A critical foreign policy challenge for a post-Brexit UK is its relationship with China – and a key pillar of this relationship is Britain’s higher education and research sector.
Our new research demonstrates just how important the sector is for UK-China ties. Education was the UK’s largest service export in 2018 and in 2019, one in every nine UK academic papers involved collaboration between British and Chinese researchers. China has had a rapid rise among the rankings of the UK’s research partners – going from ninth to second place in less than a decade. China is now challenging the US for the number one spot, raising pressing questions for policymakers at a time of rising geopolitical tensions.
March 12, 2021
A month ago, Caroline Wilson was still popular in China. The UK ambassador’s savvy use of Chinese social media, and her fluent Mandarin, won her more than 13,000 followers on Weibo. But this month, what was an asset became a liability when the Chinese Foreign Ministry reprimanded her over a WeChat post in which she defended critical press coverage of China.
The incident highlights a digital divide. Chinese diplomats have free rein most of the time on Twitter to criticize local governments, as Wilson herself pointed out. But Western diplomats don’t enjoy the same freedom on the Chinese internet.
March 8, 2021
When the UK officially left the European Union on Jan. 31, 2020 it put a lot of people out of a job including Nigel Farage, the bombastic former leader of the Brexit Party.
It was an open question what Farage would do next; in a 2021 New Year’s video message that has since been watched more than 1.3 million times, he gave a surprising answer.
“I’ll tell you what the next big challenge is,” he said, “and in some ways, it’s an even bigger challenge than the European Union was a bigger threat to our independence, our way of life, our liberty. And it is China.”
24 February 2021
Author: Ken Heydon, LSE
The United Kingdom’s trading aspirations in Asia will not negate its dependence on the European Union, nor will they unwind the dominant economic role of China in its neighbourhood. UK trade with Asia post-Brexit needs to be accompanied by efforts to engage Beijing in the strengthening of trade rules and disciplines.
Following its departure from the European Union, the United Kingdom is intent on pursuing its ‘tilt to the Indo-Pacific’. This includes a free trade agreement (FTA) with Australia that negotiators hope will yield major gains built on shared language and legal systems.
The Australia–UK FTA is notably ambitious in the cutting-edge issues of digital trade and telecommunications, where there is a willingness to go beyond the extensive provisions in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) in encouraging cross-border data flows.
It’s been a rough month for HSBC in the UK.
First, in January, the bank’s CEO, Noel Quinn, and its chief compliance officer, Colin Bell, were asked to appear before the foreign affairs committee of Britain’s Parliament to account for HSBC’s support of a repressive security law imposed by authorities in Beijing on Hong Kong six months earlier.
Then, earlier this month, the London-headquartered bank was taken to court in the UK by Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, who is fighting a US extradition request from Canada.
But in a ruling today (Feb. 19), the UK High Court of Justice spared HSBC from having to get further embroiled in the case, which has become a symbol of China’s increasingly fraught relations with Western democracies.