Hello and welcome to The Rundown, a podcast from Politics Home.

I'm your host, Alan Tolhurst, and with me to discuss the UK's relationship with China,

whether the government is getting its policy right towards Beijing and my colleague,

social media journalist Zoe Crowther, alongside two brilliant guests,

the Conservative MP Mark Logan,

a vice chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on China, as well as Chris Cash, director of the China research group, which was set up by Tory MPs in 2020, to promote debate and fresh thinking about

how Britain should respond to the rise of China.

So the kind of the starting point for this discussion really is that back in October, Rishi Sunak made his first big foreign policy speech signalled an end to the so-called golden era of relations between China and Britain ushering a new phase of robust pragmatism towards Beijing.

The Tory MP and China Hawk, Ian Dung Duncan Smith, called that tortological nonsense.

But fellow Conservative Alicia Kearns, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, told me for a piece that it rings exactly the sort of bells I want to be hearing.

I'm going to start with you, Chris Alicier, now chairs the committee at the CRG after a group was set up by Tom Tuganat and Neil O'Brien. Can you explain why it was kind of set up and why it was kind of needed and what the sort of work is that you do there? Yeah. So as you correctly

said earlier, the China Research Group was set up by by Tom and Neil in May 2020. And there was

basically a recognition that China had become a significant geopolitical issue and the UK didn't have parliamentary group focused on China.

So Tom and Neil decided that it would be a good idea to set one up.

So they chaired the group initially and we had a steering committee of around 10 MPs and still have 90 MPs as part of the wider group.

And the CRG was created not as a lobbying or a campaigning group.

So quite different to the ERG, despite the similarity in names.

Yes, one of the many RGs that exist within the Conservative Party in the past few years.

Right, right. And there are reasons, but for why we adopted the name. But it was set up to think more

about how do we respond to the rise of China, what type of relationship do we want with China,

and where do we need to draw red lines in our relationship with China? And that's still the model

that we pursue to this day. And so obviously, you're kind of seen as being a bit more hawkish, I suppose,

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