Last week the UK Government acknowledged the national security threat posed by China. As a result, hawks have been quick to criticise Beijing’s absence from the “enhanced tier” of Britain’s Foreign Influence Registration Scheme (FIRS), which came into effect on Tuesday. On this, they are correct: China should be placed on the top tier. In this new world of great power struggles, so too should the United States.

FIRS is designed to bring transparency to foreign influence efforts in the UK. The “standard tier” requires the registration of any political influence activities, such as lobbying, at the direction of any foreign government apart from the Republic of Ireland. The “enhanced tier” goes significantly further. It requires the registration of “relevant activities” (including commerce, research, and attendance of events) conducted by specified foreign-controlled entities or individuals and organisations at the direction of specified foreign powers. As currently specified, it provides a basis for mapping the activity of Russian and Iranian state-linked actors in the UK.

Mapping China’s activity in the UK in this way would go a long way towards enabling Britain to develop a more coherent and systematic China policy. A major obstacle to this has been the fact that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is active in all elements of Chinese society. That makes it impossible to do business with Chinese companies, engage in academic collaboration with Chinese institutions, or work with any kind of Chinese organisation without interacting with the Party-state.

Economic, academic, and other collaborations with Chinese counterparts are in the interests of many British individuals and organisations, as well as Britain as a nation — provided they are conducted with an awareness of the CCP’s approach.

Influence operations abroad form a key part of that approach. Most of the time, these operations consist of gradually forging personal ties, cultivating business relationships, gathering freely available information, and persuading foreign interlocutors of CCP talking points. That is, Chinese influence operations rely on interactions that are perfectly normal, legal, and necessary in a democratic society. This makes it very difficult to track the nature and extent of Chinese influence efforts. That is, unless one requires the registration of all activities of Chinese state-linked entities, as inclusion on the enhanced tier of FIRS would.

Opposition from within the government to including China alongside Russia and Iran was apparently motivated by the risks it could pose to bilateral business ties. Undoubtedly this would impact an economic relationship which is worth Britain pursuing. But the impact would likely be temporary, and could be offset significantly by recasting the purpose of FIRS from a system for monitoring the influence of declared adversaries to one for navigating the realities of great power competition.

Which is why the US should also be included on the enhanced tier. Many are rightly worried about Chinese influence in the UK, but China’s footprint pales into insignificance in comparison with America’s. The objection that US entities are less beholden to Washington than their Chinese counterparts are to Beijing is becoming less and less persuasive. Satellite company Maxar, for example, cut off Ukraine’s access to imagery in compliance with the Trump administration’s directive and European leaders openly fear that Washington could coercively leverage its dominance of Big Tech.

China’s rise as a great power has allowed it to extend its influence globally and pursue the CCP’s ends. The flip side is that the US is no longer hegemonic but becoming more like a “normal” great power. This means it will increasingly resort to coercive measures to achieve its aims, given it no longer possesses the power to enforce a rules-based order.

Britain now finds itself in a world of competing superpowers. In FIRS, it has an effective tool for monitoring and responding to their influence. Doing so will require the political will and strategic foresight to risk short-term backlash from Beijing and Washington in order to pursue long-term strategic autonomy.

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William Matthews is Senior Research Fellow for China and the World at Chatham House, where he works on China’s geopolitical influence with a focus on technology, defence, and security.

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