THE UK WILL TODAY start to try to rebuild its relationship with China, following years of backing US-led hostility and political interference.

New British prime minister Sir Keir Starmer will meet Chinese leader Xi Jinping at the G20 summit in Brazil today.

“We are both global players, global powers, both permanent members of the security council and of the G20,” Starmer told the press. “China’s economy is obviously the second biggest in the world. It’s one of our biggest trading partners and therefore I will be having serious, pragmatic discussions with the president when I meet him.”

TROUBLEMAKERS

The last meeting between the countries’ leaders was Theresa May’s visit to China in 2018.

However, later that year, Hong Kong obeyed a G-7 legal recommendation to table an extradition amendment. The US then used it as a “flashpoint” to launch a hybrid warfare disinformation operation. It funded street protests using activist groups long-financed by the National Endowment for Democracy, a regime-change unit, and other specialist interference operators.

The efforts of these US political interference units were backed by UK’s 77th Brigade psychological operations group in the creation of an entirely false narrative.

But the US-UK operation failed in its aim, which was to cause the PLA to step in.

MORE FAILURES

So the US and UK instead dubbed Beijing’s passing of a relatively mild anti-collusion “national security” law for Hong Kong in June 2020 as an outrage that would cause the populace to flee.

Again the ploy failed. The populace pointedly did not flee.

Early the following year, 2021, the UK went live with a British passport scheme, designed, as law professor Grenville Cross said, “to harm Hong Kong”.

But again it failed. Fully 97 per cent of eligible Hong Kong people ignored it, preferring to stay in the city. But this did not prevent the creative western mainstream media presenting the three per cent who did sign up for the scheme as a massive exodus “fleeing oppression”.

(Since then, a significant proportion of the three per cent have returned to Hong Kong.)

JUST POLITE

Xi Jinping will be polite at the meeting with Starmer, as is his wont. But the Chinese leader knows that he has all the cards.

First, China remains in growth mode in multiple areas, while Britain is struggling financially with huge problems, particularly in productivity, in the transition to clean energy, and in other areas.

Second, the Chinese will not forget Britain’s very active role in America’s political interference games. The west has lost any moral high ground it had with China.

And third, China sees the British as a very small nation (not even one per cent of humanity) with its once outsize influence in steady decline. The downward direction is not going to reverse.

The world is in transition, and both Starmer and Xi know it.

Yet the UK will continue to try to patch things up. UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves is expected to visit China in the New Year.

[published in fridayeveryday .com]




Lai See(利是)

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