The Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, a cross-party international grouping of China-sceptic legislators, has published an audit of the UK's approach to Beijing that reads less like a policy recommendation and more like an incident report. The core finding: the UK lacks the institutional capacity — language skills, lived experience, senior expertise — to engage competently with the world's second-largest economy. A visiting Chinese delegation reportedly noted that no senior UK official engaging with Beijing spoke Mandarin or had significant experience of living in China. The audit's framing sentence is deliberately underlined: "Successful UK engagement with China must always be framed by an understanding that the PRC is an inherently hostile authoritarian state that does not share our values." This is the analytical spine — every recommendation flows from treating Beijing as an adversary first and a partner second, with engagement calibrated accordingly. Former security minister Tom Tugendhat endorsed it as filling "a gap left by years of policy neglect." The report identifies a structural problem beyond ideology. British expertise on China exists — in academia, in former diplomatic circles, in think tanks — but it is "siloed" and "not translated into capability." This is a recurring pattern in UK governance: knowledge that lives in one part of the system never reaches the people making decisions. The result is a power imbalance with China that is compounded, not mitigated, by the UK's own institutional weakness. On trade-offs, the audit is unusually candid. Climate cooperation is flagged as low-risk and essentially unavoidable, but the document acknowledges the price: accepting supply chains "tainted by forced labour and unfair trade practices." This is the moral hazard at the heart of Western engagement with China, stated plainly rather than euphemised. Red lines are recommended around critical infrastructure, frontier technologies, and human rights — though the report offers no mechanism for enforcement. Kerry Brown, director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London, offered a pointed critique of the audit's own blind spot. While welcoming the call for better language skills, he argued the security-oriented framing promoted by some IPAC members actively discourages the lived experience in China that would build genuine competence. "You can't teach really important things in a classroom," he said. The paradox is clear: the UK needs people who understand China deeply, but the securitised framing makes spending time in China a reputational or career risk. The recommendations — better institutional coordination, strengthened national security tools, supply chain diversification — are sensible but generic. They could have appeared in any UK foreign policy report of the past decade. The audit's real value is diagnostic, not prescriptive: it names the gap between ambition and capability with unusual specificity. Whether that diagnosis translates into investment in human capital rather than another round of strategy documents is the open question. The deeper structural issue is that the UK is trying to run a sophisticated great-power relationship with a shallow bench. This is not unique to China policy — it echoes similar deficits in UK capacity on trade negotiation, industrial strategy, and regulatory expertise post-Brexit. The IPAC audit is a symptom of a broader institutional hollowing-out, and until that is addressed, any China strategy will be executed by people who don't fully understand the counterparty.
