David Lammy is planning a visit to China in September that would fall within the first 100 days of him taking office. The foreign secretary is in talks over a trip to Beijing next month that would signal the UK wants to resume high-level engagement with the country. No date has been officially confirmed. A Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) spokesperson said: “Foreign secretary travel will be confirmed in the usual way.”
Lammy had planned to travel to China while Labour was still in opposition earlier this summer, but his trip was postponed when the general election was called. After Labour won the election, Lammy met China’s foreign minister, Wang Yi, at a meeting of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on 26 July. The FCDO said that, at the meeting in Laos, the foreign secretary “set out that the government would cooperate where we can, compete where needed and challenge where we must”. Lammy will come under pressure to take a robust stance on human rights. As shadow foreign secretary in 2023, he reaffirmed Labour’s position that it would take steps to recognise China’s treatment of Uyghurs as genocide. China has imposed sanctions on seven parliamentarians, including the Labour peer Helena Kennedy, for criticising its human rights record. Whitehall is carrying out an “audit” of UK-China relations, which Labour’s manifesto said would aim to “improve the UK’s capability to understand and respond to the challenges and opportunities China poses”. The last foreign secretary to visit China was James Cleverly in August 2023. The Conservative government came under pressure from hawkish backbenchers to take a robust stance on China. A senior British source working on UK-China relations said: “Under the Conservatives, with the exception of the one Cleverly visit, there was no senior-level engagement with China. “If you look at Starmer’s foreign policy messages you have a reset with Europe and he’s talked about reconnecting with the rest of the world. If that doesn’t include China, then it doesn’t count as reconnecting with the rest of the world.” Ruby Osman, a policy adviser on China at the Tony Blair Institute, said: “Despite having their own – sometimes more serious – differences with Beijing, the US, France, Germany, Australia and Italy have all still had head-of-state meetings with President Xi. “Meanwhile, the UK has seemed almost uniquely uncomfortable with engaging with China in the past few years. We’ve had just three ministerial visits in five years, with little to show. Labour’s challenge will be shifting the mood in Westminster back to a recognition that engagement doesn’t have to mean agreement.” Osman added: “David Lammy has been setting the stage for greater engagement since well before the election … There’s also likely to be a lot of appetite from the Chinese side to boost engagement. Beijing’s aim will be to use the election as a reset in relations after a rocky few years.” Catherine West, now a Foreign Office minister, travelled to China last spring for meetings with senior government officials. She said at the time she had raised Labour’s concerns about Chinese interference in British democracy and national security, underlining that “this is something we will act on in government”.