Written evidence submitted by Dr Frank Maracchione (CAU0025)

Engaging plural China with industrial cooperation, investment in localised research and specialised diplomatic teams
Dr Frank Maracchione, University of Kent and Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute[1]

Dear Chair and Members of the Committee,

Thank you for the opportunity to submit written evidence to this Foreign Affairs Committee’s inquiry as part of the UK Government’s China Audit.

I am Dr Frank Maracchione, a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the School of Politics and International Relations at the University of Kent, where I work on knowledge production about China in Global Majority countries. I hold a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Sheffield, funded by an ESRC White Rose Pathway Award. My PhD thesis is titled “Amir Timur in Shanghai: Locating agency in Uzbekistan–China relations,” and discusses normative relations between Uzbekistan and the People’s Republic of China. My research explores: the power and agency of political actors in the Global Majority (Global South); Global China and the political economy of South–South cooperation; and computational approaches to political communication (Structural Topic Models).

I am writing because I have experience in fruitful and regular collaboration with policymakers at the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, as well as the US Department of State and private-sector research partners such as Global Partners Governance (London) and the Central Asia Barometer (Bishkek). Plus, I have conducted research funded directly by the UK Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF), in collaboration with FCDO, on the impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine on Sino-Russian entanglements with Central Asia, which has been presented to senior FCDO officials and informed the Committee’s report ‘Countries at Crossroads: UK Engagement in Central Asia’. Therefore, I believe my contribution could be important feedback on the UK government’s work on China in Global Majority countries, particularly from a research perspective.

Plus, my work with the US Department of State and participation in the US Department of State’s China Watchers annual meeting in Bishkek provides a good comparative perspective on the institutional approach to Global China in the two countries. Finally, my fieldwork research in Uzbekistan adds a unique perspectives on Global China’s activities, which can contribute uncommon perspectives on China’s present and future global impact. I hope the evidence and recommendations below will assist the Committee in shaping a coherent, informed UK strategy towards plural China.

Summary advice:

Section 1 - Engaging Plural China

• Recognise ‘China’ as a plural set of state and non-state actors, not a monolithic bloc
• Diversify UK policy away from zero-sum geopolitics toward nuanced critical engagement
• Leverage local and Global South/Global Majority expertise to inform strategic choices
• Pursue cooperative partnerships in trade, technology, humanitarian aid and green industries
• Embed production localisation in the UK’s green industrial agenda

Section 2 - Building Institutional Expertise & Independent Research

• Create a dedicated, well-funded China coordination structure across government
• Expand independent, fieldwork-based research on Global China via UKRI and ESRC

Engaging plural China: beyond the big brother

Responding to the following questions:

1)      How should the Government consider and assess trade-offs in the UK-China relationship? For example, how should the Government seek to balance its growth agenda and environmental goals vs. security and human rights concerns in China? 

2)      What should the Government’s objectives be for the UK-China relationship in the short term and the long term? 

3)      In which areas can, and should, the Government engage with China? Where should the Government draw red lines?

4)      How should the Government assess UK dependencies on China? Where should the Government focus its efforts on strengthening UK security and resilience? 

I will start my written evidence by discussing what exactly this Committee means by ‘China’, and providing advice on which actors the UK government should pay attention to when drafting its China policy. There is a tendency amongst foreign policy experts and practitioners to attribute a coherent and common political direction or aim to a plurality of actors generally identified as ‘China’. These include state institutions or state-funded organisations, including think tanks, universities and cultural organisations (e.g. Confucius Institutes), international organisations like development/policy banks (e.g. AIIB, China Development Bank) or cooperation forums (e.g. SCO, BRICS), and state-owned enterprises (SOEs, e.g. China State Grid), but also non-state actors such as private companies (e.g. Huawei or BYD), Chinese communities, particularly those residing abroad, up to the level of individual Chinese citizens abroad.

