Andrew Sabisky is a self-described superforecaster. As one of Philip Tetlock’s devotees he claims to have an elite sensitivity to seeing the future. It’s a rare skill, so I hope you will understand the caution with which I say that when it comes to China, he’s completely wrong.
It’s true that the US and China are dominant in AI, and that India is a rising power, but the conclusion he chooses – to throw ourselves on the mercy of China – raises questions not just about the end but the signals he’s receiving.
The argument goes, according to Sabisky, that the United States and India are inevitably hostile to the UK. He not unfairly believes that we are too dependent on the United States, and somewhat inexplicably that Narendra Modi’s India is an immovable nationalist monolith. In contrast, he claims that ‘China is perhaps the only superpower whose elites do not have a fundamental aversion to Britain on historical-ideological grounds’. That’s news to me.
First, overdependence on the US is a criticism many of us share in defence and increasingly economics. But the connection between us is more than an alliance or a treaty. It’s genetic, coded into our societies and systems of governance. The unhelpful interventions in British politics by US leaders, and the obsession with US politics here, is because familiarity allows for disagreements among friends.
The American Dream was born in Bristol, Manchester and Glasgow. We hold £1.2 trillion invested in each other’s economies and trade £331 billion a year. At September’s state visit, American firms committed £150 billion to Britain, the largest package of inward investment ever, £31 billion of it aimed at AI. True, the withdrawal of Anthropic’s Fable 5 is worrying, but that’s a warning for us to improve, not to sell out.
Second, the Indian Republic is the most populous nation the world has ever known. And with more than 2,500 political parties competing for power, hardly a monolith. Governments must win votes from a young country that wants jobs and homes not history. That puts the focus on the future. Just look at the trade deal signed with us only last year, the most comprehensive India has agreed with any Western partner. It enters into force this month.
Trade should double by 2030, hardly surprising given that we share nearly two million Britons of Indian heritage, a language, common law, growing defence ties, and the fact that India is a democracy whose governments change at the ballot box. Is our relationship complicated by history? Of course. Is India inherently hostile? No, it is not.
Finally, for a grudgeless power, China gives a good impression of bearing a resentment so large and enduring so as to be visible from space. This dictatorship of gerontocrats remembers every slight and nurtures every grievance not just as ancient history, but as contemporary policy. Kevin Rudd’s masterful tome, On Xi Jinping, details that the President’s own words are replete with resentment and revenge towards us.
For China’s Communists the century of humiliation is the founding myth of the People’’ Republic. Comrades are reminded that Britain is Villain-in-Chief, because the alternative is to admit that China’s Communists allowed Chiang Kai-shek to bear the brunt of the fight against Imperial Japan. Mao and his comrades held back their forces like vultures waiting to feed on the carcass of what remained, and who would want to admit to that? So Hong Kong and the Opium Wars are replayed today to justify a belligerence to which Sabisky is curiously either blind or of which he’s ignorant.
In the UK and US, Chinese traffic in fentanyl and nitizines that kill tens of thousands each year are justified by Beijing-backed commentators as a reverse opium war and revenge for the poppy. At home it’s just as bad. Slavery in Xinjiang isn’t just killing Uyghurs but destroying jobs here, and hostility to freedom of speech is being played out by attempting to silence professors in British universities. Beijing’s agents are actively trying to prevent British students here in the UK from learning what China doesn’t like.
It gets worse. In November, MI5 warned Parliament that Chinese intelligence was trying to recruit MPs, peers and staff to influence our politics. China hacked the Electoral Commission and ran reconnaissance on those who criticised Beijing. MI5’s Director General reports a 35 percent rise in state threat investigations in a single year.
As the former security minister, I’m not allowed to divulge even half of the egregious behaviour I saw from Beijing. The more severe threats are not in the public domain. China isn’t a partner spurned, but a hostile state making direct attacks on our nation. The pattern of espionage, influence, interference and, on occasion, even violence is equalled only by enemies like Russia and Iran. The US and India are the opposite. For a poker player, you’d have thought one of these signals would act as a tell. Apparently not.
To those of us who have carefully watched China’s increasing aggression towards the UK, Sabisky’s piece isn’t just a counsel of despair but abandonment of all hope.
The Chinese government we are invited to place greater dependence on may be good at engineering, but DeepSeek can’t tell you what happened in Tiananmen Square on 4 June 1989. That’s no surprise because every lab on Sabisky’s list operates under the 2017 National Intelligence Law, which obliges all Chinese organisations to ‘support, assist and cooperate’ with state intelligence work – at home and overseas. That is the small print on the offer of shared data and co-created robots: an information economy funnelling every element of your business to Shenzhen and a machine workforce with a kill switch held in Beijing. What he’s suggesting is not a partnership. It’s vassalage.
We must never choose that road. We have the talent, the money and the energy to rebuild our country but bad policies have led some to believe that the only answer is the warm embrace of death. Again, that’s just wrong.
Many of us know the truth of China not because we can forecast the future but see the present
Sabisky even quoted Tolkien describing Saruman being wrong. At the Council of Elrond, the wizard of Many Colours says it is hard not to conclude that against the power rising in the East there is no victory, and it would be wise to extend the hand of friendship. But Gandalf retorts that the ring can only have one master – siding with the East is choosing enslavement, and to what?
China is struggling. Its population is shrinking, its workforce is aging and peaked more than a decade ago, its government is corrupt and unstable and needs faster growth than it can currently muster to keep the wolf from the door.
In London, DeepMind’s Nobel Prize winning founder Sir Demis Hassabis is setting out what government has got wrong and what must change to see us prosper. His Chinese equivalents would fear prison or worse if they displeased the Party. We can change the policies that have made energy expensive and capital unavailable.
Reforming pension savings would liberate the oxygen of investment around the economy, and energy liberalisation would lower prices. Those policy failures have cost us for 20 years, but both can be fixed: pension reform, compute, and power costs can be changed, fast.
Today we need partnership with democracies who understand competition of ideas and have the rule of law to protect them, America, Japan, India and the Crown Four of Canada, Australia and New Zealand, shows a better hope for a future with Britain at the heart of a new economy, not the slave of the old.
Sabisky’s suggestion that Europe should offer ASML’s EUV machines as tribute to the emperor would be the largest voluntary transfer of strategic advantage in modern history. Techgeld would fail just as surely as Danegeld and buy neither peace nor prosperity but see us living under Chinese rule. Unlike Canute, Xi would ignore our courts and his promises. Australia learned this truth when they asked awkward questions about a pandemic and found exports embargoed.
The piece identifies a real problem: overdependence on one ally, and too little strength of our own. But the answer is to rebuild not abase ourselves. Many of us know the truth of China not because we can forecast the future but see the present. China is making threats today, giving them more leverage to cause pain is no solution for tomorrow.
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