What the West Keeps Getting Wrong About China

Britain’s so-called golden era of relations with China ended ignominiously and has few defenders left. Yet have the lessons of this epochal misstep really been learned? For all the greater weight given to security concerns, the UK’s revamped policy toward the Communist Party-ruled superpower — shared to varying degrees by the European Union and US — rests on an assumption that trade and investment interests can be carved out from the more menacing aspects of China’s rise. It’s a proposition that will be tested.

The message that shines through from Martin Thorley’s All That Glistens is how ill-equipped Western democracies are to interact with a highly disciplined, strategically minded and secretive one-party state. Thorley’s book, published this month, examines the golden era through three case studies set during the period of rapprochement championed by former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne. These cover: the Hinkley Point nuclear plant; the City of London’s rise to become the largest Western trading center for the renminbi; and Chinese investment in the London property market — including the 2018 sale of Royal Mint Court to serve as a giant new embassy, a project that remains controversial and has yet to be approved seven years later.