An Anglo-Sino relations reset

Friday 30 January 2026

Keir Starmer’s visit to Beijing on 29 January 2026 is being sold in Westminster as a thaw after an eight-year frost: not a conversion to Chinese governance, nor a romantic notion of ‘global Britain’ revived, but a hard-edged attempt to secure growth, reduce friction for exporters and rebuild a working diplomatic channel with the world’s second-largest economy. 

That framing matters because Anglo-Sino relations have, in recent years, been conducted in an atmosphere of permanent suspicion. The United Kingdom has worried about espionage, interference and strategic dependence. China has resented what she perceives as lectures on human rights, British criticism over Hong Kong and the steady tightening of investment scrutiny. The result has been a familiar European condition: trade continuing by inertia, diplomacy conducted in half-closed rooms and every new headline treated as a test of loyalty to either Washington or Beijing. Starmer’s wager is that he can do something more British: resume relations without pretending away the arguments.

A reset built around services rather than sentiment

The clearest signal from Beijing is practical. China has agreed that British citizens may travel visa-free for stays of under 30 days. It is easy to dismiss visa policy as a tourist matter, but it is, in truth, a services policy. It reduces the cost of doing business for small and medium-sized firms, eases last-minute client visits and makes it simpler for universities, cultural institutions and professional bodies to maintain the human contact that contracts require.

Alongside this London and Beijing are to begin a feasibility study towards a bilateral services agreement, a piece of machinery that, if it becomes real, would be more consequential than any single investment announcement. Goods trade between Britain and China is politically noisy and strategically sensitive. Services trade is politically quieter and, for Britain, structurally more valuable. The United Kingdom already exports substantial services to China, and the government is explicitly pitching the trip as a way to expand British opportunities in sectors where she retains global advantages: finance, law, education, skills and parts of healthcare. 

This is the doctrine of renewal by competence. Britain is not going to out-manufacture China, but she can sell what she reliably produces: trusted contracts, dispute resolution, higher education, insurance, asset management and specialised engineering and design. The prize is not merely higher exports but a more diversified growth strategy at a time when her domestic economy is sluggish and her alliances are under strain. 

Tangible benefits, not merely warm words

A reset is only credible if it can point to objects you can count, sign or bank. On that score, the visit has already produced several tangible outcomes.

Visa-free travel for Britons is the simplest, most immediately felt change. It should lift tourism, but the more durable effect is to lower transaction costs for business.  British exporters of consultancy, creative services and specialist manufacturing often lose out not because their product is inferior, but because friction eats margin. Visas are friction.

Tariffs on Scotch whisky are another visible deliverable. Reports following Starmer’s talks indicate that China will reduce tariffs, framed domestically as a direct boost to a flagship British export industry. Whisky is a cultural product as much as a commodity: it supports rural employment, visitor economies and branding that spills over into other ‘Made in Britain’ goods. In the small arithmetic of politics, a tariff cut is the kind of headline a government can carry back to Scotland without needing a seminar on geopolitics.

Then there is the mixture of commercial diplomacy and corporate strategy, exemplified by AstraZeneca’s announcement of a very large China investment programme through 2030, made to coincide with the visit. It is not an investment into Britain, but it is not irrelevant to Britain either. A British-headquartered life sciences champion that expands profitably abroad can sustain research budgets, headquarters functions, dividends, pension holdings and tax receipts at home. The government has been keen to frame such deals as supportive of British jobs and trade, even if the factories being built are in China. 

Finally there is an area rarely associated with Anglo-Sino cooperation, but politically potent in Britain: border security. Downing Street has presented a new UK–China border security agreement focused on disrupting the supply of small boat parts and engines and intensifying cooperation against organised smuggling and synthetic drugs. It is a reminder that, for all the rhetoric about values, modern diplomacy is often a barter of problems. China, whose factories make a great deal of the world’s small marine machinery, can assist with supply-chain disruption if she chooses. Britain, in return, signals that she is prepared to treat China as a state with which one can do business, not merely a rival to be denounced from a distance.

The strategic logic: de-risking without decoupling

There is an older British habit at work here: balancing. Not the theatrical balance of power of the nineteenth century, but the contemporary version: keeping alliances intact whilst refusing to outsource every national decision to the strategic mood of another capital.

Starmer’s China policy is being cast as ‘clear-eyed’ engagement. The phrase is a cliché because it describes a difficult truth. Britain cannot ignore China, because China is too large, too enmeshed in global supply chains and too central to the technologies that will define the next decades. Yet Britain also cannot be naïve, because Chinese state power is not simply the backdrop to Chinese commerce: it is often woven into it.

Hence the likely shape of renewal: more ministerial contact, more commercial access where the risk is tolerable, and tighter boundaries around the sectors where dependence becomes dangerous. A services-focused agenda fits this logic neatly. Advising, teaching and arbitrating are harder to use as tools of geopolitical conflict than port infrastructure or telecommunications backbones. The danger, of course, is that services exposure can still create leverage: universities can become financially dependent, law firms can self-censor to keep clients and financial institutions can build books whose fragility invites political pressure. The task for London is to take the gain without surrendering the capacity to say no.

The price of renewal: arguments do not vanish

It is equally important to notice what did not change in Beijing.

Human rights issues did not evaporate, even if they were not allowed to dominate the visit. Reporting indicates that Starmer raised matters such as Jimmy Lai (an imprisoned democracy activist) and the persecution of Uyghurs, and those concerns will continue to shadow any rapprochement. The domestic political risk for Labour is that ‘pragmatism’ comes to look like silence, and silence comes to look like complicity. The risk for China is that she mistakes British politeness for British acquiescence and then reacts with fury when Parliament, the press or civil society proves that it is not.

National security will be the other permanent quarrel. A warmer diplomatic tone does not repeal the laws of intelligence. If China continues to be seen as a source of interference or espionage, British countermeasures will persist regardless of the number of photo opportunities.

So renewal is best understood as a return to managed competition. It is not friendship. It is not submission. It is a decision that Britain will argue with China in person, not only about China in public.

What Britain can reasonably hope to gain

If the visit is more than theatre, the tangible benefits for the United Kingdom should fall into five baskets.

First, lower friction for travel and deal-making, beginning with the visa-free regime and the knock-on effects for business services, tourism and academic exchange. 

Secondly, export wins in politically resonant sectors, such as whisky, where tariff reductions can be translated into jobs and tax receipts without complex explanation. 

Thirdly, the groundwork for a deeper services relationship, if the feasibility study develops into rules that reduce market barriers for British finance, law, education and professional services. 

Fourthly, cooperation on specific domestic priorities, including border security measures aimed at disrupting the supply chains used by people smugglers and intensifying work against synthetic drugs. 

Fifthly, a stabilised diplomatic channel that reduces the likelihood of sudden crises spiralling out of control. Even adversaries benefit from a telephone line that is answered. This is less glamorous than tariffs or visas but it is often the most valuable outcome of all.

The measure of success

The danger for any government is to mistake activity for achievement. A state visit can be a performance, and performances are seductive. The real test will be what remains in six months: whether firms actually travel more, whether services exports rise, whether promised studies become agreements, whether border cooperation produces measurable disruption and whether Britain retains the confidence to set limits when Chinese interests collide with her own.

In that sense the renewal of Anglo-Sino relations is not a moment but a method. It is Britain returning to the work she does best when she is at her most serious: trading with rivals, speaking carefully, protecting what matters and, when necessary, disagreeing without theatrics.