The Foreign Secretary David Lammy will touch down in Beijing next week to pay his respects. Next year, Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor, is expected to do the same.
We haven’t seen this level of deference to the Chinese Communist party since 2019. Back then, Philip Hammond heaped praise on his hosts. He endorsed their Belt and Road initiative – of Chinese-funded infrastructure spanning the globe – and promised British co-operation ‘as we harness the “Golden Era” of UK-China relations’.
The calls from Tory China hawks to label Xi’s empire ‘a systemic threat’ hold little sway with the new regime
That was the high-water mark of Anglo-Chinese collaboration. George Osborne and David Cameron had courted the Chinese hard. Boris Johnson, too, was initially tempted to follow a pro-Sino approach – backing Huawei for 5G access. But, under pressure from the US, he stepped back, concluding that China posed a substantial threat to the liberal global order.
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