"Engagement" and "influence" are two of the most used yet vaguest terms deployed to describe the UK's relationship with China, or promote a certain kind of relationship.
Engagement
Calls for “engagement” typically promote partnerships and interaction in business, education, culture and government, and are associated with a less security-focused emphasis.
Of course, one could just as well describe counter-espionage or outright warfare as “engagement” by one party with another.
The political use of the term to promote positive and trusting interactions implies that those skeptical about the benefits of positive and trusting interaction are in favour instead of simply ignoring China, IE ‘not engaging’. This is rarely the case.
Influence
“Influence“, similarly, is sometimes deployed as little more than a slur, the suggestion of which is that anyone who even meets with CCP or Chinese state-related parties is subject to a sort of one-way influence.
The implication is that, in such situations, influence flows very strongly and in one direction only.
It would be foolish to assume this of any interaction between two parties, although evidence might come to light in specific cases that influence has, indeed, flowed mostly in one direction, and involved some kind of deception or misinformation, or had an undesirable effect.
Our goal is to probe interactions and relationships that fall under the broad rubric of influence and engagement, analysing evidence so that instances of both can be assessed in as much detail as possible.
One important element of our research relates to the United Front Work Department (UFWD) – one of the Party’s six main departments. The UFWD is responsible for building friendship and alliances with non-CCP elements. Most of its work takes place within China, however, it has rapidly expanded its international footprint in recent decades. Through what it calls “Overseas Chinese affairs”, the UFWD seeks to network amongst, befriend, surveil and interact with British Chinese communities.
UFWD documentation makes the goal of this explicit: it is to turn such communities into “a new force in unifying the motherland and revitalising China” – to use them for the CCP’s ends. For a foreign authoritarian government to seek to work amongst and use British people in this way is troubling and demands sensitive treatment.
You can read more about our work on this matter here.
We analyse the UK-facing activities of two of the other main CCP departments: Propaganda and International Liaison. Both are engaged in political warfare against the UK.
We study sub-national ties between the UK and China, which pertain to Chinese actors’ interactions with local governments and the devolved administrations in the UK.
We also look at the lobbying of business, including in the City of London, and of universities and organisations involved in higher education.
Beyond the propagation of strategic narratives and ideology, we are interested in how engagement of this kind affects policies – be they the policies of the British government or British organisations and businesses.
We study influence and engagement in an academic context. Outside of a few big institutions with large endowments, the British university sector is unprecedently dependent upon Chinese student tuition fees.
Our analysis suggests many, if not most, universities would be making a loss if these fees were lost and not replaced.
We study engagement between the university sector and Chinese parties, starting with the Chinese government, which is involved in two major educational schemes in the UK. These are the China Scholarship Council scheme, which sees Chinese students awarded scholarships in China and enjoy waived fees from British universities, and the Confucius Institute scheme, by which 30 Confucius Institutes exist within our universities, as partnerships between a Chinese entity and the host university in the UK.
Finally, we also analyse Chinese funding in the realm of China studies itself. Read more about our work on influence and engagement in universities here.
