By Farah Master, Colleen Howe and Liz Lee
HONG KONG/BEIJING, January 30 (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s visit to China is the latest victory Beijing can score in its rivalry with Washington, but the deals it brings back to London also show the limits of the balancing act the middle powers can try to play.
He follows Canadian counterpart Mark Carney, who struck a trade deal in a similar visit weeks ago, before heading to Davos to herald a new global trade order as US President Donald Trump strains long-standing ties with allies.
European leaders have also visited, as have India’s Narendra Modi and others since Trump began his second term a year ago, but it is less clear what tangible long-term economic and security benefits such visits would yield for Western powers.
“Traditional allies of the United States feel uneasy and are now hedging their bets, but they are far from being able or willing to substitute China for the United States,” said John Quelch, an expert in global strategy at Duke Kunshan University.
From the perspective of London, Ottawa and other Western capitals, the visits show Trump that alternatives exist if he keeps pressure on issues from Greenland to renegotiate the USMCA trade agreement among the United States, Canada and Mexico.
But these are “superficial gestures amid stalled global growth,” said Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief Asia-Pacific economist at Natixis.
“These visits highlight the severe limits of any ‘pivot’ to China,” she said. “They expose the vulnerability of middle powers, chasing scraps while China’s export flood overwhelms their industries.”
And they benefit Beijing, supporting the narrative of a broad pivot to China as the world’s “reliable partner,” in contrast to Trump’s chaotic tariff policies and his growing list of threats and demands toward partners and rivals alike.
“President Trump’s efforts to decouple the United States from China are also decoupling the United States from the world,” Quelch added.
STARMER SCORES WIN ON VISAS, WHISKEY
The agreements reached by Western powers on such visits come in return for deeper integration with a country that had a trade surplus the size of the Dutch economy last year but where consumption is too weak for even its own producers to thrive at home.
On his trip to the world’s second-largest economy, Starmer secured 30-day visa-free access for Britons traveling to China and lower tariffs on whisky, while British drugmaker AstraZeneca unveiled a $15 billion investment in China.
He got nothing beyond “frank dialogue” about the tension arising from China’s increasingly assertive position on Taiwan, its stronger ties with Russia after the invasion of Ukraine and a crackdown on rights over the former British colony of Hong Kong.
British and American politicians who have criticized Starmer’s trip have also aired accusations of espionage and human rights abuse, which Beijing denies.
Similarly, Carney left China with expectations that Beijing would reduce or drop tariffs on canola, lobster, crab and peas, but this led to threats of 100% tariffs from Trump, who warned Ottawa about allowing Chinese EVs in North America.
And even before Starmer ended his visit to China, Trump warned Britain that it was dangerous to do business with Beijing, after the Prime Minister praised the economic benefits of resetting relations with China.
CHINA’S EXPORT GROWTH POSES RISKS FOR THE WEST
China’s imports last year were flat at $2.6 trillion, but were largely driven by energy and commodities from emerging markets, rather than the West.
Its trade surplus, however, jumped by a fifth, to a record $1.2 trillion, as its manufacturers responded to Trump’s tariff measures by moving into almost every other market in the world, at the expense of domestic producers.
Such a pace of growth puts China’s trade surplus on track to roughly reach the size of the $3 trillion French economy by 2030 and the $5 trillion German economy by 2033.
Its exports to the European Union last year jumped by 8.4%, while imports fell by 0.4%. China sent 7.8% more to Great Britain, while it bought 4.7% less. With Canada, sales grew 3.2% while purchases fell 10.4%.
“This makes it an especially risky proposition for countries trying to protect or grow their own manufacturing industries to substantially increase trade integration with China,” said Eswar Prasad, former China director at the International Monetary Fund.
“China hardly provides a safe harbor for countries trying to cope with the negative economic effects of US tariffs,” added Prasad, who now teaches trade policy at Cornell University.
Still, some analysts say, significant trade wins with China may not be that important – or even realistic – for countries like Britain or Canada right now.
Resetting ties may be the best they can get, but this could still be valuable, as the previous deterioration in relations has exposed critical supply chain dependencies on China.
The Asian giant’s trade countermeasures have helped widen trade imbalances in both directions, rather than reducing them, analysts said.
The visits by Starmer and Carney are “a propaganda coup for Beijing,” said Noah Barkin, a Europe-China expert at the German Marshall Fund and Rhodium Group, warning, “This is not a pivot for China. It’s about reducing tensions with Beijing.”
He added, “No country wants to be in open conflict with both superpowers at the same time.”
(Additional reporting by Liangping Gao and Kevin Yao in Beijing and David Kirton in Shenzhen; Writing by Marius Zaharia; Editing by Clarence Fernandez)