Week after week in Beijing, leaders of middle powers allied with the US have made back-to-back visits there, to strengthen their countries’ ties with China, at a time when their relationships with the Trump administration have continually deteriorated. These diplomatic visits have even followed a predictable pattern, with arrivals on the Wednesday evening, followed by meetings with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People on Thursday or Friday, to jointly underscore the importance of a stable, predictable and rules-based world, followed by a meeting with Prime Minister Li Qiang.

On Thursday, January 29, it was British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s turn to take part in these proceedings, in the first visit to China by a British prime minister since Theresa May in 2018, before Beijing’s harsh clampdown on Hong Kong and the Covid-19 pandemic years. Starmer has clearly stated his desire to revive the United Kingdom’s relations with China, though without the naïveté that characterized an earlier rapprochement under David Cameron. In 2015, Cameron had taken Xi to a pub for fish and chips and a pint of IPA, before his chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, staged a visit to Xinjiang, the Chinese region notorious for the repression of the Uyghur minority population. To this day, Osborne remains the only high-level European politician to have taken part in such a public display.

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