The Future of UK-China Relations

The Search for a New Model

Kerry Brown

• Publisher: Agenda Publishing
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781788211574
• eBook ISBN: 9781788212694
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Asian Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

At a time when both China's role in the world is becoming the focus of international business strategy and Brexit is pushing the UK to look to the rest of the world for trade and investment, Kerry Brown assesses the potential for a new "golden age" of UK–China relations.

For too long, Brown argues, China has been regarded with indifference by the UK, despite a well-established relationship stretching back some 200 years. Now, more than ever, Britain needs to actively engage with China and seek to understand China's ambitions. This entails a radical change of mindset, vocabulary and attitude, as well as establishing a clear vision of what the UK wants from a resurgent global China, beyond trade and money.

Brown shows that our future relationship with China is deep with symbolic meaning and will have reverberations throughout the world, as either a sobering example of what a world run on Chinese values might look like, or as a model of how to successfully rebalance a sudden asymmetrical dependence on a newly powerful China. It is one, however, that requires the UK to question some of its own national myths and the story it tells about itself, as well as to learn about a new power with a very different history and set of values.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Tales from the Golden Age
• 2. What Does China Want? The Case of the UK
• 3. Walk on By: What Does Britain Really Want From China?
• 4. Who Cares? The China Circle in Britain
• 5. The Good, the Bad and the Brexit: Britain and China Outside the EU
• 6. The UK and China: Scenarios for the Coming Decade
• Appendix: The UK–China Balance Sheet
• Further Reading
• Notes
• Index