Editor's note: Andrew Korybko is a Moscow-based American political analyst. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The UK released its long-awaited Integrated Review of the UK's Defence, Security, Development and Foreign Policy, earlier billed as its biggest one since the Cold War, but it woefully gets everything wrong about China. Describing China as the greatest challenge to "open societies" and the UK's economic security, the document peddles debunked information warfare narratives about China. It's also terribly mistaken in considering China to be a "systemic challenge," including to the UK's values. The proposed solutions to these problems are more trade and investment, which is a good thing, but also deeper ties with the U.S.-led Quad, which is troublesome. 

The Integrated Review is correct in characterizing what many in the West nowadays call the Indo-Pacific region as "increasingly the geopolitical center of the world" due to its commanding importance over global trade routes, but practically everything else of relevance about China is wrong. In the order of the propagandistic points that were earlier mentioned, the first to be countered with facts is that China is the greatest challenge to "open societies." This false claim is premised on the inaccurate portrayal of China as a hegemonic power hell-bent on imposing its domestic political, economic and social models onto others. 

The opposite in fact is what's actually true: China's has no problem with what the West considers to be "open societies." As a case in point, it's either the largest trade partner or among the largest one of literally every single "open society" on the planet. Where China draws the line, however, is when these "open societies" seek to impose their own models onto the Chinese people, especially in Hong Kong as the UK has attempted to arrogantly do over the past few years in its former colony. "Open societies" shouldn't be synonymous with "universalist societies," and each society should respect every other's models. The era of imperialism is over. 

China isn't a threat to the UK's economic security either. Once again, the opposite is true: China and the UK are economically complementary to one another. They also have deeply rooted, extensive and historical trade ties. At one time in history, the British Empire was an economic threat to the old China, but relations have since equalized ever since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and especially over the past four decades. The false narrative that China constitutes a so-called threat is purely a figment of the former Trump administration's imagination as it sought to scare other countries away from trade and tech cooperation with China. 

These previously mentioned clarifications help explain why it's so fundamentally wrong to consider China as a "systemic challenge" to anyone. Once again, the country isn't exporting any of its models. All that it exports is goods and services, though it also imports and courts a lot of them too, which it plans to do much more of through its new development paradigm of dual circulation. The Chinese system is unique, which gives it certain systemic advantages, but these are only perceived as a "challenge" if one has a hyper-competitive zero-sum mindset. China, however, embraces the philosophy of win-win cooperation and wants to help all of its partners. 

This observation, of course, isn't mentioned in the Integrated Review, but it would have re-framed the entire document if it was. Instead of getting everything wrong about China, the UK would have probably gotten everything right. It's of course welcome that the UK's foreign minister said that he's against the Cold War mentality, though it's worrisome that his country still wants to increase its nuclear warhead stockpile by over 40 percent. This is a clear contradiction. Considering that the UK wants to intensify relations with the Quad and is scaremongering about China, it makes one wonder who those nukes are truly intended against. 

Words aren't enough in international relations since it's ultimately action that matters. If the UK sticks to the Integrated Review's script and schizophrenically tries to improve economic ties with China in parallel with seeking its implied containment in coordination with the Quad, then Chinese-UK relations won't improve. London needs to look inward and deeply reflect on the insecurities in its national psyche that are influencing it to falsely portray Beijing as a "systemic challenge" and other such inaccurate depictions that it knows very well are false. The problem isn't China, it's the UK's own post-Brexit identity crisis, which it must focus on fixing first. 

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