We Need to Be Clear-Eyed About a Changed China, David Cameron Tells Washington Security Forum

British Foreign Secretary David Cameron answers questions during a press conference with U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken at the State Department in Washington on Dec. 7, 2023. Win McNamee/Getty Images

Western Democracies now need to “harden” and “be very clear-eyed” about China, British Foreign Secretary David Cameron told an international security forum in Washington on Thursday.

The new Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton, who is known for ushering in the so-called golden era of Sino-British relations when he was prime minister, defended his policy of engagement but said the East Asian country “has changed” since he left office.

“I think with China, what I would say is, in my time as prime minister, yes, we tried to build a positive relationship, we tried to engage over issues like trade, and some of those resulted in good economic outcomes for our country,” he said at an event at Aspen Security Forum.

“But China has changed since I left office. We’ve seen the treatment of the Uyghurs; we’ve seen the treatment of Hong Kong; we’ve seen the wolf-warrior diplomacy; we’ve seen the kind of terrible situations that were created when Australia said something, or Lithuania did something. And you know, it’s a different China we’re dealing with, and we need to harden our systems, and be very clear-eyed as a result,” he added.

The former prime minister welcomed Chinese leader Xi Jinping in London during his state visit in 2015, heralding the so-called golden era.

Since then, a China Tribunal and a Uyghur Tribunal, both chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, KC, who had led the prosecution of former Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, found that the Chinese regime had committed torture and crimes against humanity in state-sanctioned forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, mainly adherents of the Falun Gong spiritual movement, on a significant scale; and torture, crimes against humanity, and genocide against Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.

The Epoch Times began reporting on allegations of forced organ harvesting against Falun Gong practitioners in 2006, but the Chinese regime repeatedly denied the allegations.

Despite the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) ongoing abuse of human rights, Beijing’s relationship with the West only soured in recent years following the CCP’s initial cover-up of the COVID-19 epidemic, its imposition of a draconian national security law in Hong Kong, and increasingly aggressive diplomatic approach.

According to a report published in July by the Intelligence and Security Committee of Parliament, the UK acted too late to tackle the risks posed by the CCP and the response had been “completely inadequate,“ although security minister Tom Tugendhat, who was a vocal critic of the government’s China policy before becoming a minister last year, said the UK has ”woken up in time” to the CCP threat.

Lord Cameron’s remarks were made on the 82nd anniversary of Japan’s attack of Pearl Harbor.

Asked what a “Chinese Pearl Harbor” would look like, Lord Cameron said the legacy of the World War Two event is “the importance of strength and deterrence through strength,” adding, “you don’t have to be a brilliant student of history to know that appeasing [Adolf] Hitler in the 1930s was a disaster.”

Using his first trip to the United States as foreign secretary to strengthen the alliance between the two countries and urged U.S. politicians to keep up their support for Ukraine, Lord Cameron argued that “the world has changed” and it’s unlikely to “snap back.”

“The world changed with [Russian President Vladimir] Putin’s invasion [of Ukraine]; it’s changed with the way Iran is behaving in the Middle East; it’s changed with the level of insecurity we feel in our world; it’s changed with the fact that China has become so much more hostile,” he said.

“We’ve got two crises in the world at the moment, Ukraine and the Middle East, I think it’s probably more likely [if] we get a third then we lose one of the two we got already.”

Lord Cameron also argued for using soft powers and investing in developing countries “rather than leave them to the mercy of Chinese debt traps,” referring to the communist regime’s “One Belt One Road” initiative.