Visit by Britain’s PM Starmer shows drawbacks of ‘China pivot’ in countering Trump

BEIJING – British Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s visit to China is the latest win Beijing can tout in its rivalry with Washington, but the deals he brings back to London also show the limits of the balancing act that middle powers may try to play.

He follows his Canadian counterpart, Mr Mark Carney, who

struck a trade deal

on a similar visit weeks ago, before heading to Davos to herald a new global trade order as US President Donald Trump disrupts longstanding ties with allies.

European leaders have also visited, as have India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and others since Mr Trump began his second term a year ago. But it is less clear what tangible long-term economic and security benefits such visits yield for Western powers.

“Traditional US allies feel hard done by and are now hedging their bets, but they are far from being able or willing to substitute China for the United States,” said Professor John Quelch, an expert in global strategy at Duke Kunshan University.

From the perspective of London, Ottawa and other Western capitals, the visits demonstrate to Mr Trump that alternatives exist if he keeps up pressure on issues from Greenland to renegotiating the USMCA trade deal among the US, Canada and Mexico.

But these are “superficial gestures amid stalled global growth”, said Dr Alicia Garcia-Herrero, chief Asia-Pacific economist at Natixis.

“These visits highlight the severe limits of any ‘pivot’ to China,” she said. “They expose middle powers’ vulnerability, chasing scraps while China’s export flood overwhelms their industries.”

And they benefit Beijing, by supporting the narrative of a broad pivot to China as the world’s “reliable partner”, in contrast with Mr Trump’s chaotic tariff policies and his growing list of threats and demands towards partners and rivals alike.

“President Trump’s efforts to decouple the United States from China are also decoupling the United States from the world,” Prof Quelch said.

Wins for Starmer

The deals clinched by Western powers on such visits come in return for deeper integration with a country that

ran a trade surplus

the size of the Dutch economy in 2025, but where consumption is too weak for even its own producers to prosper at home.

On his trip to the world’s second-largest economy, Mr Starmer secured 30-day visa-free access for Britons travelling to China and lower tariffs on whisky, while British drugmaker AstraZeneca unveiled a US$15 billion (S$18.9 billion) investment in China.

He got nothing beyond “frank dialogue” on tension arising from China’s increasingly assertive stance on Taiwan, its stronger ties with Russia after the Ukraine invasion and a rights crackdown on Britain’s former colony of Hong Kong.

British and US politicians who criticised Mr Starmer’s trip also aired accusations of espionage and human rights abuse, which Beijing denies.

Similarly, Mr Carney left China with expectations that Beijing will cut or drop tariffs on canola, lobsters, crabs and peas, but that triggered threats of 100 per cent tariffs from Mr Trump, who warned Ottawa about allowing Chinese EVs into North America.

And even before Mr Starmer wraps up his China visit, Mr Trump warned Britain it was

dangerous to get into business with Beijing

, after the British Prime Minister extolled the economic benefits of resetting relations with China.

Risks for the West

China’s imports in 2025 were flat at US$2.6 trillion, but they were driven largely by energy and commodities from emerging markets, rather than the West.

Its trade surplus, however, jumped a fifth, to a record US$1.2 trillion, as its manufacturers responded to Mr Trump’s tariff measures by muscling into virtually 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 US$3 trillion French economy by 2030 and the US$5 trillion German economy by 2033.

Its exports to the European Union in 2025 jumped 8.4 per cent, while imports dipped 0.4 per cent. China shipped 7.8 per cent more to Britain, while buying 4.7 per cent less. With Canada, sales grew 3.2 per cent while purchases plunged 10.4 per cent.

“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 Professor Eswar Prasad, a former China director at the International Monetary Fund.

“China hardly provides a safe harbour for countries trying to cope with the adverse economic effects of US tariffs,” added Prof Prasad, who now teaches trade policy at Cornell University.

Still, say some analysts, significant trade wins with China may not be as important – or even realistic – for countries such as Britain or Canada right now.

Resetting ties may be the best they can get, but that could still be valuable, as previous deterioration in relations exposed critical supply chain dependencies on China.

The Asian giant’s trade countermeasures helped to widen two-way trade imbalances, rather than narrow them, analysts said.

The visits by Mr Starmer and Mr Carney are “a propaganda coup for Beijing”, said Mr Noah Barkin, Europe-China expert at the German Marshall Fund and Rhodium Group, while warning: “This is not a pivot to China. It is about reducing tension with Beijing.”

He added: “No country wants to be in open conflict with the two superpowers at the same time.” REUTERS