(Bloomberg) -- Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi said his country’s ties with the UK “stand at a new starting point,” in the clearest signal yet that Beijing is eager for a thaw after the Labour Party’s return to power in London — even as both sides still clash over security and human rights issues.
Wang made the remarks as he welcomed his British counterpart David Lammy to Beijing on Friday. The UK foreign secretary called the talks “constructive” on areas ranging from “pragmatic cooperation to issues of contention.”
Lammy’s two-day visit — starting with a bilateral meeting and dinner with Yi before heading to Shanghai to meet British business leaders — is only the second by a UK foreign secretary in six years, after Conservative James Cleverly’s last year. Clashes over Hong Kong and allegations of Chinese hacking of British institutions had led to a five-year hiatus in top-level exchanges.
According to the UK side’s readout of their meeting, Lammy urged Yi to investigate and prevent Chinese companies from supplying Russia’s military operation in Ukraine, and the envoy also raised concerns about human rights in Xinjiang, the implementation of the national security law in Hong Kong, and called for the release of British national Jimmy Lai.
Meanwhile, China called Taiwan and Hong Kong internal affairs, and said “non-interference in internal affairs is a basic norm for international relations.”
Still, Yi also said China agrees to fully resume its dialog with the UK across various sectors and both ministers agreed to deepen cooperation on green energy, trade, science, technology, health and development.
While Lammy pointed out the two sides had “different perspectives” in certain areas, the UK’s new Labour government intends to resume an economic and financial dialog that was paused in 2019, Bloomberg reported earlier.
The UK is moving ahead with the rapprochement, despite only now beginning to work on an “audit” of ties with Beijing. China was the UK’s sixth-biggest individual trading partner after Ireland as of March, according to the Office for National Statistics, with an annual value of almost £87 billion ($114 billion).
But Lammy’s visit comes at an awkward time for the UK. China continues to retain close ties with Russia despite its ongoing war against Ukraine, and Beijing this week ordered its second major military drills around Taiwan since President Lai Ching-te took office in May. Bloomberg reported this week that senior UK ministers have been informed of widespread and likely successful efforts by Chinese state actors to access its critical infrastructure networks.
“Neither of us has an interest in escalation or greater instability as fellow permanent members of the UN Security Council,” Lammy told his counterpart. “We hold special obligations to the global community to show the world that diplomacy can and does work, to show that countries such as ours with different histories and outlooks still find pragmatic solutions to complex challenges and to show that problems are not insurmountable.”
--With assistance from Colum Murphy and Foster Wong.
(Updates with readouts from the meeting throughout.)
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