Britain seeks trade with China without triggering Trump’s fury

But Starmer, the first British prime minister to visit China since 2018, will have to navigate an increasingly fraught space between two global superpowers.

His trip comes just days after President Donald Trump threatened to impose a 100% tariff on Canada if the country’s prime minister, Mark Carney, made a trade deal with China. There is no indication that Canada and China are discussing a broad economic agreement, but Carney agreed to lower tariffs on some Chinese electric vehicles on a visit this month with Xi Jinping, China’s top leader.

“If Governor Carney thinks he is going to make Canada a ‘Drop Off Port’ for China to send goods and products into the United States, he is sorely mistaken,” Trump wrote on social media, calling Carney “governor” in a reference to his repeated threats to annex Canada and make it the 51st U.S. state.

For China’s leadership, Starmer’s visit gives Beijing an opportunity to court another staunch U.S. ally alienated by the Trump administration. Chancellor Rachel Reeves, Britain’s most senior finance official, and Peter Kyle, the country’s trade secretary, are accompanying Starmer on his trip, along with several of the country’s top financial services CEOs.

When Theresa May, the last British prime minister to visit China, went there in 2018, she vowed to cement what her predecessors had dubbed a “golden era” of Chinese-British relations.

For Starmer, however, meeting with Xi is risky. The political consensus in much of Britain has turned decidedly against China, with growing concerns over national security and human rights, and deep anger about the dumping of cheap Chinese products on global markets.

Starmer suffered blowback when prosecutors dropped a case in September against two British nationals accused of spying for China, and when his government last week approved a controversial Chinese mega-embassy in central London.

Critics, including the Trump administration, say the embassy will allow China to conduct widespread spying. Starmer’s visit was partly contingent on British approval of the embassy, according to Chinese analysts and Chinese state media.

Those tensions between economic and national security interests are at the heart of Starmer’s trip.

“We labor under these misapprehensions that we’re going to be able to get a lot of money quick, that it’s going to enable the government to tell a good news story about the economy, which they desperately need,” said Luke de Pulford, the executive director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, an international group of lawmakers that pushes for a more critical view of the Chinese government.

“You can understand the political imperatives,” he said, “but the longer-term resilience, health, national security of the U.K. is at stake.”

Starmer is not the only leader who has taken the risk of triggering Trump’s ire by trekking to Beijing.

António Costa, the president of the European Council, and Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, met with Xi in July at the Great Hall of the People. French President Emmanuel Macron was welcomed in China last month with a red carpet and an honor guard. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is expected to go in February.

So far, Trump has lashed out directly only at Carney, who warned in a recent speech of a “rupture” in the world order because of the superpower competition between the United States and China.

“Every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great-power rivalry,” Carney said in Davos, Switzerland last week. He added: “The middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

If Starmer is looking to hedge against an increasingly mercurial Washington, Beijing will be more than willing to oblige — but on its terms.

“I don’t think China is trying to drive a wedge between the United States and its allies,” said Kerry Brown, a professor of Chinese studies at King’s College London. “Mr. Trump is managing that very nicely on his own and needs no help from Beijing. But China is an opportunist, and if there are some favorable winds coming its way because of how everyone else is feeling about America now, then they will take these.”

China will likely expect Britain to welcome more Chinese investment and exports, Brown said. It will also want to depoliticize a bilateral relationship that has been dominated for years by security and human rights issues and by the status of Hong Kong, he added.

One area of friction is the fate of Jimmy Lai, the former Hong Kong media tycoon who was convicted in December of national security crimes, and who has become a symbol of the erosion of freedoms in the former British colony. Lai, a British citizen, is expected to be sentenced in the coming weeks and faces up to life in prison. Starmer has called for Lai’s release. Beijing has dismissed such calls as “blatant interference” in its internal affairs.

Yvette Cooper, Britain’s foreign secretary, is not joining Starmer on his trip to China, suggesting that political issues are taking a back seat to the desire for economic investments. One British official, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, said such issues would be raised but would not be a focus of the trip.

Opening Britain’s market to Chinese firms and depoliticizing its relationship with China would signal growing cracks in the U.S.-led alliance that had previously worked to restrain China but that has been shaken by Trump’s threats to seize Greenland and by his vows to punish those who oppose the move. (The president has since backed off both threats, but worries remain.)

In contrast, China has been casting itself as a stable and reliable power. Beijing argues that the United States is trying to return the world to the “law of the jungle” in which big powers bully weaker ones simply because they can — although China has few reservations about exerting its own leverage over smaller nations.

Analysts in China, noting that Starmer has made economic growth a top priority, say that British companies want greater access to the Chinese market and that British consumers need affordable Chinese technologies such as electric vehicles, solar panels and wind turbines.

“This visit signifies a restart of China-U.K. relations under a new situation,” said Wu Xinbo, the dean at the Institute of International Studies at Fudan University in Shanghai. “Both sides hope, through this visit, to confirm the positioning and development path” so that bilateral relations can “reach a new high point.”