchant marine, unrivaled financial
expertise, a fleet bigger than any other three navies combined, and an
Indian army that could act as a strategic military reserve made Britain
the first genuinely global power in history. Unlike any previous empire,
Britain derived most of its wealth not from plunder or tax but from its
dominant position in global trade, and it used its military and
economic muscle to protect free trade and open markets. Long before the
"golden time" in Sino-British ties dawned, Britain's relations with
China were entirely a product of this muscle. China's emperor rejected a British trade delegation in 1793,
but 50 years later his descendant was unable to resist any longer after
British ships sank his fleet, seized Hong Kong and moved to blockade
the Grand Canal, threatening Beijing with famine. The "unequal treaties"
that followed, giving Britain a monopoly over trading rights along much
of China's coast, remained in force until the 1940s, and China did not
recover Hong Kong until 1997.
The
story of how Britain's 19th-century system broke down is even better
known. Free trade allowed some of Britain's commercial partners — most
important, the United States and Germany — to industrialize their own
economies. On the one hand, their growing wealth allowed them to buy
more British goods and to raise British revenues even further, but on
the other it made them rivals in international markets and rich enough
to challenge Britain militarily.
After
about 1870, Britain's financial and military lead over its rivals
steadily shrank, and with it, the country's ability to police the
international order and to deter other great powers from trying to unite
Europe. In 1914, Germany's leaders decided that their own strategic
position was so parlous that they had no choice but to risk war with the
world's policeman. Even if they did not initially aim to master Europe,
their war goals rapidly evolved in that direction. Britain and its
allies defeated this challenge, but only at a ruinous cost, and a second
German offensive (much more explicitly aimed at Continental mastery)
could only be overcome with the power of the Soviet Union and the United
States.
Same Interests, New Tactics
In
1962, former U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson famously said, "Great
Britain has lost an empire and not yet found a role." But that was not
entirely true. Lord Palmerston, Britain’s foreign secretary, had been
nearer the mark in 1848 when he said, "We have no eternal allies and we
have no perpetual friends … [only] our interests are eternal and
perpetual."
For
more than 400 years, Britain's strategic interest had been to engage
vigorously in global trade while preventing the rise of a single
dominant power on the European continent. In the 17th century, that
required all-out naval conflicts with the Dutch. In the 18th century, it
required all-out naval conflicts with France as well as colonial
expeditions and occasional Continental land wars. In the 19th century,
it mostly meant policing the world's sea-lanes and trying to conduct the
Concert of Europe. Between 1914 and 1945, it meant total air, sea and
land wars with Germany and an increasing reliance on the United States;
and from 1945 into the 2010s, it meant even deeper dependence on
American economic and military strength, combined with a delicate
diplomatic dance with what we now call the European Union.
British
leaders constantly had to recalibrate the balance between their
American and European interests. In the 1950s-1960s, they found
themselves leaning too far away from Europe and being shut out of the
Franco-German alliance that headed the European Economic Community. In
the 1970s, they found themselves leaning too far in the other direction,
entering the renamed European Communities on disadvantageous terms in
1973. Since the 1980s, they have leaned away from Europe again,
renegotiating their financial contributions in 1984-85, opting out of
the euro in 1992, joining the American-led invasion of Iraq in 2003
against Western Europe's strong objections, and committing in 2013 to an
in-out referendum on the European Union within the next four years.
Seen
in this light, the dawning of a "golden time" in Sino-British relations
takes on new meaning. British interests remain focused, as they have
been for centuries, on balancing between Europe and the wider world, but
Britain’s special relationship with the United States is just one
vehicle for pursuing that balance. There are no eternal allies.
Since
about 2010, British governments have begun wondering whether the
American alliance is still the best way to maintain their nation's
position in the world. Their interest in becoming "China’s strongest
partner in the West," as Osborne has put it, need not mean that Britain
is drawing further away from Europe, since both U.S. President Barack
Obama and his Chinese counterpart insist that they want to see Britain
remain within the European Union. Nor does it need to mean that Britain
is turning its back on the United States. But it does, nevertheless,
represent a significant rebalancing. Britain, with the world's
fifth-biggest economy (in nominal terms) and, by many judgments, its
fifth-strongest military, is by any reckoning an important ally of the
United States. But the most significant aspect of Britain’s apparent
strategic realignment is surely the fact that it is not the only country
that is engaging in such activity. Whether we put the blame on the
foreign policy vacillations of the Obama administration, the
recklessness of the Bush administration, or the steady growth of Chinese
economic and military might, even such long-time American allies as
Australia, South Korea and Israel are looking for new friends.
The
United States has been the world's greatest power for nearly a century,
and for more than a quarter of that time it has dominated the
international order more completely than any power in history. But there
are growing signs that the ground is shifting under our feet, and few are more revealing than the banners with which London welcomed China's president in October.
Link: https://www.stratfor.com/sample/weekly/golden-age-sino-british-relations-now