UK finance minister to visit China in January to revive regular economic talks, sources say

Beijing: Britain’s finance minister Rachel Reeves will visit China for two days in January to revive high-level economic and financial talks that have been frozen since 2019, three people with knowledge of the plan said.

Reeves is scheduled to meet China’s vice premier He Lifeng, the country’s economy tsar, on Jan. 11 in Beijing to restart what had been annual talks known as the Economic and Financial Dialogue (EFD), they said.

If the discussions go well, the two sides could look to re-launch what had been a regular and wider meeting known as the Joint Economic and Trade Commission (JETCO) later next year, the sources said. China is the UK’s fifth-largest trading partner.

A UK Treasury spokesperson would not confirm the dates of Reeves’ visit and said further details would be announced in the usual way. China’s finance ministry did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Businesses in Britain, where the economy is losing momentum, have also pressed to restart meetings of the UK-China CEO Council, a group established by then-Prime Minister Theresa May and then-Premier Li Keqiang in 2018, one of the sources added.

Media reported on Thursday that HSBC Chairman Mark Tucker will lead a business delegation visiting China next month in a bid to boost trade and investment with a particular focus on financial services.

Reeves will go to Shanghai on Jan. 12, where she will meet with British companies operating in China, according to the sources, who asked not to be named because they were not authorised to discuss the plans.

Britain suspended most economic dialogues with China in 2020 after Beijing imposed a national security law in Hong Kong, a former British colony. Since then, spying allegations, the war in Ukraine, and the sanctioning of lawmakers have increased tensions between the two countries.

The Labour government, in power in Britain since July, has made improving ties with China one of its main foreign policy goals after a period under successive Conservative governments when relations plunged to their lowest in decades.

In 2022, then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, a Conservative, declared the end of a “golden era” of relations with China that one of his predecessors, David Cameron, had championed.

Over the preceding decade, British and Chinese officials had met annually for high-level trade and investment talks, holding an EFD almost every year and a JETCO every two years.

Those talks resulted in the London-Shanghai stock connect scheme, Britain joining the Beijing-based Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, and joint investment into green technologies, including the UK’s Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant.

China bought £32 billion ($40 billion) worth of British goods in the year to the end of June, British government data shows. Chinese inward foreign direct investment stocks in the UK are worth £4.3 billion.