The trade secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, will travel to Beijing to revive a key trade dialogue with China months after saying it had been naive to allow Chinese investment in sensitive sectors, the Guardian has learnt.
Reynolds is scheduled to travel to China later this year for high-level talks in an effort to boost bilateral trade and investment.
His trip is intended to restart the UK-China joint economic and trade commission (Jetco), which has not met since 2018 when relations began deteriorating after Beijing’s crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong.
In documents published after Rachel Reeves’ trip to China in January, the Treasury set out its intention to revive the talks.
The government is also planning to conclude its cross-Whitehall audit of UK-China relations by June, although the results will not be published in full.
The audit fulfils a Labour manifesto commitment and is expected to make a number of policy recommendations, including a call to improve expertise on China within government. This could include Mandarin language programmes, and training for civil servants and parliamentarians about the Chinese system. The Foreign Office declined to comment.
Reynolds’s trip will raise eyebrows after he said on Sunday that the UK had “got it wrong in the past” and Conservative governments had been “far too naive” about allowing Chinese investment in sensitive industries such as steel.
The government has also come under pressure to take a tougher stance towards Beijing over human rights and security concerns. In an article for the Guardian on Tuesday Wera Hobhouse, a Liberal Democrat MP who was refused entry to Hong Kong to visit her grandchild last week, said that “until we get a clear answer for why I was deported, no government minister should be visiting China on official business”.
Hobhouse said she believed she was denied entry “because of my role as a British parliamentarian, and one who has levelled criticism at Beijing for its human rights abuses”.
Ministers seized control of British Steel’s Scunthorpe steelmaking plant from its Chinese owners, Jingye, on Saturday amid a rapid deterioration in relations with the company’s executives. Some inside the government suspect Jingye’s actions may have been intended to stop Britain producing its own virgin steel and force it to rely on imports from China.
“You’ve got to be clear about what is the sort of sector where actually we can promote and cooperate and ones, frankly, where we can’t,” Reynolds told Sky News’ Trevor Phillips on Sunday. “I wouldn’t personally bring a Chinese company into our steel sector.”
He argued that even privately owned firms had direct links to the Chinese Communist party,
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said “a lot of UK-Chinese trade is in non-contentious areas” such as agriculture, life sciences and the automotive sector.
He appeared to moderate his comments about the steel industry on Tuesday, telling broadcasters that he would look at Chinese firms “in a different way” without ruling out their involvement completely.
Reynolds’s planned trip is a signal that the government does not intend to row back on its rapprochement with Beijing. Keir Starmer is also expected to visit China later this year.
Asked in October whether the UK would revive the Jetco, Reynolds said he was “certainly open to having a conversation” about it. Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak both drew up plans to do so while they were in office.
The Guardian revealed this week that ministers were considering targeting parts of the Chinese state under new foreign influence rules.
