When Keir Starmer meets Xi Jinping in Beijing at the end of January, becoming the first UK prime minister to visit China in eight years, the two could exchange notes on their respective domestic power struggles. Xi has just purged his top general Zhang Youxia, a 75-year-old combat veteran who was previously considered his closest military ally. Zhang stands accused, alongside another general, of having “trampled on” Xi’s authority and thus “severely undermined the party’s absolute leadership over the military”.
Starmer, who saw off Andy Burnham’s attempt to return to Westminster via Gorton and Denton less than 24 hours after the investigation into Zhang was revealed, knows a thing or two about having his leadership undermined and his remaining authority trampled. Of course, the factional struggles inside the Labour Party have a long way to go to reach the exalted levels of the Chinese Communist Party. But Zhang’s downfall should serve as a reminder about the nature of the political system he is dealing with, and that he will not find easy answers in Beijing.
In November, Starmer’s national security adviser, Jonathan Powell, had a preparatory meeting with China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, in which they both praised the importance of UK-China relations. (Wang resumed the role in 2023 after the previous foreign minister, Qin Gang, disappeared; Qin eventually resurfaced in a conspicuously junior role.) “In a turbulent and rapidly changing world,” Wang told Powell, the two countries should “strengthen necessary coordination”. Expect similar bromides to emerge from this week’s exchanges as Chinese officials seek to position themselves as the stable, responsible alternative to the volatility emanating from the US under Donald Trump. Starmer will presumably be determined to channel Canada’s PM, Mark Carney, who travelled to Beijing on 14 January, and show that the UK also has options beyond Washington.
But China is driving that turbulence, too. Xi likes to say that the world is currently undergoing “great changes unseen in a century”, telling Vladimir Putin in 2023, one year into Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine, that they were “driving these changes together”. Without Beijing’s economic support, Putin would have long since been forced to abandon his war. Xi is also presiding over the fastest military build-up in recent history, while at the same time carrying out China’s most extraordinary purge of military leadership since the days of Mao Zedong. Zhang is just the latest casualty of a crackdown that has targeted all but one of the six top officials serving on the Central Military Commission under Xi. While rumours swirl about the precise nature of the allegations against Zhang, the overall objective of the purge seems to be to produce a military that demonstrates absolute loyalty to Xi, who is said to have ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready to seize Taiwan by 2027.
On the economic front, Beijing has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to coerce trading partners and exploit supply chain dependencies, such as China’s chokehold over the processing of rare earth elements and dominance in renewable energy technology. For the UK, now outside the European Union and beyond the protections of the common market and its “trade bazooka”, the prospect of finding much leverage to push back in that relationship looks tenuous.
Before Starmer had set foot in China there were accusations that he was “kowtowing” to Beijing. By approving the new Chinese “mega embassy” in London, which was widely understood as a necessary condition for this visit – albeit a decision that is subject to judicial review – and packing his plane with British CEOs, the Chancellor and Business Secretary, but not the Foreign Secretary, the PM risks looking desperate for business deals with China. His government’s handling of allegations of Chinese espionage targeting parliament last year was described by the former British diplomat Charles Parton as a “masterclass in ineptitude”. The government completed its much anticipated “China audit” in June 2025, but then decided not to publish it, perhaps for fear of antagonising Beijing and jeopardising trade. Starmer has been saying since 2024 that it is a government priority to secure the release of Jimmy Lai, the 78-year-old British publisher imprisoned in Hong Kong, but he has yet to agree to meet Lai’s family. These actions do not signal strength.
This diffidence is not new. Successive UK governments have tried and mostly failed to evince a coherent China policy that reckons with both the country’s formidable economic clout and the national security threat it poses, lurching between the naivety of the “golden age”, proclaimed by David Cameron, and what Starmer has called the “ice age” that followed. He has an opportunity to set out a new approach. Trump is providing daily justification for the UK to hedge its bets, while Carney has shown that it is possible to emerge from Beijing with new trade commitments and your dignity intact. To succeed, the Prime Minister must avoid looking like a supplicant at the court of Xi and incurring the wrath of Trump. There are no economic miracles on offer in Beijing. But Starmer’s strategy of keeping his head down has gotten him nowhere. Neither Xi nor Trump respect weakness. Perhaps it is time to try standing up.
[Further reading: Europe has a lot to learn from Mark Carney]
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This article appears in the 28 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, How we escape Trump
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Subscribe here to commentChina will eventually replace Japan in car making so should be encouraged to build factories in Britain to service the millions of us who will be driving EVs. Local manufacturing will also replace the assembly lines for most iPhones and media paraphernalia so why not offer an already trained workforce, as the Irish did, for much of the European market. Courage, mes infants, we are not yet ready to capitulate our leadership in technology.