British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s China policy aims to balance economic engagement with security concerns while ending the UK’s tendency to swing between confrontation and accommodation, but mixed signals have drawn criticism from both China hawks at home and officials in Beijing. Meaningful progress in UK-China relations will depend on delivering concrete cooperation rather than rhetoric or symbolic high-level visits.
Britain’s Prime Minister Keir Starmer is set to visit China in January.
At the Lady Mayor’s banquet held on the 1st of December last year, British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer observed that the UK government’s policy on China must cease blowing “hot and cold”.
The same speech saw Starmer reiterate the core doctrines of the “China policy” that this Labour administration has adopted since taking office. It presented no surprises to any moderately informed observer of British foreign policy.
The peril of context collapse
Two balancing acts – or uneasy straddles – collectively comprise the bulk of Starmer’s approach to China.
The first, which is the one that is most oft-cited in public commentary, comprises the substantive balancing of Britain’s strategic and security interests – fending off against purported espionage, infiltration, and malign influence – against its economic priorities, which have become particularly salient in view of the lacklustre growth data throughout recent years. The detrimental aftermath of Brexit has been compounded by a mixture of the war in Ukraine and limited business appetite for investment, even despite the best efforts of the incumbent government in attracting investments into emerging technological sectors, such as AI.
The second is much less featured in public discourse – yet far more salient in the minds of the majority of Starmer’s foreign policy team, extending from his Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper and National Security Advisor Jonathan Powell, down to director-level civil servants in the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO).
This tradeoff involves the signals that Starmer is keen to emit. On one hand, Starmer is apparently keen on engaging China, whom he termed a “defining force in technology, trade and global governance”, and rebuilding the ties frayed substantially during the previous Conservative administration. Such a proclivity also explains – in part – his likely openness to the approval of a new China embassy in central London, much to the chagrin of his critics.
On the other hand, Starmer is seeking to mollifying the more vociferous China skeptics amongst his backbenches and the Opposition (especially the Conservative Party) by verbally noting that China did present security threats to the UK.
Alas – as Erving Goffman and Joshua Meyrowitz observe in their analysis of new media forms and their surrounding sociology, those engaging in public communication may find themselves vulnerable to the challenge of “context collapse”. This term refers to the blurring and eventual elimination of the barriers separating different audiences, causing a message intended for one to be received by the other concurrently.
In seeking to please both sides, Starmer has found himself pleasing no one. The China hawks found his remarks far too deferential and trade-oriented in his vision for the Sino-British relationship. The Chinese embassy, on the other hand, blasted the battered Prime Minister for his “erroneous remarks”. Such is the perilously high-stakes nature of public service.
Global governance as a common ground?
To say that the Sino-British relationship needs some fresh blood or air, would be an understatement. The present stagnation behooves a concrete, demonstrable accomplishment that both leaderships – especially the British – can highlight as a benefit resulting from more constructive engagement: a quick win.
Whilst some have touted the prospective visit by Starmer to China in late January as a “win” of such kind, this suggestion inevitably conflates the means with the ends, or the form with substance – an official, high-level delegation to Beijing may help reassure Chinese leaders of the Labour leadership’s openness to conversations, yet is insufficient in convincing sceptics that it is high time for Britain to substantive re-engage China.
Starmer has made clear that he views himself as a foreign policy pragmatist – especially on China. Working-level conversations between diplomats and technocrats have yielded modest fruits – with 600 million GBP-worth of agreements signed in the 2025 UK-China Economic and Financial Strategy Dialogue. The real proof of the pudding, however, lies in whether a major positive can come out of the leader-to-leader talks.
This is where global governance comes into the picture as a strategic bridge – more specifically, Beijing and London may find mutual benefits in pursuing deeper cooperation over some of the most pressing challenges afflicting the world in the status quo.
Both Starmer and his predecessor, Rishi Sunak, have made AI governance and safety a core component of the UK’s global soft power push. Sunak oversaw the convening of the AI Safety Summit at the Bletchley Park in 2023, advocating “identifying AI safety risks of shared concern” and co-hosting the subsequent year’s summit in 2024. Starmer has pledged to ensure that the UK can win “the global race of our lives”, whilst acknowledging concerns over privacy, security, and job displacement.
On the other hand, the Chinese state launched the Global AI Governance Initiative (GAIGI) – a set of proclaimed tenets undergirding Beijing’s vision of responsible AI management and safety. Whilst much of the initiative’s contents remain “dexterous[ly] ambiguous”, as I have argued elsewhere, it does appear that Beijing would invest heavily into at least the rhetorical and symbolic scaffolding for a vision that it could claim as its own – on how AI should be developed, distributed, and managed across vast swathes of the world.
Indeed, more recently, Beijing has proposed the establishment of a World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) – a multilateral institution that also doubles up as an implicit rebuking of the approach adopted by leading American conglomerates on AI development. It remains to be seen as to how much teeth and actual impact WAICO has, though its very creation could well present a window for Sino-British engagement – especially between ethicists, lawyers, and technocrats who may find themselves agreeing over domains that must remain off limits to AI decision-making.
Another area of shared concern consists of climate change. At the Brazil COP30 summit this year, Starmer lambasted voices who suggested “tackling climate change can wait” – he framed the development of renewable energy a matter of “energy security”, and tacitly criticised the unilateralism of countries such as the US, when it came to shirking their responsibilities over combating climate change.
Climate change also features prominently in China’s Global Governance Initiative (GGI) – as one amongst the numerous key categories of actions subsumed under the amorphously termed banner term of “global governance”. From the “Two Mountains” to “ecological civilisation”, these plentiful political terms, extensively invoked by the incumbent Chinese administration, speak to the fact that the state views its track record on climate change as a source of both pride and credibility on the global stage.
Going forward, beyond navigating the fine balance between optimising the costs and vitality of renewables supply chains and weaning off excess dependence upon China, the Starmer administration should actively explore domains in which China and the UK can work together on the climate – for instance, in co-sponsoring and -backing climate change initiatives in third countries, e.g. Indonesia, Mexico, or South Africa.
Higher education institutions as critical bridge-builders?
As Oxford Vice-Chancellor Professor Irene Tracey put it in her address at Peking University – which had just awarded her an honorary Doctorate – “soft diplomacy is what universities offer alongside education and research”. With some of the world’s most exceptional and profound higher education institutions, as well as a highly concentrated pool of human capital, the UK is well-placed to be the origin of not just hard, technical knowledge, but also norms, rituals, and best practices on the fronts of global governance.
It thus behooves policymakers in London to tap into the enduring ties between leading UK universities and their counterparts, to engage in the benign exporting of the British worldview on challenges ranging from artificial intelligence to climate change, from food crises to pandemics. The prerequisite, however, is that the higher education sector must remain as immune from overt politicisation as possible – as Jinghan Zeng advocated in his recently published memoirs.
At times like these, more – not fewer – academic exchanges and partnerships are crucially needed. This should not and need not come at the expense of the upholding of reasonable national security interests.
The future of Sino-British relations can be better and brighter. What is needed here, however, is much more than mere bravado.
