The ‘China Audit’ one year on: Clarification, procrastination, or obfuscation?
Part 2: Fostering China knowledge and exchange in the broader community
The Thinker | No. 07/2026
This article is the second part of a mini-series analysing the ‘China Audit’ one year after the publication of His Majesty’s (HM) Government’s National Security Strategy. The first part, which explores HM Government’s current approach to People’s Republic of China (PRC) expertise, can be read here.
Benefiting more from current external expertise
The ‘China Audit’ team rightly spoke of the need to ensure that His Majesty’s (HM) Government benefits from non-government experience of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). PRC experts in the United Kingdom (UK) are not thick on the ground. Think tanks can afford very few PRC-focused staff, and have difficulty in offering them meaningful career progression. Funding is scarce and generally businesses are not keen to help out, either because they have no business in the PRC or because they do, and do not want to be associated with free-ranging expressions on the country.
Where HM Government does support think tanks, it tends to be project-based, which does little to help pay salaries and running costs. It may fail to give value for money. 18 months ago, the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) launched five tenders of £100,000 to produce one report each. Far more could have been achieved by giving five think tanks a £100,000 grant each, with a requirement to produce 5-10 reports relevant to government concerns (and still have money to finance more work from which HM Government might benefit). Time in preparing the tenders, both in government and think tanks, could be better spent producing useful material.
While there has been an increase in meetings between officials and outside experts, it does not appear to be systematic. The same is true of commissioning of reports useful to PRC issues across a variety of departments. Giving the Great Britain-China Centre, or a similar organisation with extensive contacts, a coordinating role to canvas requirements would take the burden off HM Government.
Growing future expertise
The PRC is not going to go away. Growing longer-term expertise from which HM Government can benefit must start now. Unfortunately, an obsession with speaking Mandarin is a hindrance, and the ministers in charge of the Department for Education (DFE) have consistently refused to contemplate changes.
Over the last ten years, the Mandarin Excellence Programme has spent £26 million. During that time the number of students taking A Level Chinese language has halved; almost all students already speak a Chinese dialect. The reason is not hard to see. Particularly at A Level, students will avoid subjects where top grades needed for university entrance are difficult to attain. Those new to Chinese cannot compete with native speakers, for whom an A Level is an easy option.
One imaginative solution, long campaigned for, is to launch an A Level in Chinese civilisation without a language requirement. This follows the successful model of the classical civilisation A Level, which has helped to raise undergraduate numbers. The likelihood is that the same form of introduction would induce more undergraduates to study Chinese at university, where the language tuition is aimed at non-native speakers.
Those campaigning for this new A Level have done the hard preparation of a curriculum. They see no difficulty in getting the financial sponsorship to subsidise it over the first few years: top companies and university bodies such as the Russell Group have already expressed support. Yet, the DFE has consistently blocked the proposal. Incredibly, the curriculum assessment the DFE put out last November does not mention China nor Chinese in its 197 pages, except in one footnote.
‘The audit showed that under the last Government there was…a profound lack of knowledge regarding China’s culture, history and – most importantly – language’, said David Lammy, then Foreign Secretary, in his June 2025 statement. HM Government has shown a profound lack of imagination in trying to correct that.
A coherent China strategy requires better government structures
In 2019, HM Government replied to the Foreign Affairs Committee report:
The policy is underpinned by detailed cross-Whitehall implementation plans against which progress is monitored and directed through regular and frequent meetings of the China National Strategy Implementation Group (NSIG), led by the SRO [Senior Responsible Officer], reporting to the NSC(O) and through that body to the NSC.
The National Security Council (NSC) rarely discusses the PRC, averaging
about once every two years. Senior officials also meet irregularly and infrequently. Very few at Director General level have any direct PRC experience. There should be quarterly meetings of the NSC on the PRC chaired by the Prime Minister, which would reconcile differences over PRC policy between departments. The NSIG has lost momentum and relevance. In tandem with quarterly meetings of the NSC, there should be quarterly meetings of the NSC(O), that is of the top officials in departments, chaired by the National Security Adviser (NSA).
