On Tuesday, the softening of Mr Sunak’s position was leapt upon by Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader. He leant on Second World War rhetoric to warn that “appeasement” was now being pursued.
Sir Iain was one of a handful of Tory MPs sanctioned last year by Beijing after criticising its treatment of Uyghur Muslims. But other fellow China hawks have been brought inside the nest. Tom Tugendhat is now the security minister, attending Cabinet, while Nusrat Ghani is the science minister. They cannot speak out against Number 10 from their government positions.
Now that Mr Sunak is in power, he no longer needs to think about appealing to the Tory membership and his party’s hardline group has thinned, leaving him freer to act.
Then there is the departure of Ms Truss herself. Whitehall insiders who watched the transition closely from Boris Johnson to Ms Truss and then to Mr Sunak have no doubt she wanted the toughest approach to China of all three.
As foreign secretary, in an interview with The Telegraph, Ms Truss had spelled out her critical view of Beijing, vowing to block Chinese involvement from UK critical national infrastructure – a broad outlook she carried over into Number 10.
Most attention has fallen on how she wanted to rewrite the so-called “integrated review”, an attempt by Mr Johnson to bring together thinking on defence, foreign security and development policy into a single, overarching framework in 2021.
In it China was labelled a “systemic competitor” in general, but also more specifically “the biggest state-based threat to the UK’s economic security”. Ms Truss was widely reported to have wanted to upgrade China to something closer to an overall “threat”, though the exact wording was never known.
It is telling that Mr Sunak, pushed by reporters during his flight to the G20 summit on whether he agreed, stuck closely to the wording found in the current integrated review, rather than either Ms Truss’s more punchy vision or indeed his own rhetoric during the campaign trail.
China’s Kremlin influence still felt
And then there is the geopolitical situation. All Western nations are attempting to tread the line between engagement and condemnation with Beijing, trying to both stand up to its nefarious practices and cajole it into joint cooperation on crucial world issues.
At this moment, perhaps that seesaw has tipped a little towards the former choice.
With a land war once again raging in Europe after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, China’s influence over the Kremlin has not gone unnoticed by leaders seeking the conflict’s end.
It was noteworthy that in the readout after Joe Biden, the US President, and Mr Xi’s first meeting in Bali there was common agreement that nuclear wars cannot be won and must never be fought.
It was a restatement of existing Chinese policy, but given Washington fears Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, could use nuclear weapons in Ukraine – it was always going to be read as a Kremlin warning.
