The Thinker | No. 02/2026
Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister, has arrived in Beijing for the first state visit by a British prime minister to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in over seven years. He is accompanied by Rachel Reeves, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Kyle, Secretary of State for Business and Trade, and a delegation of 60 business leaders.
The Prime Minister will almost certainly meet Xi Jinping, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and Li Qiang, Premier of the State Council. He may also meet Zhao Leji, Chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, met all three on his recent visit). Reeves and Kyle will meet with their CCP counterparts.
Should the Prime Minister even be in the PRC?
The answer is yes. Ministers should visit the PRC often. Opportunities to increase knowledge and understanding by personal experience are never wasted. Face to face meetings are a rare chance to communicate British positions directly to Chinese leaders without their going through interpretation by officials.
Although the CCP is adept at arranging ‘Potemkin’ visits, with form deliberately intended to dazzle reality, a perceptive politician should be able to see more deeply. In this author’s experience as adviser to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, that committee – neutral beforehand – returned from its visit to Beijing convinced, based on the evidence it found, that the CCP’s activities posed a threat to the United Kingdom’s (UK) interests.
What are the aims and possible achievements of the visit?
His Majesty’s (HM) Government likes to frame its PRC relations under the heading of the ‘Three Cs’ (Cooperate, Compete, Challenge). Divining the substance behind the slogan is difficult. If indeed HM Government has a connected strategy for the UK’s relations with the PRC, ‘most of the detail is not disclosable’, as David Lammy, then Foreign Secretary, told Parliament in June 2025.
HM Government is looking to the PRC to boost Britain’s economic growth and prosperity; an aim repeated to the author by several civil servants and reflected in the composition of the party accompanying the Prime Minister. Trade and investment are laudable aims to pursue, although ministers should cease speaking about trade and should rather emphasise exports (if the UK exported nothing to the PRC, it would still be Britain’s seventh biggest trade partner).
Ministers exaggerate exports to the PRC. They should exclude precious metals, which are traded in London but add little to economic growth, as well as Hong Kong, given its separate ‘One Country, Two Systems’ status (although some exports will be transhipped to the PRC as well as elsewhere in Asia). With those exclusions, the latest figures (to the end of June 2025) have British annual exports to the PRC of goods and services at £30.5 billion (around 3.3% of total exports), putting it in sixth place.
While ministerial visits should seek to promote exports, in practice, political impetus has limited effect on exports. Poor political relations have not historically held back countries’ exports. In the UK’s case, although diplomatic relations entered the doghouse when David Cameron, then prime minister, met the Dalai Lama in 2012, exports continued to rise. During the period of no ministerial visits under the Conservative government, exports hit a record in 2022 and remained high in 2023. Similarly, good relations had little effect; exports in 2016 and 2017 were below the total of 2015, when Cameron announced a ‘golden era’ in UK-PRC relations.
Moreover, Britain and other countries’ exports to the PRC have been falling in recent years. This is hardly surprising, given the CCP’s policies of self-reliance, ‘dual circulation’, and ‘Made in China 2025’, reinforced at October’s Party Plenum. The aim of the upcoming 15th ‘Five-Year Plan’ is to ensure that the PRC continues to increase the consumption of domestic goods in order to avoid dependencies on free and open countries whom the CCP regards as hostile. The same also applies to services, where Chinese intentions mirror their model used in manufacturing industries: cooperate, copy and kick out. At times, it is tempting to recall the words of the Qianlong Emperor to the first high-level British delegation to Beijing led by Lord Macartney in 1793:
Our Celestial Empire possesses all things in prolific abundance and lacks no product within its borders. There is therefore no need to import the manufactures of outside barbarians in exchange for our own produce.
Trade relations have improved since then. Ministers can open doors to accompanying business executives. The re-establishment of business and economic dialogues can create opportunities. But some scepticism is warranted when said ministers return home announcing a raft of deals. Those are the result of long months and years of hard work by businesses; and many ‘deals’ are memoranda of understanding which may evaporate before contracts are signed.
