The darker side of Starmer’s China trip

The British embassy in Beijing is not much to write home about. Two storeys tall and concealed behind a modest security gate, only its flagpoles give away its significance.

The complex is an understated presence compared to the vast monuments to China’s past that Sir Keir Starmer has been visiting this week.

Yet the UK’s diplomatic outpost provides a greater insight into the nature of modern relations between these two nations than the platitudes being offered by their leaders.

The buildings, adopted as the new home for British diplomats in 1959 after the old premises were taken over by Chairman Mao, are showing their age seven decades on.

Wallpaper is peeling off, and parts of the masonry are crumbling. And so – echoing China’s newly approved “super-embassy” in London – a £100m renovation is being negotiated.

According to those with first-hand experience, however, the embassy’s future is being used as a tool of leverage over the UK by the Chinese authorities. The heating keeps being switched off. Eviction notices have been issued. At times, some embassy staff have been told to sleep overnight on the premises, to be on the safe side.

The tensions are one of many reminders, on the edges of this self-declared “landmark” of a prime ministerial tour, that stark differences remain despite the rhetoric of engagement.

Coming together for joint endeavour is the rhetoric being pushed by Sir Keir’s aides, but squint and it is not hard to see the more sinister forces, of which Downing Street will be much more wary than it is publicly admitting.

For those travelling with the Prime Minister, the basics of telecommunications underscore the reality that the Chinese state must be treated with a high degree of caution.

Government officials, like the reporters sent by Fleet Street to document Sir Keir’s three-day tour of Beijing and Shanghai, have been issued with “burner” phones and laptops.

In other words, the prospect of hackers infiltrating computers and private messages during the official visit is so real that only equipment wiped of anything significant can be used.

The means of connecting to the internet are laced with the same suspicions. Security experts have urged the use of virtual private networks, or VPNs, to access the internet during the trip.

The tech allows an internet connection to be established via a third nation outside, say, China. That – rather than using WiFi offered by hotels or cafes – is advised.

VPNs also allow foreigners to circumvent China’s internet firewall, which blocks access to WhatsApp, the encrypted messaging app wused across Whitehall.

There are yet darker dangers said to be lurking, about which members of the UK delegation have been warned, including the prospect of a Cold War-era technique: the “honeytrap”.

For those who roll their eyes at the prospect, the tale of Gordon Brown’s 2008 trip to China and the fate of one Downing Street adviser along for the ride provides a cautionary tale.

After a boozy party thrown by Richard Branson to mark the opening of a Virgin air route to China, the aide succumbed to the interests of a mystery female and headed upstairs. The night ended with one government BlackBerry down.

Keeping laptops by their sides is a more mundane piece of guidance given to those on the trip, meaning not leaving computers in hotels to minimise the prospect of a hack.

According to Tom Tugendhat, a former Tory security minister and a China hawk, the Government has taken another extraordinary step to avoid the touring group being bugged.

Mr Tugendhat claimed the reason Sir Keir was being flown on a commercial aeroplane, not a Government one, was to limit the risk of eavesdropping.

He claimed on X that a “burner plane” was being used, saying a Government one “would need to be guarded round the clock to stop China putting bugs on it.”

No 10 has not commented.

The jumpiness reflects the wider reality of mass surveillance in China in 2026. CCTV cameras abound, with facial recognition technology being honed.

One European diplomat described escaping Beijing for the woods and fresh air on a hike only to discover, upon reaching the top of a mountain, a camera staring back.

In another reminder of the significant economic and technological advances by the country in recent years, paying in cash in the capital is so vanishingly rare that it is hard to do.

Instead, there is a single payment app, Alipay, that both facilitates and tracks exchanges. To activate cards, formal ID must be uploaded and verified with a photograph or video of the person’s face.

The app goes much further than a simple electronic bank card, with goods ordered with a tap in the app and delivered within hours. Every exchange is logged.

To some Europeans who have made Beijing their home, many in the city seem to have made a tacit agreement that the ease that mass surveillance brings is worth the loss of privacy.

Perhaps it is a charge that can be made of Western nations too, with personal data so willingly given up for the ease of sharing holiday snaps with friends and family.

Yet it is the autocratic nature of the Chinese government – again glimpsed at moments amid all the talk of shared goals during this great reset in relations – that brings a sharper edge to it all.

It was seen in the hand clamped tightly on one reporter’s bicep by a Chinese security figure as he attempted to hear the Prime Minister speak in a roped-off area without the appropriate badge.

Peter Kyle, the laid-back Business Secretary, who chatted to reporters at the back of the plane to China, captured the differences via an anecdote.

Addressing a room of British business delegates travelling with the Prime Minister on Thursday night, Mr Kyle described a scene that had played out behind closed doors earlier that day.

On approaching Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, his counterpart – the Chinese government figure holding the business brief – bowed low and deep before his country’s leader. Mr Kyle, seeing his own Prime Minister, offered a perfunctory nod.

Sir Keir’s reset may have common causes and shared goals at its heart, but the differences – in values and practices – are jarringly evident to those witnessing all this up close.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]