LONDON — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney left Beijing and promptly declared the U.S.-led “world order” broken. Don’t expect his British counterpart to do the same.

Keir Starmer will land in the Chinese capital Wednesday for the first visit by a U.K. prime minister since 2018. By meeting President Xi Jinping, he will end what he has called an “ice age” under the previous Conservative administration, and try to win deals that he can sell to voters as a boost to Britain’s sputtering economy.

Starmer is one of a queue of leaders flocking to the world’s second-largest economy, including France’s Emmanuel Macron in December and Germany’s Friedrich Merz next month. Like Carney did in Davos last week, the British PM has warned the world is the most unstable it has been for a generation.

Yet unlike Carney, Starmer is desperate not to paint this as a rupture from the U.S. — and to avoid the criticism Trump unleashed on Carney in recent days over his dealings with China. The U.K. PM is trying to ride three horses at once, staying friendly — or at least engaging — with Washington D.C., Brussels and Beijing. 

It is his “three-body problem,” joked a senior Westminster figure who has long worked on British-China relations.

POLITICO spoke to 22 current and former officials, MPs, diplomats, industry figures and China experts, most of whom were granted anonymity to speak frankly. They painted a picture of a leader walking the same tightrope he always has surrounded by grim choices — from tricky post-Brexit negotiations with the EU, to Donald Trump taking potshots at British policies and freezing talks on a U.K.-U.S. tech deal.

Starmer wants his (long-planned) visit to China to secure growth, but be cautious enough not to compromise national security or enrage Trump. He appears neither to have ramped up engagement with Beijing in response to Trump, nor reduced it amid criticism of China’s espionage and human rights record.

In short, he doesn’t want any drama.

“Starmer is more managerial. He wants to keep the U.K.’s relationships with big powers steady,” said one person familiar with planning for the trip. “You can’t really imagine him doing a Carney or a Macron and using the trip to set out a big geopolitical vision.”

An official in 10 Downing Street added: “He’s clear that it is in the U.K.’s interests to have a relationship with the world’s second biggest economy. While the U.S. is our closest ally, he rejects the suggestion that means you can’t have pragmatic dealings with China.”

He will be hoping Trump — whose own China visit is planned for April — sees it that way too.

Bring out the cavalry

Starmer has one word in his mind for this trip — growth, which was just 0.1 percent in the three months to September.

The prime minister will be flanked by executives from City giants HSBC, Standard Chartered, Schroders and the London Stock Exchange Group; pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca; car manufacturer Jaguar Land Rover; energy provider Octopus; and Brompton, the folding bicycle manufacturer.

The priority in Downing Street will be bringing back “a sellable headline,” said the person familiar with trip planning quoted above. The economy is the overwhelming focus. While officials discussed trying to secure a political win, such as China lifting sanctions it imposed on British parliamentarians in 2021, one U.K. official said they now believe this to be unlikely.

Between them, five people familiar with the trip’s planning predicted a large number of deals, dialogues and memorandums of understanding — but largely in areas with the fewest national security concerns.

These are likely to include joint work on medical, health and life sciences, cooperation on climate science, and work to highlight Mandarin language schemes, the people said. 

Officials are also working on the mutual recognition of professional qualifications and visa-free travel for short stays, while firms have been pushing for more expansive banking and insurance licences for British companies operating in China. The U.K. is meanwhile likely to try to persuade Beijing to lower import tariffs on Scotch whisky, which doubled in February 2025.

A former U.K. official who was involved in Britain’s last prime ministerial visit to China, by Theresa May in 2018, predicted all deals will already be “either 100 or 99 percent agreed, in the system, and No. 10 will already have a firm number in its head that it can announce.”

Threading the needle

Yet all five people agreed there is unlikely to be a deal on heavy energy infrastructure, including wind turbine technology, that could leave Britain vulnerable to China. The U.K. has still not decided whether to let Ming Yang, a Chinese firm, invest £1.5 billion in a wind farm off the coast of Scotland.

And while Carney agreed to ease tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles (EVs), three of the five people familiar with the trip’s planning said that any deep co-operation on EV technology is likely to be off the table. One of them predicted: “This won’t be another Canada moment. I don’t see us opening the floodgates on EVs.”

Britain is trying to stick to “amber and green areas” for any deals, said the first person familiar with the planning. The second of the five people said: “I think they‘re going for the soft, slightly lovey stuff.”

