Competitor or adversary? West struggles to define relationship with Beijing

If you want to solve a problem, it helps to be able to define it, but when it comes to a problem like China, western leaders have been struggling to find the right words.

Sunak has made clear he does not want the UK to be out of step with its allies on the issue, most importantly the US. In Washington, meanwhile, China designation is a delicate and evolving art.

The delicacy was apparent when a Chinese balloon sailed over the continental US earlier this month. The US declared the high-altitude airship and its payload to be designed for spying and shot it down once it was safely over the Atlantic. The secretary of state, Antony Blinken, cancelled a long-planned trip to Beijing to address bilateral tensions, but at the same time stressed that channels of communication would be kept open and that the US remained keen on a meeting when conditions allowed. Blinken may meet his counterpart, Wang Yi, as soon as this week, at the Munich security conference.

The problem with categorising China is that there are multiple aspects to its global role as it expands its presence on the world stage. For that reason, Democratic senator Chris Murphy has warned against digging up old cold war rhetoric.

Washington is acutely aware that it has been complacent in its competition with China for global clout, having assumed that better US technology and its democratic model would win the day, only to find that African countries and other parts of the global south were sitting on their hands when the US called for support in the UN general assembly. Last year an old Pacific ally, Solomon Islands, signed a security pact with Beijing, denying entry to a US Coast Guard cutter not long after.

As for collaboration with China, she said there was little choice other than to work with Beijing to address the climate emergency.

It is in the military arena, of course, where the stakes are the highest and the risks of a competitive relationship becoming adversarial are greatest. Last week, the Pentagon informed Congress that China now had more missile silos than the US. It was an eye-catching claim, though most of the silos are empty and the US retains a substantial superiority in submarine and airborne launchers. China is estimated by the Federation of American Scientists to have 350 nuclear warheads. Even if that number tripled, as the Pentagon predicts it will, it will still be less than a fifth of the US stockpile.

There is agreement for now, however, that repeatedly deeming China to be a threat risks making matters worse, shaping policy in such a way that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.