This image of a unitary and coordinated actor that is ‘China’ is prevalent in the context of the globalisation of China’s economy, where a common perspective, particularly amongst students of geopolitics, is that China’s global economic expansion is steered centrally by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and its domestic and international priorities.[2] Focusing on China-Global South relations, following this view, China would be building a political and material system by which to secure natural resources for export-oriented mass manufacturing, and export its overcapacity,[3] flooding international markets with its products, and setting up new institutions to support its global worldview. Therefore, the aims of CCP-controlled Chinese SOEs and private companies would be to counter domestic challenges like overproduction, rising wages, youth unemployment and/or demographic threats,[4] and Western geoeconomic pressures, such as tariffs and derisking, like the well-known ‘China plus one’ strategy,[5] employed by multinational companies to diversify their China-based production.[6] Yet, this report takes an alternative view that stresses the independent agency of Chinese companies and their foreign economic/political partners, particularly ‘small states’, in shaping China’s global expansion.[7]

But can a Chinese company ever be fully private? Research indicates that this varies on a case-by-case basis. SOEs have more transparent mechanisms for government oversight through internal organisations linked to the CCP.[8] During my own fieldwork research in Central Asia, I learned that this also applies to regional branches in foreign countries, where managers need to show personal adherence to CCP ideology and take part in regular party training for managers and employees.[9] While similar organisations are often established in private companies, recent research has not found conclusive evidence that these efforts significantly influence the companies' alignment with party priorities.[10] Reducing Chinese actors to mere instruments of a party-state agenda undermines the quality of both research and policymaking aimed at understanding and reacting to Chinese globalisation. Therefore, I advocate for a policy approach that diversifies its strategy in dealing with a plurality of Chinese economic actors. The strategy needs to be based on analysing these actors’ actions/interactions with host societies.

This more nuanced view, unsurprisingly, resonates very well in the PRC, where a report by the Centre for China and Globalization stated that China’s globalisation is moving from export-oriented to ‘cooperative’ (共建式), meaning that “Chinese enterprises take the lead in industrial localization” and “enhance host countries' manufacturing capabilities through collaborative development.”[11] This narrative responds to the new trend of offshoring of Chinese manufacturing. Chinese companies are becoming increasingly relevant abroad, which is interpreted in China as a shift from an export-driven model to one focused on co-development and local industrial integration. This new phase of ‘cooperative globalisation’ has some purchase as firms like BYD and Geely are leading the global electric vehicle (EV) market, while offshoring production to Central, South, and Southeast Asia through joint ventures that enhance local manufacturing capabilities. BYD’s 2024 joint venture with Uzbekistan’s UzAuto, for example, broke the state monopoly on car production and introduced high-quality EV assembly. More broadly, over 18,000 Chinese firms were operating globally by 2011, employing over a million people, with outbound manufacturing investment growing at an annual rate of 44% between 2009 and 2016. In Ethiopia, the Huajian Group now runs nine shoe factories, exemplifying what the Chinese government-run news outlet Global Times called the regional shift to “from made-in-China to made-in-Africa”.[12] These developments reflect not just economic strategy but an evolving role of Chinese companies as global industrial actors embedded in host economies.

Uzbekistan is emerging as a key site of Chinese industrial offshoring and cooperation. In 2024, for the first time, Chinese companies surpassed Russian ones in both number and sectoral presence. Imports from China doubled in 2023, driven partly by high-tech goods like electric vehicles (EVs). BYD, China’s leading EV producer, has begun local production, marking a shift in Uzbekistan’s industrial landscape. Local policymakers frame this as a success of state-led industrial policy: Chinese investment is seen to bring technology and employment. Yet, this rosy story about government-to-government cooperation, development and innovation ignores other political and societal pressures – labour movements, informal employment, labour migration, public opinion/protests – that affect Chinese firms’ behaviour. While these are often taken into account in policymaking about China,[13] they are written off as resistance and used to prove a point about the low standards of Chinese investment.

