The City’s self-styled ‘cheerleader in chief’, Lord Mayor Alastair King, on a recent visit to Beijing and Shanghai found leading Chinese banks keen to expand in London. What with Chinese diplomats also keen to establish a fortress-embassy at Royal Mint Court on the City’s eastern edge, that may ring alarm bells with those who regard Xi Jinping’s neo-Maoist regime as anything but friendly. But as King also observes, ‘the tectonic plates are shifting’. All geopolitical relationships are up for review – though what follows is my own analysis, not the Lord Mayor’s.
A previous British visitor to Shanghai, chancellor George Osborne in 2015, declared an urge to be ‘China’s best partner’ in ‘a golden decade’ of trade and investment that he hoped would include Chinese financing of UK nuclear power. Then came the crushing of Hong Kong, the spread of Covid from Wuhan, the banning of Huawei from UK 5G networks and the increasingly hostile rhetoric of Xi himself. China business looked less and less attractive, while British post-Brexit hopes focused more and more on securing a trade deal with the US. What now?
The Donald Trump regime has made territorial threats towards Canada, Greenland and Panama, favours Russia over Ukraine, regards Europe as ‘pathetic’ and is at best equivocal towards the UK, save for the appeal to presidential vanity of Buckingham Palace banquets. It deploys tariffs like a loose machine gun, with no certainty that this week’s ‘Liberation Day’ target list will still apply next week.
Beijing’s leaders, by contrast, are currently a direct threat only to Taiwan, whose rulers, exiled from the mainland after Mao’s revolution, themselves once claimed sovereignty over the whole of China.
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