UK calls China a major challenge but an essential economic partner

Foreign Secretary David Lammy said “China’s power is an inescapable fact” and freezing relations with the world’s second biggest economy is “not an option.” He spoke to lawmakers as he outlined findings from the government’s “China audit.” UK-China relations have chilled since the short-lived “golden era” announced by then-Prime Minister David Cameron in 2015, after a series of spying and cyberespionage allegations, Beijing’s crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong, a former British colony, and China’s support for Russia in the Ukraine war. China was one of many challenges identified in a review that the government said marked “a hardening and a sharpening of our approach to national security” in an increasingly dangerous world.