The fightback: it’s time for the West to take on China

Boris Johnson says it is a mistake to ‘call for a new Cold War on China’. Yet China is, in many ways, a more formidable foe than the Soviet Union ever was. It is more integrated into the world trading system and its economic model is less flawed. This gives it a commercial pull in the West that the USSR never had. Its purchase over businesses and institutions goes some way to explaining why there is such reluctance in the UK, and the West more broadly, to take a tougher line on Beijing. ‘It’s the money, there wasn’t that complication in the Cold War,’ laments one cabinet minister.

Yet in the past year China has made a series of tactical missteps. The most recent was last week’s imposition of sanctions on the EU and UK politicians most critical of the Chinese Communist party. This kind of aggression makes a unified response from the democratic world much more likely.