Starmer Arrives in China, Promising to Make ‘Real Progress’ With Xi Jinping
The British leader’s trip to China comes after several weeks of tension with Trump.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer arrives for a three-day visit in Beijing on Jan. 28, 2026.
UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer arrived in China on Jan. 28 for a three-day visit, a week after his government approved plans for a controversial new Chinese embassy in London.
Starmer, who is traveling with more than 50 representatives of UK businesses, will meet with Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Chinese Premier Li Qiang on Jan. 29, before talks in Shanghai with local officials on Jan. 30.
“It doesn’t make sense to stick our head in the ground and bury it in the sand when it comes to China; it’s in our interests to engage,” Starmer told reporters aboard the plane to Beijing. “It’s going to be a really important trip for us, and we'll make some real progress.”
The most recent meeting between a British prime minister and Xi was in 2018, when Theresa May visited Beijing.
Starmer said he believes he can improve trade ties with China without harming the UK’s relationship with the United States.
“The relationship we have with the U.S. is one of the closest relationships we hold, on defense, security, intelligence, and also on trade and lots of areas,” Starmer told reporters.
Writing in an opinion piece published in The Times of London on Jan. 27, China’s ambassador to the UK, Zheng Zeguang, said the UK and China should “seek common ground while managing differences.”
“It is a fact that China and the UK do not see eye-to-eye on every issue,” Zheng wrote. “The right approach to addressing these differences is to engage in rational dialogue, and look for solutions in the spirit of mutual respect and pragmatism.”
China is the world’s second-largest economy and a major trading partner for the UK, but there has been a shift in the relationship in recent years amid a growing awareness of the security threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
Espionage Operations
In September 2025, prosecutors dropped the charges against two British men, one of them a former Conservative Party parliamentary researcher, who had been accused of spying for China.
In the wake of the trial’s collapse, the Crown Prosecution Service sought to clarify with Starmer’s deputy national security adviser, Matt Collins, whether China was considered by the UK government to be a hostile state or an enemy.
On Oct. 15, 2025, Collins’s witness statements were published and revealed details of CCP espionage operations in the UK.
Protesters outside a proposed site for a new Chinese Embassy in London on Jan. 17, 2026.
In his August 2025 statement, Collins said, “The Chinese intelligence services are highly capable and conduct large-scale espionage operations against the UK to advance the Chinese state’s interests and harm the interests and security of the UK.”
The leader of the UK Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch, said on Oct. 16, 2025, that Starmer “doesn’t have the backbone to stand up to Beijing.”
Starmer had said that his government was not responsible for the collapse of the trial and sought to blame the previous Conservative government, which lost power in the July 2024 election.
In November 2025, Iain Duncan Smith, a former leader of the UK Conservative Party, who was sanctioned by China in 2021 after he highlighted the repression of Uyghurs in Xinjiang, told The Epoch Times that the new Chinese embassy at Royal Mint Court would have room for “200 extra spies” and would increase the CCP’s capacity for transnational repression.
On Jan. 20, the UK government granted planning permission for the new embassy.
In a letter, the UK’s domestic intelligence agency, MI5, said security risks linked to the new embassy could not be fully eliminated but could be managed, and it said the new embassy would replace seven different diplomatically accredited Chinese sites across London and that “this consolidation should bring clear security advantages.”
UK Tensions With Trump
Starmer’s trip to China comes after several weeks of tension with U.S. President Donald Trump over the issue of Greenland. The UK was among those threatened with U.S. tariffs.
The British prime minister also described remarks made by Trump that non-U.S. countries in NATO had been absent from the front line in Afghanistan as “insulting” and “appalling.”
The UK lost 457 military personnel as a result of operations in Afghanistan between September 2001 and August 2021, according to the Ministry of Defence.
A member of the British armed forces 16 Air Assault Brigade who returned from helping with operations to evacuate people from Kabul airport in Afghanistan walks to the air terminal after disembarking a RAF Voyager aircraft at RAF Brize Norton, Oxfordshire, England, on Aug. 28, 2021. Alastair Grant/PA
Last week, Trump threatened to impose a 100 percent tariff on Canadian goods if its prime minister, Mark Carney, were to make an unspecified deal with China.
Carney responded in a speech in Davos, Switzerland. Without naming the United States, Carney said such powers are using “economic integration as a weapon, and tariffs as leverage.”
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