Britain has good reason to be reluctant, as Chinese-affiliated groups have long been accused of hacking and espionage, including against MPs and Britain’s Electoral Commission. Westminster was gripped by headlines in December about a collapsed case against two men who had been accused of spying for China. Chinese firm Huawei was banned from helping build the U.K.’s 5G phone network in 2020 after pressure from Trump.

Even now, Britain’s security agencies are working on mitigations to telecommunications cables near the Tower of London. They pass close to the boundary of China’s proposed embassy, which won planning approval last week.

Andrew Small, director of the Asia Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think tank working on foreign and security policy, said: “The current debate about how to ‘safely’ increase China’s role in U.K. green energy supplies — especially through wind power — has serious echoes of 5G all over again, and is a bigger concern on the U.S. side than the embassy decision.” 

Starmer and his team also “don’t want to antagonize the Americans” ahead of Trump’s own visit in April, said the third of the five people familiar with trip planning. “They’re on eggshells … if they announce a new dialogue on United Nations policy or whatever bullshit they can come up with, any of those could be interpreted as a broadside to the Trump administration.”

All these factors mean Starmer’s path to a “win” is narrow. Tahlia Peterson, a fellow working on China at Chatham House, the international affairs think tank, said: “Starmer isn’t going to ‘reset’ the relationship in one visit or unlock large-scale Chinese investment into Britain’s core infrastructure.”

Small said foreign firms are being squeezed out of the Chinese market and Xi is “weaponizing” the dependency on Chinese supply chains. He added: “Beijing will likely offer extremely minor concessions in areas such as financial services, [amounting to] no more than a rounding error in economic scale.”

Chancellor Rachel Reeves knows the pain of this. Britain’s top finance minister was mocked when she returned with just £600 million of agreements from her visit to China a year ago. One former Tory minister said the figure was a “deliberate insult” by China.

Even once the big win is in the bag, there is the danger of it falling apart on arrival. Carney announced Canada and China would expand visa-free travel, only for Beijing’s ambassador to Ottawa to say that the move was not yet official.

Despite this, businesses have been keen on Starmer’s re-engagement. 

Rain Newton-Smith, director-general of the Confederation of British Industry, said firms are concerned about the dependence on Chinese rare earths but added: “If you map supply chains from anywhere, the idea that you can decouple from China is impossible. It’s about how that trade can be facilitated in the best way.”

Embassy row

Even if Starmer gets his wins, this visit will bring controversies that (critics say) show the asymmetry in Britain’s relationship with China. A tale of two embassies serves as a good metaphor. 

Britain finally approved plans last week for China’s new outpost in London, despite a long row over national security. China held off formally confirming Starmer’s visit until the London embassy decision was finalized, the first person familiar with planning for the trip said. (Others point out Starmer would not want to go until the issue was resolved.)

The result was a scramble in which executives were only formally invited a week before take-off.

And Britain has not yet received approval to renovate its own embassy in Beijing. Officials privately refer to the building as “falling down,” while one person who has visited said construction materials were piled up against walls. It is “crumbling,” added another U.K. official: “The walls have got cracks on them, the wallpaper’s peeling off, it’s got damp patches.”

British officials refused to give any impression of a “quid pro quo” for the two projects under the U.K.’s semi-judicial planning system. But that means much of Whitehall still does not know if Britain’s embassy revamp in Beijing will be approved, or held back until China’s project in London undergoes a further review in the courts. U.K. officials are privately pressing their Chinese counterparts to give the green light.

One of the people keenest on a breakthrough will be Britain’s new ambassador to Beijing Peter Wilson, a career diplomat described by people who have met him as “outstanding,” “super smart” and “very friendly.” 

For Wilson, hosting Starmer will be one of his trickiest jobs yet.

The everyday precautions when doing business in China have made preparations for this trip more intense. Government officials and corporate executives are bringing secure devices and will have been briefed on the risk of eavesdropping and honeytraps.

One member of Theresa May’s 2018 delegation to China recalled opening the door of what they thought was their vehicle, only to see several people with headsets on, listening carefully and typing. They compared it to a scene in a spy film.

Activists and MPs will put Starmer under pressure to raise human rights issues — including what campaigners say is a genocide against the Uyghur people in Xinjiang province — on a trip governed by strict protocol where one stray word can derail a deal. 

