Trump warns Britain on China ties as Starmer hails reset.
Trump warns UK over China ties as Starmer praises reset. Starmer has moved Britain closer to China as Trump continues to threaten and destabilize.
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| Trump warns Britain on China ties as Starmer hails reset |
Tonight, are we seeing the world order rewritten? Good night to a special program from Beijing on the world order and whether the younger stepson’s visit here is part of a much larger global shift.
Karamama becomes the latest foreign leader to build trade and trust with China in the name of mutual benefit. Beijing seems to have won the argument for maintaining differences on human rights and geopolitics,
while laying the foundation for a pragmatic relationship based on economics and a shared belief in a rules-based world order. For some, of course, like Canadian leader Mark Carney, that world leader is already in the world order because major powers around the world are dismantling him,
not least Donald Trump, whose tariff wars, regional threats, and military action have gone hand in hand with trashing post-war institutions and treaties.
So, is Britain being pushed into seeking new relationships? Has Trump made China great again, you might say? I’m in Brussels, where the EU is caught between an untrustworthy America.
and an increasingly dominant China. And I’m in Washington, D.C., where the Trump administration is reacting to traditional allies looking east and turning to China.
The last British leader here was Theresa May eight years ago. Much has changed since then. Britain has seen Chinese spying scandals and alleged cyberattacks.
China’s alignment with Russia through the invasion of Ukraine. Then came Donald Trump and his dismantling of old alliances. And despite the economic boom in Britain,
Sakhar Stallmer thought it was time to move on from these dark days of disagreement. He already is.
He is trying to sell the trip as a mutual success in business terms, with British citizens now able to visit China without a visa.
This is our political editor, Gary Gibbon. The generation of the security state here is long. The drumbeat of a sunset curfew means medieval gates and huts must be closed to the outside world.
Today’s surveillance state is a high-tech, often brutal successor, but karma has decided that Britain cannot afford to keep China at arm's length.
Chinese state media said Kama was hoping for Beijing’s economic development. Figures. His host, President Xi, was warm in his opening remarks,
praising Cama for rejecting the icy relationship pursued by recent Tory governments and referring to those volatile times, without naming Donald Trump.
Over the years, China-UK relations have gone through some twists and turns. This has not served the interests of both our countries. At present, the world is fluid and turbulent.
In the past, Labour governments have played a significant role in promoting China-UK relations. You have said publicly that China is an opportunity and that dealing with the Chinese is not a choice but a necessity.
I appreciate those words. As you said, this is the first visit by our UK Prime Minister in eight years. In my mind, it has gone too far.
I look forward to taking our relationship further, focusing on delivering development and security for the UK. My only complaint is that the visit is too short.
Karma boasted that his meeting with President Xi lasted longer than planned, lasting about 3 hours in total, and yielded real results in the national interest.
He said that human rights issues, such as the upcoming sentencing of British businessman Jimmy Lai in Hong Kong, were raised. For example, how forcefully did you raise issues such as the jailing of pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai?
Well, we raised those issues as you would expect.
Um, part of the rationale for engagement is to make sure that we can both take advantage of the opportunities available, which we have, but also have a serious conversation about the issues.
that we disagree on. Was he listening to that? Do you think so? Um, yes, we had a respectful discussion about that. The Chinese Premier introduced Karma to the guard of honour. This is a serious shift in the UK’s stance on China.
The government has decided that China’s industrial-scale espionage, its cyberattacks, and its support for Russia through the
Ukraine conflict and more should not be an obstacle to improving economic relations. No 10 said there were already tangible benefits from the new approach,
including 30-day visa-free travel to China for British visitors, bringing the UK into line with countries that have maintained ties with China, such as France and Germany.
And we’ve made some really good progress on the whisky tariff, um, on visa-free travel to China, and on information sharing and cooperation, on irregular migration.
In the eight years since Theresa May arrived in Beijing, the global order has been shaken. New-age costume cults have taken hold of visitors to the Forbidden City.