Instead, local perspectives and expertise should be central in shaping the UK’s approach to Global China as Chinese companies are becoming so pivotal for the UK economy, particularly in the green sector. Relatedly, Chinese companies are also moving their manufacturing facilities to Europe. This is only partially the case in the UK, where the Chinese company Yutong is at the forefront of the greening of the public transport sector, providing British electric buses to a large number of UK cities. Yet, the company only relies on local dealer Pelican to assemble some minimal parts of its buses.[14] This has created many negative feelings towards Chinese imports, to which the government has rapidly attempted to provide a corrective through its investment in local production as part of its Plan for Change.

Yet, there is more than can be done to support local production, including through a broader localisation of foreign production, which could create new jobs and build avenues for technology sharing and transfer. This could start from expanding the percentage of assembly that takes place in the UK, up to the point of localising production for entire components of electric buses, thereby joining the supply chains of Chinese brands beyond the role of purchaser. This is particularly relevant in preparing for the potential arrival of BYD electric cars, whose price, technology and good reputation pose a challenge for European car manufacturers. In the spirit of cooperation discussed above, a red line for foreign, including Chinese, involvement in local economies could become the embedding of production in local economies, in the spirit of the government's Plan for Change.

Building institutional expertise and funding independent localised research

Responding to the following questions:

1)      Does the FCDO, as well as other Government departments and agencies, have sufficient expertise and resources to manage the multifaceted UK-China relationship? 

2)      Where should the Government focus its efforts when strengthening ‘China capabilities’? 

3)      How effective is cross-Government coordination on China? 

4)      How should the Government ensure coherence and consistency across departments, as well as in the public sector, academia and the private sector? 

As a consequence of how UK diplomatic training works, including the preference for ‘in post’ training and learning on the job, as well as the mobility of diplomatic staff, there is a clear necessity for establishing long-term permanent knowledge structures that allow the embassies to maintain a thorough understanding of local conditions, as well as transversal structures that gather and collate information coming from multiple sources. The size, speed and significance of the globalisation of the Chinese economy make plural Global China a very relevant variable in the design of the UK’s role in the world. In academic and independent research settings, knowledge produced on China in the social sciences, similarly to that produced on the United States, is very rarely designed around specific regional expertise. Conversely, expertise on China and the United States is often shared between different disciplines and departments, with thematic and area experts contributing similar amounts of work to academic publications and think tank policy reports. While it is fair that the regional directorate coordinates expertise on China, more transversal mechanisms should be established to ensure that there is dedicated research and information gathering on China’s global activities in UK embassies.

The Biden administration under Blinken has famously, and not without controversy, created a separate institution outside the regional departments, the Office of China Coordination (OCC, also known as the China House), to handle Global China affairs. The OCC works in coordination with and CIA’s China Mission Center “to surge funding, resources and personnel into centralised hubs tasked solely to track China’s growing global footprint”, as reported by Kine on Politico.[15] Through my activity, I came in touch with many US China Desk officers, posted outside China in US embassies, for example, in Central Asia, who worked in a collegial system with other China watchers internationally. I took part in one of their annual meetings, which take place in different countries and include sessions with academic and professional researchers sharing findings from their research.[16]

Firstly, if the government were to proceed with establishing a “special” China policy separate from its overall strategy, it would be normal to create a dedicated structure—properly funded and staffed with the necessary expertise—to gather information, design and enforce the policy, and review it routinely. In 2023, the Rishi Sunak government established a China Capabilities Programme involving:

1)      “the training of 170 civil servants in Mandarin, with 20 going through a language immersion programme in Taiwan

2)      training to hundreds of HM Government staff, increased China expertise in the tech and military sectors. Courses also delivered on culture, government structures and policymaking

3)      establishment of the China experts’ advisory group to test and inform government policymaking, with a broad range of external specialists”. (Prime Minister’s Office 2023).

