It’s out of the fire and into the fire with the latest new prime minister of the United Kingdom, Andy Burnham. With respect to policy toward the People’s Republic of China, one of the bad signs is Jim O’Neill.
At the Henry Jackson Society site, John Hemmings argued a couple of weeks ago that the emergence of economist Jim O’Neill “as a senior Burnham advisor is yet another signal that we are likely to have a China policy that was last in vogue ten years ago in 2015. In 2013, Osborne wanted China to invest into reinvigorating the UK’s ageing nuclear infrastructure, into the UK’s financial services sector, and into £24bn worth of ‘Northern Powerhouse’ projects…. Is Burnham going to join the long list of left-leaning political leaders who abandon UK national interests for Chinese investment?”
What Hemmings means by “last in vogue…in 2015” is unclear. As I write, the last year in which the UK government followed a policy of systematically appeasing the People’s Republic of China was 2026. But perhaps Hemmings expects an O’Neill-advised Burnham to become even more suicidally obliging than Starmer.
Seven years at Xinhua
Now The Telegraph is reporting on “Burnham adviser’s ‘irresponsible’ China links” (August 6, 2026). That Burnham adviser is “Lord O’Neill.”
Lord O’Neill, a former Goldman Sachs economist known for coining the Bric acronym to refer to Brazil, Russia, India and China, launched the Brics Plus Thinking policy platform on July 6, two weeks before Mr Burnham became prime minister.
The economic adviser co-founded the think tank, which advances Beijing’s view of a “multipolar world” and pushes for closer ties between Europe and China, with Gemma Cheng’er Deng, a former senior director at China’s official state news agency.
Ms Deng worked for seven years at Xinhua in senior positions typically reserved for Chinese Communist Party members.
But her experience—previously touted publicly for years on various social media and other websites—was expunged from the internet before the think tank’s launch, according to a Telegraph review of archived webpages.
“The fact is that someone seeking to influence the discourse about China in the UK has concealed working for nearly a decade for Chinese state media,” said Sam Dunning, director of UK-China Transparency, a research non-profit specialising in Chinese influence abroad….
“The fact of the work itself plainly indicates someone who passed muster as far as the Chinese Communist Party was concerned, profiting personally and perhaps making high-level official connections through a career contributing to state propaganda,” said Mr Dunning.
This is as bad as it sounds. But we already knew that O’Neill (shown above, left), a CCP propagandist, had joined Burnham’s team. Xinhua-trained Deng (shown above, right) is just another CCP propagandist, one who will help O’Neill get the CCP-compatible lingo right.
Clobbered with BRICS
O’Neill and Deng’s new website talks like this: “it is only sustainable that the Political West better engages with the BRICS+” and “We must move beyond a debilitating cognitive dissonance where the West moralises on politics but relies materially on the very nations it critiques.” (Current makeup of BRICS: Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa + Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.)
Is this “cognitive dissonance,” manifested by buying stuff and critiquing evil policies, to be resolved by trying harder to economically decouple—or, instead, by being studiously silent about evil policies? Should Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting stop sounding the alarm in order to help resolve the debilitating cognitive dissonance?
The recently ousted prime minister, Keir Starmer, governed the United Kingdom as if he were an agent of the Chinese Communist Party. But I’m open to the possibility that Burnham will insist on even more disastrous forms of accommodation.
Also see:
Chatham House: “What the UK must get right in its China strategy”