President Trump’s attacks on the international order have made a number of governments think they need to toe the line.
Beijing and President Xi are trying their best to seize the moment, urging long-time US allies to exercise more autonomy.
Prime Minister, what is your impression of President Xi? Is he someone you can do business with? Yes, we had a very productive session,
But despite the warming relationship, doing business will not lead to the massive infrastructure investment from China that the UK has been begging for.
The economic benefits may not seem as historic as Kstarma would like, but right now, he will take anything that tickles the stubbornly sticky economic dial. Okay,
A little earlier. Gary, join in here. Gary, um, the Prime Minister says he raised the Jimmy Lies and human rights, but I mean, how firmly?
Absolutely, uh, it has been very clearly established with China for a while. If you want to expand economic relations with China, you don't go down the path of making a lot of noise about human rights.
You turn down the volume a little bit. And there have been people who have tried to play it both ways. Get economic engagement, come here and sit in the room and say, "
What about Sue and Sukes and the rest?" And what the Chinese do in the room is say, "Oh, well, you want to talk about that?" And they keep burning all the time
Who was available to you in the room to discuss this issue and punish you like that? What we know about Kearstalmer is
that he now proudly calls himself a British pragmatist all the time. He doesn't want to go down that path. He wants to keep talking about things,
But he is willing to adjust the volume. And I think that's what he did in the room today with President Xi and others. Now the Chinese are also pointing at Trump.
and saying that we are the people who are keeping the world order. Where do we think Karma is now in the world order, and where is it going? Well, we had an interview with Kama at Chequers last week.
and asked him exactly that. Where was he on the spectrum of leaders? If Mark Carney was at the front and had in fact more or less abandoned the old world order, where was Karma?
And you got the very strong impression that he was at the other end of that spectrum. He still desperately wants to cling to the idea that the US and the intelligence, defence, and other sectors.
have a special relationship that will be very familiar even after Donald Trump. But there are already people in Vital who are apparently starting to get a frightful amount of him.
The task of looking into the crystal ball that imagines Britain without that relationship. And one of the things he often goes around saying is that it will take decades to unravel.
Gary Gibbon was speaking to me earlier. Now, President Xi has described the world we live in as turbulent and fluid. But China’s economy is growing steadily,
seeking to dominate all the key technologies of the 21st century. So how does Britain understand this growing power? Here’s our economics correspondent, Helia Ebrahimi.
Let’s look at the bigger picture, the race for global supremacy in the US with President Trump on one side, countries like the US in the middle, and President Xi on the other. Well, the US
economy is still the largest in the world, at $28 trillion. You have China in second place with $18 trillion and the UK in sixth place with just under $4 trillion.
And when it comes to defence, the US remains the biggest spender. But here’s the rub, because that $300 billion goes a long way in China.
It has allowed President Xi to build 234 warships, creating the world’s largest navy. China has been very clear that it wants to dominate the industrial world,
especially in new technologies like AI and quantum computing, with the clean energy and rare earths that they need. And in many of those areas, like green energy
In robotics, China is already ahead. And one of the numbers that American tech bosses are looking at is how much money is being spent on research and development.
And you can see how close China is to catching up. Of the 74 key technologies where the US used to dominate, China now leads in 66 of them.
In the real world, this shows up in the number of new inventions. Look at the patent applications. Virtually zero. And now, suddenly, China is at 1.8 million.
That’s a huge swing. Now China’s edge holds great appeal, but it’s a relationship that has brought risks as well as opportunities. There has been a wave of Chinese investment in the UK,
including some of the country’s biggest pub chains, a Premier League football club, and some of London’s most recognisable skyscrapers.
But the real money has been in critical infrastructure, nuclear power, battery storage, and clean energy. But this is also where the controversy has arisen. The 2020 decision to exclude Chinese tech giant Huawei from our 5G mobile network at the behest of the Americans revealed the challenge of finding solutions on the Chinese side. Currently, the head of Huawei UK, Manat, is one of Britain’s leading industrialists.
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