British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has said that the so-called golden era of relations with China is over as the UK need to evolve its approach towards Beijing. Mr. Sunak made the remarks while addressing Lord Mayor’s Banquet in London.
In his first foreign policy speech, the British Prime Minister said, the closer economic ties of the previous decade had been naïve. He said, the UK now needed to replace wishful thinking with robust pragmatism towards competitors.
On Monday evening, Sunak said Britain’s approach to China needed to evolve and Beijing was “consciously competing for global influence using all the levers of state power”.
“Let’s be clear, the so-called ‘golden era’ is over, along with the naive idea that trade would lead to social and political reform,” Sunak said in London’s financial district, a reference to former finance minister George Osborne’s description of Sino-British ties in 2015.
The speech, comes after protests in China over the weekend against the country’s strict Covid lockdown laws.
Some in Sunak’s Conservative Party have been critical of Sunak, regarding him as less hawkish on China than his predecessor Liz Truss.
