Will David Lammy’s trip to Beijing fix the UK’s China problem?

The foreign secretary’s unexpectedly early visit risks exposing the limits of the UK’s influence on the world stage, writes Mary Dejevsky

For the first Labour government in 14 years, the home front quickly turned problematic, what with street riots in the first month and the supposed shock-horror discovery of a huge hole in the public finances. On the foreign front, however, Sir Keir Starmer arrived in power with something of a golden ticket – at least compared with his immediate predecessors.

He had barely entered No 10 than he was whisked to Washington for the 75th anniversary Nato summit, followed a week later by the European Political Community gathering at Blenheim Palace, where he was host. Here were two perfect get-to-know-the-allies, get-to-know-the-neighbours events, with the bonus of a one-on-one meeting with the US president, without having to appear the supplicant.

This stellar debut was not all that Starmer and his government had going for them in foreign relations. They had come to office without the taint – as seen by many Europeans and to an extent also the United States – of responsibility for Brexit, and with sufficient time having passed for the EU to be open to some degree of normalisation. Starmer knew better than to try anything that would smack of reversing Brexit, but a limited rapprochement designed to smooth the cross-border movement of goods, if not people, could be deemed in the interests of both sides.

Starmer was fortunate also in inheriting total cross-party agreement on one of the most urgent foreign policy issues of the day – the war in Ukraine – and shared impotence on the other: relations with Israel and the multiple conflicts in the Middle East. Labour, what is more, has such a sweeping majority in the House of Commons that its own dissidents on Israel are easily outnumbered. Fervent calls for a ceasefire were the most anyone could really do.

Starmer faced a bit of a spat about returning the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, but it quickly blew over, in part because the objections came mostly from the opposition benches and in part because the agreement put the UK on the right side of international court judgments and chimed with the de-colonising spirit of Labour and of the times.

For all these reasons, then, foreign policy really should not have been a problem for the new UK government – at least not so soon. Suddenly, though, it is – the trigger being the visit of David Lammy, the foreign secretary, to Beijing.

Now, it should be noted that this is the foreign secretary. Had it been the prime minister getting on the plane to Beijing, that would have sent a whole different order of signals.

But a foreign secretary visit is still a big deal so early in the new government’s term. And it seems somehow ill-timed, given the many outstanding issues between our two countries – as Rishi Sunak, who is proving a more adept politician and Commons performer in the twilight of his party leadership than he ever was as prime minister, delighted in pointing out. During a forensic interrogation at Prime Minister’s Questions, Sunak left Starmer searching his notes for an adequate response to an opposition leader who seemed better informed than he was on the UK’s security precautions vis-a-vis China.

Sunak’s point was that measures his government had put in place appeared to have been delayed or sidelined by the new government. These measures, it could also be argued, took on new relevance, following last week’s annual update from the director general of MI5 – who, even as he stressed the threats from Russia and Iran, noted multiple efforts by China to steal data and information.

This is only one of the very many issues between the UK and China, however. At the top of the list might be the repression of civil liberties and especially free speech in Hong Kong, as exemplified in the detention and trial of the businessman, democracy campaigner and publisher, Jimmy Lai. As a British citizen, Lai could reasonably expect vocal support from the Foreign Office, but his family and his lawyer say the only recent UK foreign secretary to have received them was Lord David Cameron.

Then there is China’s increasingly assertive conduct towards Taiwan, exemplified in military exercises only this week, described by Beijing as “punishment” for a pledge of resistance by Taiwan’s president. The exercises included shows of naval and air power encircling the island.

A further issue, on which MPs of all parties have made a stand, is the repression of Uyghurs in their home region of Xinjiang. Tracking where Uyghur forced labour may have featured in the supply chain of goods sold in Britain and then imposing a ban, however, remains more easily said than done.

Now it might be said that the plethora of differences and disputes that have piled up between the UK and China makes the case for a high-level visit. But that presupposes that the new government is clear as to its objectives and how to achieve them – and, as Starmer’s discomfort in the Commons showed, this is far from evident.

As in much else, the government is in a bind of its own making. On the one hand, it wants to capitalise on its freedom from EU regulation to conclude trade deals and attract foreign investment – as per this week’s investment summit. On the other, it wants to uphold ethical standards and protect national security. Because of its size and its political system, China encapsulates how difficult that can be.

Beijing could also be forgiven for some confusion about the UK’s intentions. In the space of 10 years, it has heard George Osborne tell the Shanghai Stock Exchange that the UK and China were on the threshold of a “golden decade”. Enter, only a year later, Theresa May, fresh from the Home Office, bearing all sorts of concerns about Chinese money and expertise in UK infrastructure, from nuclear power to telecoms to university research. Some was stopped, and some wasn’t.

Now along come Starmer and Lammy, espousing a doctrine of “progressive realism”, (set out by Lammy in anticipation of becoming foreign secretary), which, as applied to China, bears more than a passing resemblance to Johnsonian “cake-ism”. The idea seems to be that we can have trade and investment on our terms, because China likes trade as much as we do; that we can berate China for its “behaviour” (and it will listen), and that, even if it doesn’t, it is so big and becoming so globally important that we can’t ignore it, so compromises will be made.

Now, I have sympathy with the need to deal with China (and not just China) as it is, rather than as we would wish it to be. But the government’s approach so far seems to reflect an inflated sense of the UK’s capacity to influence others, including countries, such as China, that have been largely impervious to outside influence for many a year. An instructive parallel might be with the recent – failed – Starmer-Lammy mission to persuade the US to allow Ukraine to fire Western missiles deep into Russia.

Among the welcome shifts made by the present government on foreign relations have been an acceptance of the UK as a medium-sized power and the need to listen more and preach less. It is not apparent, however, that Starmer has yet reached an honest understanding of the UK’s place in the world or of the leverage it can, and cannot, exert. David Lammy’s premature China trip risks laying this deficiency bare.