The front page of China’s foreign ministry website features a large rotating photo gallery of Xi Jinping’s latest diplomatic triumphs. The first image currently shows the Chinese leader shaking hands with Keir Starmer in front of a vast bronze artwork inside the Great Hall of the People in Beijing. Then Xi is shaking hands with Finland’s prime minister Petteri Orpo in front of the same artwork. Then Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney. Xi maintains the same blank, inscrutable expression in every picture, only the flags and the faces of his interlocutors change.
The cumulative impression is of a succession of beleaguered Western powers, disoriented by the sudden adversarial turn of the United States under Donald Trump, beating a collective path to the comparatively predictable authoritarianism of China under Xi. He treats them each to a similar lecture about the great turbulence now shaking the world in the form of “unilateralism, protectionism, and power politics,” as he put it to Starmer, clearly alluding to Trump, and the consequent need to work together to build a “more just and equitable global governance system.”
“International law is only truly effective when all countries abide by it, and major powers, in particular, must take the lead,” Xi informed the British prime minister. “Otherwise, they will regress to a jungle-like world.” This sentiment would be more convincing if Xi wasn’t currently backing Vladimir Putin’s war on Ukraine, ramping up military drills around Taiwan, and presiding over the most concerted purge of China’s military leadership since the era of Mao Zedong.
Still, with the British economy and Starmer’s premiership in a parlous state, the prime minister was never likely to correct the record. Instead, he praised his “very warm and constructive” talks with Xi, which he hoped would lead to a “more sophisticated” relationship between the UK and China. In the short term, he said this meant making progress on reducing Chinese tariffs on whisky, securing visa-free travel to China for UK citizens, and co-operating to reduce the supply of Chinese-made boat engines to people-smuggling gangs operating in Europe.
Later, addressing business leaders in the Great Hall of the People, Starmer turned to the cliched story about a group of blind men confronting an elephant that he said Xi had offered as a parable of the western approach to China. “One touches the leg and thinks it’s a pillow, another feels the belly and think it’s a wall,” Starmer explained. “Too often this reflects how China is seen.” Instead, the UK saw the “whole elephant” and would engage accordingly. In practical terms, this appears to mean drumming up business deals in China while bringing up human rights concerns in private and traveling with burner phones, such is the acknowledged risk of Chinese espionage.
This suits Xi fine. At the same time that he is consolidating his personal power at home, he is depicted in Chinese Communist Party (CCP) controlled media outlets as a distinguished global statesman who is reclaiming China’s rightful place in the world. The main evening news programme on CCTV on 29 January, for instance, featured an 18-minute montage of Xi hosting Starmer. People’s Daily, the CCP’s flagship newspaper, commended the “steady improvement” of China-UK relations as Starmer adopted an approach of “pragmatic realism” and recognised that for the UK, “especially post-Brexit, strategic isolation from one of the world’s most dynamic and influential economies is no longer an option.”
Indeed, Beijing has reason to celebrate. Where previously the talk in Europe was about “de-risking” from China, prompted by concerted pressure from the US and concerns about vulnerabilities for national security from Chinese technology and investment in critical industries, now there is increasing focus on “de-risking” from the US. Starmer is just the latest in a long line of European leaders attempting to hedge his county’s bets by deepening engagement with China. The French president Emmanuel Macron met Xi in Beijing in December. Germany’s chancellor Friedrich Merz is expected to make his first visit to China next month.
Xi wants more from these visits than merely gladhanding and grandstanding on the geopolitical tumult emanating from the US. China’s economic growth remains dependent on finding markets abroad for its exports to compensate for weak consumer spending at home and the fall out from the country’s ongoing property market crisis. Despite what Chinese officials have called the “severe and complex” external trade environment exacerbated by Trump’s tariff regime, China reported a record trade surplus last year. When Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, visited Beijing earlier this month, he agreed a deal to allow 49,000 Chinese electric vehicles into the Canadian market at drastically reduced tariffs in return for reduced Chinese tariffs on Canadian agricultural exports.
The UK will have to grapple with similar questions about how to reckon with China’s burgeoning EV manufacturing sector and whether to embrace the use of more Chinese renewable energy technology, such as wind turbines, which promise to lower short-term costs and help meet carbon emissions targets, but at the risk of throttling Europe’s own clean-tech industrial base and ensuring long-term dependence on China. The “whole elephant” of Starmer’s analogy is a formidable, complicated colossus.
So it is no wonder Xi is so keen to parade the growing list of European suitors and long-running American allies, such as the leaders of Canada and South Korea, who are all now taking their turn to queue up for the requisite photo call inside the Great Hall of the People. With Trump in power, not just voluntarily ceding US leadership of the previous international order, but actively menacing his supposed allies, Xi is only too happy to try to capitalise on the chaos and present himself, however disingenuously, as the more reliable alternative. America’s wholly self-inflicted loss is China’s gain.
[Further reading: Britain needs its own foreign policy, not America’s]
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