Boris Johnson and Joe Biden, the US president, have vowed to create a global coalition to combat China, in retaliation for its imposition of sanctions on British MPs and peers.
The two leaders have discussed plans for an infrastructure project to rival the Belt and Road strategy used by Beijing to expand its economic and political influence.
Separately, the Home Office is soon to publish an espionage bill that will make it easier to expel Chinese spies from Britain. The legislation will include a compulsory register of foreign spies in the UK. Security chiefs believe that the Chinese have far more intelligence officers in Britain than they formally declare. The bill should make it easier to send them home.
Johnson revealed the rival Belt and Road strategy when he met MPs and peers who have been hit with sanctions by China after highlighting the country’s “gross human rights violations”. The prime minister hosted five of them in the Downing Street rose garden yesterday and expressed his “full-throated support” for them.
He told the Conservative MPs Sir Iain Duncan Smith, Nus Ghani and Tim Loughton and Lord Alton of Liverpool, the crossbench peer, and Labour’s Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws that China was “buying up great parts of the developing world”, including swathes of Africa that he said were becoming “trapped in Chinese debt”.
Johnson said: “We need to come up with an alternative so that countries have a choice. The West needs to do this.” The prime minister said that he and Biden had agreed in a telephone call on Friday night to put hundreds of millions of pounds behind the initiative.
Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative is a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure project launched in 2013 by President Xi Jinping involving development and investment initiatives from East Asia to Europe.
Tacking credit for the move, Biden told reporters on Friday: “I suggested [to Johnson] we should have, essentially, a similar initiative, pulling from the democratic states.”
One of the MPs at the meeting with Johnson said that the strategy was about giving countries around the world the confidence to criticise China on human rights without losing billions in trade and investment. “We have to show them China isn’t the only option. We need to put together a global coalition,” the MP said.
The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs announced on Friday that nine Britons and their family members were prohibited from entering China and Hong Kong. Chinese citizens and institutions will be banned from doing business with them.
The announcement came after Britain, the US and other allies imposed sanctions on Chinese officials over human rights abuses against the Uighur people in Xinjiang.
Days earlier, the government published a review of foreign policy which said that Britain would treat Russia as a “hostile state” but China primarily as a commercial “competitor”.
Sir Lindsay Hoyle, the Speaker of the House of Commons, said that Beijing had retaliated “disproportionately”. In an article for The Sunday Times, he wrote: “All our MPs have done is upheld our British values, to speak out and shine a spotlight on those who have no voice. Values and beliefs voted for and supported by the majority of the British population.”
The MPs who have come under threat have been offered security protection by the intelligence agencies. Officials with the National Cyber Security Centre will monitor their email and computers for cyberattacks.
One MP said, however: “I assume the Chinese can read everything.”
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