Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home with me Alan Tolhurst.

This week, after the collapse of the Chinese spying case, we'll look at the state of the Anglo-Sino relationship.

How it has evolved over the years, bouncing from the golden era of Dovish cooperation,

to hawkishly labour them our biggest threat,

to wherever UK-China relations are now under this current government.

Which as well as fending off accusations, it undermined prosecutors in the case for fear of offending Beijing.

Kirstama has the thorny issue of planning permission for the controversial new embassy in London to deal with.

Amid accusations, his government does not have a coherent strategy for dealing with China. To discuss all that, I'm directly joined by my panel, starting with Tony Vaughn, Labour MP for Folksson and Hythe, and chair of the all-party parliamentary group on China. We also have Mark Field, the former Conservative MP, who is the Minister for Asia and the Pacific under Theresa May, as well as Dr. Kerry Brown,

Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lao China Institute at the King's College, London.

And alongside him, we have Luke DePulford, co-founder and executive director of the Interparliamentary Alliance on China.

So, Luke, I'm going to start with you. I think before we kind of get into some of the details, I think it was pretty just best to kind of start off by looking at what kind of the government's broad China policy is. If you could sum up the kind of UK government policy towards China at the moment. Yes. I mean, I think the first thing to say is that I don't speak for the government on China policy and Tony will be much better at that than me. And I also want to underline that I think that conversations around China policy have been

plagued by partisanship very unhelpfully. And the efforts of my organisation, the Inter-Parliamentary

Alliance on China, have been to try to emphasise that the challenges posed by the CCP under Xi Jinping, those contemporary challenges are beyond party

politics and we really need to come together. In that vein, I think that in opposition,

the Labour Party showed tremendous moral fibre in their policy on China. We had from the Labour

Party six three-line whips over the genocide amendment.

You might remember this. This was prompted by the Uyghur issue, the persecution of Uyghurs

in the northwest of China, where we tried to amend the Trade Act in order to make it illegal for

the UK to enter into a free trade agreement with a country that was alleged to be perpetrating

genocide. Six three-line whips,

and Labour said from the dispatch box, we believe this is genocide. When it started to approach

closer to the transition, became clear that Labour was going to come into power. Rather predictably,

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