Keir Starmer’s trip to China is billed as an attempt to revitalise diplomatic relations but eight years after Theresa May paved the way for a never-materialised “ambitious” post-Brexit deal, the prospect of the prime minister landing any meaningful trade deal is slim, experts have warned.

The visit to Beijing, involving a delegation of British companies led by Starmer, the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, and the business secretary, Peter Kyle, is the first since May’s 2018 visit, and will revolve around joint trade and investment efforts.

Downing Street is already treading a sensitive diplomatic path, suggesting that while issues such as human rights breaches, national security or the imprisonment in Hong Kong of the 78-year-old British pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai will be raised, the main focus will be on the business and economic links between China and the UK.

It is also, said Starmer before the flight, not about Donald Trump, who just threatened Canada with 100% tariffs if “it makes a deal with China”.

In an interview with Bloomberg, the prime minister said China would bring “significant opportunities” to British businesses and insisted he would not be forced to make a choice between China and the US.

Chief executives of banks and financial services companies, along with some handpicked small- and medium-sized businesses, are expected to be on the trip along with a delegation from Rolls-Royce, which already has a joint venture on aero engine services with Air China.

Starmer will also be under pressure to ensure China picks up the bill for British Steel in Scunthorpe, which the British state took control of last year to prevent the Chinese firm Jingye from closing the plant.

Sam Goodman, the senior policy director at China Strategic Risks Institute, believes the “bar” for a successful Starmer trip is “very low” and could amount to “a bunch of MOUs [memorandum of understanding]” on financial services and maybe the promise of a greenfield investment in the car industry.

Another China watcher and former European Commission adviser Andrew Small says Beijing is unlikely to deliver the economic boost Labour wants because margins have perished in an overheated economy.

“Every single statement that one sees from anyone in the UK government on all of this, it has this sort of South Park underpants kind of quality to it,” says Small, referring to the three-step business plan of an underpants stockpiling operation in the US satirical cartoon. The first step was to get the underpants, then do nothing, but profit would accrue magically.

“You still have this weird overhang of a view of China as economic opportunity. And if we can only unlock this and it’s a big economy and it’s still growing in all of these sorts of things, completely removed from the reality that there are very marginal gains to be made in a few areas,” says Small, the director of the Asia programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations.

Others in Europe have seen their trade dependence on China raise big risks and in the last eight years figures show that China has had the upper hand in the relationship with the UK.

China had a record trillion-dollar global trade surplus in 2025, despite Trump’s tariffs.

In the UK’s case, the trade deficit with China has more than doubled from £17bn in 2018, the year of May’s visit, to £42bn in the year to the end of the second quarter of 2025.

“It has been on a downward arc in terms of the opportunities or economic benefits to be extracted,” says Small.

China has shown its willingness to use trade to advance its foreign policies, but its foreign investment policies are also seeing it de-risk in unexpected ways, something that could affect any decisions on trade in the UK.

In December, the Chinese luxury electric car brand Zeekr delisted from the New York Stock Exchange after just one year, citing an “increasingly complex economic environment”.

China wants its companies to list in Hong Kong, says Goodman, pointing to the likelihood of Shein, which had looked at listing on the London Stock Exchange, now listing there.

There are also questions about the asymmetric quality of Chinese investments in the UK and whether they do deliver jobs.

Small notes that Xi Jinping’s sense of power has only grown over the past year with his success in facing down Trump in the tariff war giving a sense of vindication that he can introduce export restrictions “without pushback” and that he can feel emboldened to use trade as a weapon “pretty openly”.

In other words, doing business with China is now a double-edged sword.

In an unpublished paper for the Centre for Statecraft and National Security at King’s College London as part of its ongoing work for the Cabinet Office, Goodman cites eight tactics deployed by China which weaponises their trading relationship.

Among them are import bans and anti-competition investigations such as those against French brandy makers, Google and Nvidia.

Last year, China nearly brought car production around the world to a halt, after imposing export bans on Nexperia chips, used in Germany, Mexico, the UK and Japan, because of a row with the Dutch government.

“Foreign businesses are seen as fair game and a useful pressure point to China” in terms of its relationship with foreign countries, says Goodman.