Under Prime Minister Keir Starmer, the U.K.’s Labour government has sought to re-establish strong ties with China, after successive Conservative administrations adopted a more hawkish stance.
Last month Starmer became the first U.K. prime minister to meet President Xi Jinping in person since 2018. Foreign Secretary David Lammy visited China in October, only the second such visit in six years.
The trip would be an opportunity to revive the so-called U.K.-China Energy Dialogue, a forum for talks on climate and energy aims launched in 2010 under former Prime Minister David Cameron, but which has not held a formal session since 2017.
The U.K. and China are “overdue” to hold the sixth such dialogue, one of the business figures said.
Any visit would also be politically sensitive. The Conservatives in opposition have accused Starmer and Miliband of making the U.K. over-reliant on China in their push to decarbonize Britain’s electricity grid and ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by 2030.
The government has also faced calls from some of its own MPs to guarantee solar panel components imported from China have not been produced using Uyghur forced labor in the Xinjiang region.
The U.K. sees China as a lynchpin of international efforts to combat climate change. At the last United Nations climate summit, COP29, Miliband emphasized the importance of China paying its fair share of climate finance to developing countries to help them decarbonize their economies.
The U.K. also wants to play a supporting role to Brazil — host of next year’s climate summit COP30 — in encouraging ambitious emissions reduction targets for 2035 from China and other major polluters.