Pro-democracy publisher Jimmy Lai, who has British nationality, is facing sentencing in Hong Kong imminently for national security offenses. During the PM’s last meeting with Xi in 2024, Chinese officials bundled British journalists out of the room when he raised the case. Campaigners had thought Lai’s sentencing could take place this week.

All these factors mean tension in the British state — which has faced a tussle between “securocrats” and departments pushing for growth — has been high ahead of the trip. Government comments on China are workshopped carefully before publication.

Earlier this month, Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper told POLITICO her work on Beijing involves looking at “transnational repression” and “espionage threats.”

But when Chancellor Rachel Reeves met China’s Finance Minister He Lifeng in Davos last week to tee up Starmer’s visit, the U.K. Treasury did not publicize the meeting — beyond a little-noticed photo on its Flickr account.

Slow boat to China

Whatever the controversies, Labour’s China stance has been steadily taking shape since before Starmer took office in 2024.

Labour drew inspiration from its sister party in Australia and the U.S. Democrats, both of which had regular meetings with Beijing. Party aides argued that after a brief “golden era” under Conservative PM David Cameron, Britain engaged less with China than with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The result of Labour’s thinking was the policy of “three Cs” — “challenge, compete, and cooperate.”

A procession of visits to Beijing followed, most notably Reeves last year, culminating in Starmer’s trip. His National Security Adviser Jonathan Powell was involved in planning across much of 2025, even travelling to meet China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, in November.

Starmer teed up this week’s visit with a December speech arguing the “binary” view of China had persisted for too long. He promised to engage with Beijing carefully while taking a “more transactional approach to pretty well everything.” 

The result was that this visit has long been locked in; just as Labour aides argue the London embassy decision was set in train in 2018, when the Tory government gave diplomatic consent for the site.

Labour ministers “just want to normalize” the fact of dealing with China, said the senior Westminster figure quoted above. Newton-Smith added: “I think the view is that the government’s engagement with eyes wide open is the right strategy. And under the previous government, we did lose out.”

But for each person who praises the re-engagement, there are others who say it has left Britain vulnerable while begging for scraps at China’s table. Hawks argue the hard details behind the “three Cs” were long nebulous, while Labour’s long-awaited “audit” of U.K.-China relations was delayed before being folded briefly into a wider security document.

“Every single bad decision now can be traced back to the first six months,” argued the third person familiar with planning quoted above. “They were absolutely ill-prepared and made a series of decisions that have boxed them into a corner.” They added: “The government lacks the killer instinct to deal with China. It’s not in their DNA.”

Luke de Pulford, a human rights campaigner and director of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, argued the Tories had engaged with China — Foreign Secretary James Cleverly visited in 2023 — and Labour was simply going much further.

“China is pursuing an enterprise to reshape the global order in its own image, and to that end, to change our institutions and way of life to the extent that they’re an obstacle to it,” he said. “That’s what they’re up to — and we keep falling for it.”

End of the old order?

His language may be less dramatic, but Starmer’s visit to China does have some parallels with Canada. Carney’s trip was the first by a Canadian PM since 2017, and he and Xi agreed a “new strategic partnership.”

Later at Davos, the Canadian PM talked of “the end of a pleasant fiction” and warned multilateral institutions such as the United Nations are under threat.

One British industry figure who attended Davos said of Carney’s speech: “It was great. Everyone was talking about it. Someone said to me that was the best and most poignant speech they’d ever seen at the World Economic Forum. That may be a little overblown, but I guess most of the speeches at the WEF are quite dull.”

The language used by Starmer, a former human rights lawyer devoted to multilateralism, has not been totally dissimilar. Britain could no longer “look only to international institutions to uphold our values and interests,” he said in December. “We must do it ourselves through deals and alliances.”

But while some in the U.K. government privately agree with Carney’s point, the real difference is the two men’s approach to Trump.

Starmer will temper his messaging carefully to avoid upsetting either his Chinese hosts or the U.S., even as Trump throws semi-regular rocks at Britain.

To Peterson, this is unavoidable. “China, the U.S. and the EU are likely to continue to dominate global economic growth for the foreseeable future,” she said. “Starmer’s choice is not whether to engage, but how.”

Esther Webber contributed reporting.