There is not enough institutional knowledge in Whitehall to support prime minister Keir Starmer's pursuit of a more "pragmatic" relationship with China, Lord Ricketts, the UK's former national security adviser, has said.
Starmer this week said he wanted to build a more “serious and pragmatic” relationship with Beijing after he became the first British leader in six years to meet with Chinese Community Party leader Xi Jinping.
The prime minister and Rachel Reeves, the chancellor of the exchequer, have set out to pursue a closer relationship with the world’s second-largest economy to help it achieve its core mission of stronger domestic growth. The latter is set to visit China in 2025 to meet with her counterpart, vice premier He Lifeng.
Speaking to CSW's sister publication PoliticsHome, Ricketts said that while he had sympathy with Starmer's approach, he believed Whitehall lacked real institutional knowledge of China compared to the 1990s when the UK was in the process of relinquishing Hong Kong to China.
“There was a strong cadre of China specialists, both because we provided the governor in Hong Kong, his staff,” he said, referring to the handover on July 1, 1997.
“We’d been negotiating with the Chinese over the future of Hong Kong ever since 1984, so the Foreign Office had a very strong team of China specialists who spoke Chinese, who'd worked in China, [and] worked in Hong Kong.
“That's a smaller pool now of people because we don't have that throughput of people.
“There certainly are still deep specialists in China working in the foreign office,” he added, referring to Caroline Wilson who is the current ambassador to China.
"But beyond the Foreign Office, across Whitehall, probably, [there is] not as much of a cadre of experts on China as we should have.”
Ricketts spent 40 years as a British diplomat, including as the UK ambassador to France, before retiring in 2016. During that time, he served as the UK's first national security adviser under former Conservative prime minister David Cameron.
This is a shorter version of an article written by Tom Scotson, a reporter at CSW's sister publication PoliticsHome, where this story first appeared