 |
| Image: Flickr User - Foreign and Commonwealth Office |
By Shannon Tiezzi
Will London’s partnership with China extend beyond economics to international issues — at the West’s expense?
Chinese President Xi Jinping wraps up his visit to the U.K. today with a stopover in Manchester. He had a productive time in London, where the U.K. and China signed deals on a nuclear power station (Chinese companies will hold a roughly one-third stake in the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant), cruise ships (Carnival will sell roughly $4 billion worth of ship to China), and jet engines (Rolls Royce won a $2.2 billion contract to design new jet engines). All told, China and the U.K. sealed over $40 billion worth of deals.
The scale of the deals is not so unusual – after all, when Xi was in the U.S., Chinese companies promised to buy aircraft worth $38 billion in a single deal with Boeing. From a political standpoint, what’s more interesting in the high-level (and explicit) commitment Britain has made to be China’s top partner in the West.
“I’m clear that the U.K. is China’s best partner in the west,” David Cameron said this week, repeating what seems to have become his government’s mantra.
Xi, however, put a slightly different spin on the formula, calling on the U.K. “to fulfill its aspiration to become China’s strongest advocate in the west.” There’s a big difference between “partner” and “advocate” – the latter implies a far more active role for London taking up China’s cause in its relationship with the EU and likely the U.S. as well.
Read the full story at The Diplomat