If this seems excessive, consider the amount of ministerial time spent on crises in Ukraine and the Middle East. The ‘urgent’ too often crowds out the ‘important’, and as the head of the German security service said: ‘Russia is the storm, China is climate change.’
Similarly, science and technology issues require a collective consideration by departmental scientific advisers on more than an ad hoc basis. HM Government should establish a Scientific Advisory Committee to be a centre of expertise on science and technology security – the main area of threat – to coordinate the planning and implementation of protective measures across central and local governments, business, and academia. This would be the ultimate authority for deciding on Chinese investment, cooperation, and involvement in the British economy. It would also inform the Research Collaboration Advice Team in its work on ensuring that scientific and technological research in the UK is not fed into the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) military development programmes, as well as work on the National Security and Investment Act.
A coherent PRC strategy also requires ministers and officials to stay in post for far longer than is the current norm. There have been seven foreign secretaries in the last decade, and six ministers of state with responsibility for the PRC. By contrast, in the PRC, apart from the short-lived Qin Gang, Wang Yi has been foreign minister throughout that time. Officials often move jobs after as little as a year, compared to the three years or more of the past. A balance needs to be struck between benefiting from PRC expertise remaining longer in one post and spreading PRC knowledge throughout the system. Currently, promotion chasing incentivises fast rotation between posts.
Conclusion
HM Government’s elucidation of the implications of the China Audit has been – to be generous – sparse. For all Lammy’s lambasting of the previous government’s performance on the PRC, the current one has done little better on transparency or accountability. If the new Prime Minister wants Labour to ‘continue to guide the UK’s approach to China’, the first step should surely be to work up a clear action plan to deliver FCDO, Whitehall, and wider British societal China expertise. The second would be to set up the structures and command lines to devise and oversee the implementation of a strategy.
This would not be expensive. It is a matter of better exploiting the PRC experience that HM Government already has, not least in the FCDO, and ensuring that officials who have picked up useful experience spend more of their careers on the PRC, and are sufficiently rewarded – in pay and promotion.
Funding think tanks and academics is also not expensive. The mentioned £500,000 spent on five reports could have funded a PRC-focused researcher in each of the five think tanks. Furthermore, HM Government could have directed much of that research.
Similarly, for the longer term, the expense of getting the youth interested in China studies is not great. For example, those campaigning for a Chinese civilisation A Level have costed implementation for the initial years at £6 million, and are confident that they can find outside sponsorship. Currently, the number of students studying Chinese in Britain is around 250. That number is not sufficient to ‘improve the UK’s capability to understand and respond to the challenges and opportunities China poses’ in future.
Recommendations
Improving ‘China literacy’ within the civil service:
Future cuts in the civil service should take into account specific skills needed;
Mechanisms should be set up within the civil service to incentivise cross postings, which would spread PRC expertise more widely within departments;
The FCDO’s Supervisory Board and sub-committees should include an official with extensive experience of the PRC. That official should be responsible for ensuring PRC capability and FCDO structures congruent with agreed PRC goals, as well as championing the right approach from the rest of Whitehall and society;
Training on the PRC should be extended to more officials in departments other than the FCDO. More higher level officials should receive such training.
Fostering China knowledge and exchange in the broader community:
Increase financial support for think tanks and PRC experts in academia;
Establish a unified system for commissioning work from outside experts and for ensuring the results reach those in all departments with an interest in the topic;
The DFE should accept and promote an A Level in Chinese civilisation.
Ensuring the creation and implementation of a coherent China strategy:
The Prime Minister should chair quarterly meetings of the NSC on the PRC;
The NSC(O), chaired by the NSA, should meet at least as often, draw up plans on the PRC and ensure their progress;
HM Government should establish a Scientific Advisory Committee to be a centre of expertise on science and technology security to coordinate the planning and implementation of protective measures across central and local governments, business, and academia;
Ministers and officials should remain a minimum of three years in any PRC-related post.
Charles Parton OBE is Chief Adviser to the China Observatory at the Council on Geostrategy, and Senior Research Fellow in International Security at RUSI.
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