london
—
The unremarkable office next to an Amazon warehouse on an industrial estate in Oxfordshire, southern England, has long been a key line of defense in Britain’s national security. The office, known as ‘The Cell’, allows the British government to closely monitor the operations of Chinese tech giant Huawei as it builds the UK’s mobile network.
The Cell, owned by Huawei but staffed by British cybersecurity experts with the highest security clearances, was tasked, at Huawei’s expense, with checking all hardware and software for strings of code that could be exploited for malicious purposes.
But in the end, the unusual deal did not allay Britain’s wariness about how the Chinese government might use Huawei equipment. After a decade of allowing Huawei to establish a footprint in the country, the UK government announced in 2020 that it would ban Huawei from the country’s 5G network after a parliamentary inquiry that year concluded there was “clear evidence of collusion” between Huawei and the “Chinese Communist Party apparatus.” The company’s 5G equipment already installed will need to be removed by next year.
‘The Cell’ now stands as a monument to the difficult trade-offs Britain faces in navigating its relationship with China. Britain is struggling to balance the intelligence community’s security concerns with the private sector’s desire for cheap technology and the government’s hopes of boosting the economy.
Analysts and former diplomats told CNN that successive British governments have failed to strike the right balance toward China, resulting in policies characterized by mistrust, laxity and incoherence.
The issue of Britain’s relationship with China has become more pressing as US President Donald Trump upends the US-led world order, and some Western allies seek to diversify their trading partners and reduce their dependence on the US. Prime Minister Keir Starmer will become the first British leader in eight years to visit China on Wednesday, as more Britons question the value of their much-vaunted “special relationship” with Washington.
In an interview with Bloomberg News ahead of his departure, Mr Starmer said he was under no obligation to “choose” between relations with the US and China. Britain will maintain a “close relationship” with the United States on business and security, but Mr Starmer said it would be “unwise to sit back and ignore China”. He said the visit could present “significant opportunities” for British businesses.
A Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson said Mr Starmer’s visit offered Beijing an “opportunity to strengthen mutual trust” with the UK and could “open a new chapter in the health and stable development of UK-China relations”.
Starmer’s visit comes a week after Britain gave the green light to China’s plans to build a “giant” embassy near London’s financial district. The decision was delayed for several months over concerns from lawmakers that the vast complex, located near fiber-optic cables carrying sensitive data for financial companies, could pose a security risk.
Although British intelligence did not issue a specific warning about the embassy, it has long warned of the threat posed by China more broadly.
Ken McCullum, head of domestic intelligence agency MI5, said in October: “Do Chinese state actors present a national security threat to the UK? The answer is, of course, they do every day.” The 2023 review described China as a “groundbreaking challenge” to the UK.
Despite these concerns, Starmer’s Labor government came to power with a pledge to put the UK-China relationship on stronger footing. In its 2024 manifesto, Labor pledged to end “14 years of Tory Party toxic contradictions on China” and instead offer a “long-term, strategic approach to managing our relationship”. To this end, the government commissioned an audit of what it called “the most complex bilateral relationship.”
When the audit was finally revealed, later than expected, MPs were left in the dark about key details of the UK’s approach to China.
“The vast majority of the audit is carried out in the strictest confidence and most of the details cannot be made public without harming the national interest,” then-Foreign Affairs Minister David Lamy told parliament in June.
The result is an “omerta” policy, meaning a code of silence, said Charles Parton, a former British diplomat who worked on China issues for more than 20 years.
“If you want to have a good strategy that people understand and lead them in the same direction, people need to know what your strategy is, and they’re not making it clear,” Parton told CNN.
He said the trade-off remains puzzling, saying, “There are four things they are balancing: national security, economic prosperity, environmental concerns, and public opinion and Congressional opinion, which they declare to be their top priorities. There will never be cheers from all four sides.”
But Britain once thought it could have it all. Since 2010, Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and his Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne have fiercely courted Beijing, placing what has since been dubbed a geopolitical “bet on China.”
Osborne, who regularly visited Beijing, sought to position London’s financial district as a gateway for Chinese money to Europe and helped secure investment in a British nuclear power plant. By 2015, ahead of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s state visit to the UK, Prime Minister David Cameron declared a “golden era” for relations with China. During the visit, the prime minister offered Xi a pint at a 16th-century pub near Mr Xi’s official country villa in Buckinghamshire, west of London.
However, things soon began to unravel. Mr Osborne’s hopes of making London the clearinghouse for Europe’s renminbi were dashed in 2016 with the UK’s vote to leave the European Union. The Chinese government’s 10-year Made in China 2025 project, which aims to reduce China’s dependence on foreign technology and make it a global high-tech leader, has also slowed British exports to China.
China’s increasing crackdown on Hong Kong further strained relations, with then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson urging Britain to offer citizenship to up to 3 million residents of the former colony, which was returned to China in 1997.
By 2020, some trends began to reverse. Johnson announced a ban on Huawei in July of the same year, initially approving the use of its own equipment. In 2023, China stopped funding one of its nuclear power plants that had begun construction.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Starmer acknowledged that Britain has been “throwing cold and cold” at China for years. “We had a golden age and then we moved into an ice age. We reject that binary choice.”
George Magnus of Oxford University’s China Center said that looking at the relationship over the past decade, Mr Osborne’s “bet on China” had “clearly” not paid off.
Mr Magnus said the bet “opened the door wide open to dependence on China” in terms of now-suspended nuclear financing, real estate, Chinese financial influence in the City of London, and “China’s interference in academia, business and government institutions”.
“So what is it for? There is little in terms of trade or economic benefits for the UK,” he said. “I would like to call this period, at least for Britain, the ‘Golden Age of Fools.'”
But the United States’ growing unpredictability in imposing high tariffs on allies is prompting Starmer and other Western leaders to turn to China again. French President Emmanuel Macron visited Beijing in December, and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney visited Beijing earlier this month. After Mr. Starmer’s visit this week, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is scheduled to visit in February.
The British public may also be starting to become more tolerant of China. A YouGov poll this month found that 27% of Brits see China as a “friend and ally” or a “friendly rival”, up from 19% in October.
Meanwhile, trust in the United States is declining. According to YouGov, almost as many Brits (23%) think the US is the main threat to the UK, following President Trump’s recent threats against Greenland.
While a tentative bias toward China is understandable, Parton, a former diplomat, called for thinking more clearly about the supposed economic benefits of a closer relationship with China. MPs often tout China as Britain’s “third largest trading partner”, but Ms Parton said that was of little importance to the economic growth Britain desperately needed. Instead, he said the focus should be on Britain’s exports to China, which have long been in decline.
China will record the world’s largest trade surplus, exceeding $1.2 trillion in 2025, and there is growing concern among countries that the flood of Chinese products could further hollow out domestic industries.
Ms Parton said the UK should not cap in on China and Mr Starmer should refuse to be pushed. He pointed out that British exports to China increased in 2012, despite Beijing’s outrage over the exiled Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader Dalai Lama’s visit to the UK that year, and that exports fell during what was thought to be a “golden age”. “When you think about it, don’t you see that politics is actually not that important for trade?” he asked.
Oxford University’s Magnus also cautioned that while China may be a more predictable partner than the US at the moment, that does not mean it is a more reliable partner.
“How can they (the Chinese Communist Party) be trusted other than to pursue their own interests?” he said. “This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t trade, but it does mean you shouldn’t be naive.”