This was, practically, a step in the right direction, but the programme was framed as an “extra resource [that] will help boost knowledge and language skills across government, in the face of the systemic challenge that China poses to the UK’s security, prosperity, and values.” This implies that China, as an actor, was conceived as the Chinese government—or, more precisely, the CCP—whose aims were framed as antithetical to the UK’s foreign policy objectives. This geopolitical zero-sum vision reduces the level and quality of the programme, as (1) it creates (internally) and attracts (externally) researchers who hold compatible, unilateral views on UK–China relations, offering answers rather than posing questions about Global China. Also, (2) by imagining a dirigiste strategic China, it ignores a large majority of Chinese endeavours beyond the geopolitical ‘red lines’ that the present China Audit is considering and questioning (critical materials, energy, military, security, human rights).

Specifically, at state-level, analysing cooperative endeavours in economic, social development as inherently geopolitical reduces spaces for much-needed common action and international advocacy for material challenges faced by the UK, including climate change, humanitarian relief from natural disasters, and international conflicts, as well as tackling poverty, hunger, water shortages, and health crises. These are the challenges at the base of cooperation for achieving the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals at the United Nations.

In the humanitarian context, trilateral cooperation with China could become a means to share the burden of international aid and complement the cuts that the present government has implemented to the aid sector in its last spending review. The cuts have weakened the UK’s ability to respond to global shared challenges internationally, as well as tarnished its reputation as a global donor and champion of humanitarian relief, leaving more space to Chinese development actors to take on global leadership.[17]

As discussed above, the level of business, a geopolitical China strategy might have the effect of taming and blocking UK’s participation in innovation processes and partnerships whose central nodes are moving towards East Asia and the PRC, including in the context of electric vehicles, and batteries, where BYD’s challenge to Western carmakers’ leadership is a well-established phenomenon revolutionising global technological hierarchies in ‘green’ sectors.

To achieve balanced, sober and innovative knowledge production on China that recognises the potential, limits and dangers of Global China’s expansion, research needs to happen outside political institutions. UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and its Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) are obvious places to empower to produce policy-relevant, but independent, research on China. UKRI writes amongst its core values that “independence of research should be maintained.” Research on plural China should be conducted through critical thinking and research, and should be aimed at producing coherent and empirically informed arguments to be used by the government to produce and improve, as opposed to justify, its policies. Private funding bodies like the Hallsworth fellowships at the University of Manchester, or the Overseas Development Institute, already recognise the relevance of Chinese political economy research that looks beyond just China proper and its central government through special fellowships and research programmes looking at Global China with a focus on the Global South/Global Majority.[18] The ESRC should follow their example and implement long-term, fieldwork-based, in-depth research on China and its global endeavours.

As part of a project funded by the Conflict, Stability and Security Fund (CSSF), in collaboration with the FCDO and Global Partners Governance (GPG), I have been examining the evolving entanglements between China and Russia in Central Asia amidst the war in Ukraine. As I wrote in a piece that comments on my experience working on this project, understanding China’s role in the region, I found, requires long-term, context-sensitive research that cannot rely solely on surface-level data or externally imposed analytical frameworks.[19] In my own fieldwork—particularly in Uzbekistan—it became clear that navigating informal, often opaque communication structures demands close collaboration with local researchers who understand the subtleties of their environments. Likewise, engaging meaningfully with Chinese actors requires sustained relationship-building and cultural fluency. These dynamics are often missed in analyses conducted at a distance. Through this CSSF-supported collaboration, I was able to bring grounded insights into policy discussions, reaffirming my belief that only embedded, interdisciplinary research can fully capture how Sino-Russian influence is experienced and negotiated in Central Asia. This type of research happens mostly in academic settings and can and should be made possible by a special Global China investment through UKRI at all academic levels, and particularly for innovative research projects designed and, more importantly, run by early career researchers.

5th May 2025