If the export position is not rosy, Chinese investment could be described as thorny. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) lists Chinese net investment in the UK at the end of 2023 as 0.2% of the stock total foreign direct investment. This may be an understatement, given that Chinese money may enter Britain from funds domiciled in other countries, but even if the figure is ten times higher at 2%, it is not substantial.
Increasingly, governments have recognised the dangers of allowing the PRC access to their nation’s technology via Chinese investment. This situation presents a complex dilemma for HM Government, which is reportedly evaluating the prospect of investment involving wind energy company Mingyang and Chinese Electric Vehicle (EV) manufacturers.
HM Government eventually ruled out Chinese participation in new nuclear plants on security grounds. In light of that precedent, it appears highly inconsistent to grant Mingyang a significant role in another sector of the UK’s critical national infrastructure. Such a move risks creating what many observers describe as a significant strategic dependency. Previous challenges involving rare earths and Covid-19 equipment have demonstrated the potential for the CCP to utilise economic leverage in ways that conflict with British national interests.
Moreover, the potential ability to turn off the UK’s energy supply should not be put in the hands of a country, which HM Government knows – although does not always acknowledge – is a threat. Turbines, inverters and other grid connecting equipment contain cellular ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) modules and other connectivity devices. These require firmware updates, and the dangers of malware insertion at a time of high tension or even hostilities would be hard, if not impossible, to mitigate.
Allowing increased investment in Britain’s automobile industry by companies headquartered in an adversarial state adds a geopolitical dimension not present in other countries’ investment in the UK. Under the National Intelligence Law, Chinese companies are obligated to ‘support, assist and cooperate with’ the CCP, and the party does not hesitate to use its leverage.
Furthermore, Britain exports around 15% of its cars to the United States (US). The American ‘connected vehicle rule’ has banned Chinese software from imported cars after 2026 and hardware after 2029. Are ministers happy to forgo the American market and probably incur the wrath and tariffs of Donald Trump, President of the US, on other exports?
What else might be gained from the visit?
While it is right to pursue exports and investment, even if results may fall short of hopes, Sir Keir would like ‘consistent, durable, respectful’ relations with the PRC. The restoration of high-level visits and dialogues is doubtless encompassed by those adjectives. There is much to discuss and encourage, not least climate change, global health, cultural exchanges, tourism and more.
More difficult matters, particularly relating to human rights; Hong Kong; the treatment of Jimmy Lai, imprisoned business leader and British citizen; freedom of navigation in the South China Sea; and Taiwan also ought to be on the agenda. Xi will give little ear and no ground. Some minor concession to foster goodwill is possible though, perhaps the dropping of sanctions against current Members of Parliament.
The release of Jimmy Lai accords neither with Xi’s belief that the UK has no right to interfere in Hong Kong, nor with the fiction that under the principle of ‘One Country, Two Systems’ the Hong Kong legal system preserves a high degree of autonomy. Nevertheless, a robust attempt to increase CCP understanding of what Britain stands for, and what are British red lines, is worth making. It would be worth stressing that the PRC’s current exporting of its industrial overcapacity is not sustainable for either country, and that, if continued, the UK will have to take defensive measures.
What are the PRC’s likely objectives for the visit?
For the PRC, the importance of Britain ranks behind that of the US, the European Union (EU), Russia, India, and peripheral countries and nations in Africa. The CCP wants to maintain easy access to British markets; to keep the UK as a supporter of open trade and investment under the World Trade Organisation (WTO) system; to learn from, copy and ultimately replace its financial expertise; to continue to benefit from its educational excellence, scientific research and innovation; and to split Britain from America. In line with its adherence to ‘divide and rule’, the CCP quietly welcomes distance between the UK and the EU.
Conclusion: The leopard has not changed its spots
In Davos, Carney spoke of reordering global governance. It is unclear how close an alignment with the PRC that betokens. But if the US administration has changed, the CCP has not. Its global aims, ambitions, systems, ideology and values remain as before – that is, largely inimical to those of free and open nations. Perhaps the most important thing that Sir Keir can bring back from his visit is a clear understanding of the last of his ‘three Cs’: Challenge.
Charles Parton OBE is Chief Adviser to the China Observatory at the Council on Geostrategy.
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