UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak (left) and US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy in the Speaker's office at the US Capitol on June 7, 2023 in Washington, DC Photo: VCG

While UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was in Washington to reportedly seek a "military-style economic alliance with the US to counter threats from China," Nicholas Lyons, lord mayor of the City of London, was in Beijing on Thursday, hoping to expand cooperation between the UK financial center and China.

There is a contradiction between Sunak's attempt to appease Washington and the desire by UK businesses for cooperation with China, as well as a divergence between UK policies and its economic needs, a Chinese expert said.

On Thursday, Chinese Vice President Han Zheng met with Lyons in Beijing. Noting that the economic and trade ties between China and the UK enjoy sound momentum and huge potential, Han said financial cooperation has increasingly become a new driving force for bilateral practical cooperation, according to Xinhua.

Han also said that China is willing to deepen mutually beneficial cooperation with the UK financial community and promote the sustained and healthy development of bilateral economic and trade relations.

For his part, Lyons said that the UK and China share broad common interests and have good prospects for financial cooperation, adding that the City of London is willing to deepen cooperation with the Chinese government, enterprises, and financial institutions to achieve win-win development.

Prior to Lyons' visit, many UK business leaders have also visited China recently, hoping to expand their business in the Chinese market.

Last week, Han also met with Ben Keswick, executive chairman of Jardine Matheson Holdings, in Beijing, saying that China supports multinational companies including Jardine Matheson to achieve better development in China and jointly maintain the stability and smoothness of global industrial and supply chains.

Keswick expressed optimism about the prospects for the Chinese market and the desire for long-term development in China to achieve win-win results, according to Xinhua.

Also last week, Rene Haas, CEO of leading semiconductor firm ARM, visited China. He met with Chinese officials including Zhang Guangjun, China's vice minister of science and technology. Haas said that he felt very welcome when visiting China for the first time in four years and emphasized the importance of the Chinese market for ARM.

Such sentiments are shared by many UK businesses in China. In a survey conducted by the British Chamber of Commerce in China in April, 76 percent of businesses reported feeling more optimistic about the coming year following China's reopening.

However, even as UK businesses are increasingly optimistic about and are proactively seeking opportunities in the Chinese market, the UK government, under Sunak, is becoming increasingly hostile toward China, in an apparent attempt to form closer ties with Washington by joining the latter's containment strategy against China.

During his visit to the US, the UK leader was preparing to "ask US President Joe Biden for a military-style economic alliance between the US and the UK to counter threats from China and Russia," according to the Daily Mail.

"Sunak is now trying to outsource insolvable issues between the UK and the US, and use the UK's allegiance to the US' anti-China strategy as a bargaining chip to attract the US," Cui Hongjian, director of the Department of European Studies at the China Institute of International Studies, told the Global Times on Thursday.

However, such an attempt grossly contradicts the UK business community's genuine need to maintain cooperation with China, Cui pointed out. "There is a serious distortion between the UK's policy orientation and its actual economic development needs," he said.

Some UK media reports and pundits expect few concrete results from Sunak's visit to the US in terms of economic cooperation. "All British prime ministers get seduced by the White House… We are always told that so much will come out of it. Warm words will be said, but little ever seems to come from it," UK journalist Nicholas Owen said on TV earlier this week, adding that the US president is only interested in promoting the interests of the US.

Underscoring the big rift between the UK and the US in certain business issues, a free trade deal, which has been heavily pushed by London following its exit from the EU, will not be on the table, and Sunak is also under pressure to respond to the US' unfair subsidies for electric cars and other clean technologies, according to media reports.

Meanwhile, Sunak's hostile words and deeds do not bode well for bilateral relations and cooperation with China.

In response to media reports of the UK's plan to publish a timeline for the removal from sensitive central government sites of surveillance equipment produced by companies subject to China's National Intelligence Law, a spokesperson for the Chinese Embassy in the UK expressed firm opposition to the UK's deliberate misinterpretation of the relevant Chinese law and discrimination against Chinese companies.

"We urge the UK side to stop political manipulation and provide a fair, just and non-discriminatory environment for the normal operation of Chinese companies in the UK," the spokesperson said on Wednesday.

The Chinese Embassy in the UK has also directly pushed back against Sunak's wrongful remarks related to China.

After Sunak called China the "biggest challenge of our age to global security and prosperity" during the G7 summit in Japan at the end of last month, the embassy said that "the relevant remarks by the British side are simply parroting words from others and constitute malicious slander in disregard of the facts. China firmly opposes and strongly condemns this."

The spokesperson stated that "we call on the British side to stop slandering and smearing China so as to avoid further damage to China-UK relations."