Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain will leave on Tuesday for a high-stakes visit to China, seeking new trade and investment from the world’s second-largest economy as relations between the United States and its Western allies grow increasingly volatile.
Mr. Starmer took office 18 months ago with a promise to improve relations with China, and British officials hope that his three-day, finance-focused mission to Beijing and Shanghai will result in deals that can spur Britain’s lagging economy — and his Labour Party’s dismal standing — into recovery.
But Mr. 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 Trump threatened to impose a 100 percent 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 Mr. 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,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media, calling Mr. Carney ”governor” in a reference to his repeated threats to annex Canada and make it the 51st U.S. state.
For China’s leadership, Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. Starmer, however, meeting with Mr. 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.
Mr. Starmer suffered blowback when prosecutors dropped a case last 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. Mr. 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 Mr. 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.”
Mr. Starmer is not the only leader who has taken the risk of triggering Mr. 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 Mr. Xi in July at the Great Hall of the People. President Emmanuel Macron of France was welcomed in China last month with a red carpet and an honor guard. Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany is expected to go in February.
So far, Mr. Trump has lashed out directly only at Mr. 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,” Mr. 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 Mr. 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, Mr. 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. Mr. Lai, a British citizen, is expected to be sentenced in the coming weeks and faces up to life in prison. Mr. Starmer has called for Mr. Lai’s release. Beijing has dismissed such calls as “blatant interference” in its internal affairs.
Yvette Cooper, Britain’s foreign secretary, is not joining Mr. 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 Mr. 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 Mr. 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 like 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.”
Berry Wang contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
Michael D. Shear is a senior Times correspondent covering British politics and culture, and diplomacy around the world.
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