Starmer thaws relations with China after eight years of total coldness
The prime minister is traveling to Beijing accompanied by a large number of business leaders seeking to rebuild economic and trade ties.
LondonKeir Starmer arrives in China in the next few hours, on the first trip of a premier The British ambassador has been in Beijing since 2018, with the aim of reviving political and economic relations with Beijing after a long period of diplomatic strain. His visit comes eleven days after the Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney will travel there And, also breaking years of silence with Xi Jinping, established a preliminary trade agreement, considered historic.
The moment chosen by Starmer is not random, quite the contrary. Just a week ago, the Labour government gave the green light for the construction, next to the City of London, of the largest Chinese embassy in Europeand one of the world's largest, a controversial project that had been stalled since 2018. The visit has a strong economic component. Starmer is traveling with a delegation of British business leaders with the aim of boosting foreign investment and strengthening trade ties between the two countries.
London and Beijing are striving to put behind them a past marked by various issues that had strained relations between the two countries: the ban on the Chinese company Huawei from to provide British and European 5G networks for reasons of national security; criticism from the United Kingdom to the arrest and conviction of British citizen Jimmy Lai and other Hong Kong activists under the national security lawand the later-dropped charges against two Britons for allegedly spying for China. Starmer has only met with Xi once so far, in a meeting in Brazil in November 2024, on the sidelines of a G20 summit. This new rapprochement between London and Beijing comes amid an international context in which China is intensifying its efforts to present itself to the world as a stable alternative to the foreign policy of Donald Trump's United States, which has cast doubt on Washington's reliability as a Western partner and strategic ally. Last week in Davos, Vice Premier He Lifeng addressed this point, stating: "China is committed to fostering shared prosperity with its trading partners, both for its own development and to grow the pie of the global economy and trade." In any case, Starmer is practically the last or second-to-last to arrive in Beijing, as Trump himself is scheduled to visit Xi next April. In recent years, in fact, taking reality into account and adapting to it, French President Emmanuel Macron, as well as former German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and also Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, have visited Beijing: Macron twice and Sánchez three times, between 2023 and 2025.
Despite the international context, and in a further demonstration that Starmer refuses to accept the reality Trump is painting on the map, in an interview with Bloomberg, the premier He asserted that the United Kingdom would not be forced to "choose" between the United States and China. And that although London would continue to maintain "very close" relations with Washington on economic, security, and defense matters, what "would not be wise" was to ignore the world's second-largest economy. It is no coincidence that the Prime Minister is accompanied by a large delegation of business leaders. In addition to Beijing, Starmer is also traveling to Shanghai and, briefly, to Japan.
The visit is not to everyone's liking in the United Kingdom, however. And it was no coincidence that, this Tuesday, citing US intelligence sources, the conservative newspaper The Daily Telegraph —which has vehemently opposed the opening of Beijing's aforementioned mega-embassy in London—has revealed that senior officials in the governments of the last three Conservative prime ministers, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss, and Rishi Sunak, had their communications hacked.
And while the Conservatives insist on portraying Beijing as a new Fu Manchu of the 21st century, Starmer offers calm and pragmatism, and what Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen recently described as the "British way: having a cup of tea, reflecting around the table." In China, a country where tea is a millennia-old tradition, Starmer is confident that the resumption of dialogue can become a reality under the principle of "cooperating on matters of mutual interest and disagreeing on points of contention."
