(Bloomberg) -- Foreign Secretary David Lammy plans to travel to China next week as the UK’s new Labour government seeks to improve ties with the world’s second biggest economy after a period in which Covid, clashes over Hong Kong, and allegations of Chinese hacking damaged the relationship.
Britain’s top diplomatic envoy will travel to Beijing to meet with Chinese officials and also to Shanghai to speak with executives of UK companies operating in China, according to a person familiar with the matter. The trip will last two days, said the person, who asked not to be identified as details of the visit are still being ironed out.
Lammy’s visit will be only the second by a UK foreign secretary in six years, following the Conservative James Cleverly’s trip last year which had similar aims. Before that, there had been a five-year hiatus in visits at such a senior level.
Labour — elected to power in July on a landslide — is seeking to steady relations with China with an overall aim to cooperate with the Asian power where possible, such as on trade and climate change, while also ensuring it can challenge China on issues such as human rights. Government officials say this would mark a break from the last Conservative administration which they accuse of being inconsistent in its approach.
Lammy’s planned trip next week was earlier reported by Reuters. Bloomberg reported in August that the foreign secretary was considering such a visit.
The UK foreign office declined to comment, while China’s Foreign Ministry said there was “no information available at this time” regarding a visit, while adding that the country has a “positive and open” attitude toward strengthening bilateral ties with Britain.
“A stable and mutually beneficial China-UK relationship serves the fundamental interests of the two peoples,” the ministry said in the statement.
Relations are still a far cry from the “golden era” in bilateral ties promised by former Prime Minister David Cameron nine years ago. The Covid-19 pandemic, China’s crackdown on democracy activists in Hong Kong and accusations that Chinese hackers targeted politicians and voter data — denied by Beijing — have all weighed on the relationship. The last UK government also restricted Chinese involvement in critical national infrastructure.
While in opposition, Lammy himself laid out his approach to China in a speech to Chatham House in January last year, promising a “complete audit” of the relationship based on a strategy of what he called three Cs: Challenge, compete and, where possible, cooperate.
That would involve being “strong on national security” and “standing firm on human rights,” Lammy said. It would also entail “engaging where it is in our interests to do so - on climate change, on trade and on global health,” he said.
However in his speech to the Labour Party’s annual conference last month, the foreign secretary made just one passing reference to “an increasingly assertive China” in a section dealing with the current “disorder” in the world.
Lammy already met Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi on the sidelines of the ASEAN foreign ministers meeting in Laos in July, where he raised human rights, Hong Kong, sanctioned parliamentarians and the case of Jimmy Lai as well as setting out the government’s long-term approach to the bilateral relationship.
China’s vice premier He Lifeng and UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves discussed how they can work together on economic growth and the clean energy transition during a phone call last month, according to a British official. Following the exchange, Beijing said it was willing to restart the China-UK economic and financial dialog, which had been on pause since 2019.
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