Net zero push will put UK energy infrastructure in Chinese hands
Balancing acts are, by definition, tricky to pull off. There’s a reason they made a documentary about the Man on (the) Wire. The UK government is facing just such a tightrope act on its interactions with China.
To state some clear, irrefutable facts: China is the world’s second largest economy and going nowhere anytime soon.
It has future-proofed its economy by piling bucketloads of state-directed cash into key strategic industries, many of which the rest of the world has either become reliant on, or will do soon.
China’s leaders value the economic benefit of trade with the west, and the political manoeuvring room it is able to enjoy as a result of its increasingly central place in the global economy.
China is also a miserable dictatorship. The regime is guilty of genocide in Xinjiang and has turned the once bustling metropolis of Hong Kong into a police state.
On every measure it is a human rights basket case, and it continues to threaten an imperialist war on democratic Taiwan. Beijing’s willingness to use soft and hard power alike overseas for its own benefit is similarly unquestioned, and it is becoming apparent across the west that Chinese authorities do not believe that cracking down on free speech should be a solely domestic affair, as we have seen with the chilling actions of Chinese nationalists on UK university campuses.
China is a fact of life, then. It’s beholden on governments to work out where their line is drawn; for moral purposes, but for security purposes, too.
And it’s also surely an obligation not to put yourself, willingly, in a compromised position that means you increase reliance on China – as we are with our accelerated push to net zero – as opposed to taking strategic steps to reduce it.
If Britain is not ready to achieve our virtuous and extraordinary expensive net zero goals without irredeemably throwing our lot in with China, then we shouldn’t do it.