Starmer is walking straight into Xi’s trap
If Britain becomes dependent on China’s clean tech, it will give Beijing the power to disrupt – or paralyse – our entire economy
You might think that British exports to China must be rising strongly, reflecting that country’s vertiginous ascent to become the world’s second-largest economy. Alas, the figures point in a sharply different direction. Total UK sales to China slumped by 27 per cent between 2022 and 2024. Goods exports fell by fully 40 per cent over the same period.
The longer-term picture of British trade with China is not much better. Go back a decade to 2014 and China bought 3.7 per cent of UK exports, slightly higher than the figure for 2024.
So China is a comparatively small – and declining – market for British exports. If Sir Keir believes that he might yet strike gold in this stubbornly unrewarding rainbow, he will almost certainly be disappointed.
None of this is accidental: Britain’s failure to crack the market reflects the success of Xi’s “made in China” policy, designed to ensure that his country produces everything for itself. That strategy raises a vital question for the rest of the world. How can you trade successfully with a gigantic country whose ultimate goal is to buy nothing from you?
The only reason China imports anything from Britain today is so that it can work out how to make that item more competitively – and then export it tomorrow, while never buying it from the UK again. How can mutually beneficial trade ever be possible on those terms? Hence the balance is already vastly in China’s favour, with exports to Britain totalling £71bn in 2024, yielding a trade surplus for Beijing of £39bn.
China’s global trade surplus, meanwhile, reached an extraordinary $1.2tn (£900bn) in 2025, reflecting Xi’s iron determination, backed by export subsidies and the full weight of state policy, to dominate key industries and wipe out foreign competitors wherever they may be. Does Sir Keir believe that Britain might gain by going along with this predatory strategy?
China’s near-total mastery of the supply chains and technology for the Prime Minister’s other priority – renewable energy – shows how Xi has succeeded in carving out a dominant position. In one respect, Sir Keir is right: if Britain is serious about achieving net zero, this can only be done by decarbonising transport and electricity generation. That, in turn, will require the UK to hugely increase its dependence on Chinese-made solar panels, Chinese-made electric vehicles and wind turbines stuffed with Chinese components.
All of the above would rely on a constant flow of maintenance and updates from China, giving Xi colossal leverage over Britain for the simple reason that he would hold the power to disrupt – or perhaps paralyse – our entire economy and society. Wind turbines, though often assembled in Europe, are controlled by Chinese-made cellular modules, which provide the vital connections to adjust the settings and blade angles.
“They have to be updated on a regular basis,” says Charles Parton, a senior associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute think tank. “You could, if you wish, put [in] malware.”
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When Sir Tony Blair paid his last visit to China as Prime Minister, he claimed to be witnessing “an unstoppable momentum towards greater political freedom”. Sir Keir Starmer will doubtless avoid the heady optimism of his predecessor when he travels to Beijing today.
The Prime Minister knows that his host, President Xi Jinping, has stopped the unstoppable and become China’s most repressive leader since Mao Zedong, incarcerating millions of people from the Uyghur minority in a new gulag archipelago and imposing a draconian national security law on Hong Kong.
That measure violated a solemn treaty between China and Britain, designed to guarantee Hong Kong’s autonomy and protect its people from exactly this danger. Given Xi’s proven willingness to break a bilateral agreement – suggesting that China cannot be trusted to keep any deal – why is Sir Keir going to Beijing at all?
“Just sticking your head in the sand and ignoring China, when it’s the second-biggest economy in the world and there are business opportunities, wouldn’t be sensible,” was Sir Keir’s answer in a Bloomberg interview. So this is nothing to do with grand strategy or carving out a new role for Britain as a middle power in a world without rules. Plans for this trip were laid months ago, before the latest Greenland crisis and Donald Trump’s fulminations at Davos.
Instead, Sir Keir’s approach towards China is guided overwhelmingly by domestic imperatives. Put simply, he wants to spur economic growth and achieve net zero – and he thinks that China is essential for both priorities. In reality, he is wrong about the first and right about the second, though with potentially calamitous consequences.
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