WeeklyWorker

05.02.2026
Drive to war against China: real

More lies, more paranoia

Rightwing media outlets continue to denounce the new Chinese embassy building - clearly they take their cue from Donald Trump and his claim that it is “very dangerous” for the UK do business with China. Mike Macnair explores what lies behind the entirely artificial campaign

On January 20 the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Steve Reed, signed off on approval of an inspector’s report granting permission for a new Chinese embassy building at the former site of the Royal Mint (near the Tower of London). Publication was for some reason delayed.1 The Chinese government had bought the site and obtained diplomatic approval in 2018, under the former Tory government. But for the last few years there has been an ascending chorus of claims in the rightwing media that the new embassy building is a ‘security threat’. This has not ended despite the approval.2

Meanwhile, Sir Keir Starmer’s visit to China on January 28-31 included a meeting with president Xi Jinping, and the government has announced a series of minor (and undetailed) agreements, under the headline ‘Prime minister unlocks new opportunities for British businesses in China’:

1. Cooperation on transnational organised crime and illegal immigration.

2. Establishment of a bilateral services partnership.

3. Joint feasibility study for a UK-China trade in services agreement.

4. Cooperation in the field of conformity assessment.

5. Exports from the UK to China.

6. Strengthening the work of the UK-China Joint Economic and Trade Commission.

7. Cooperation in domiciliary services and sports industries.

8. Collaboration in technical and vocational education and training (TVET).

9. Cooperation on food safety, animal and plant quarantine.

10. Health cooperation.3

Donald Trump, on January 29, offered an off-the-cuff denunciation: “Asked about the UK ‘getting into business’ with China, Trump said, “Well, it’s very dangerous for them to do that.”4 Kemi Badenoch followed Trump’s lead at the February 2 Prime Minister’s Questions, entertainingly accusing Starmer of being “virtually a communist most of his life”.5 Badenoch was probably not referring to Starmer’s Pabloism in his 1980s youth, but was following Trump’s habit of referring to his US Democratic Party opponents as ‘communists’.6 The story was widely syndicated under the headline, “UK’s Starmer faces backlash over China trip amid claims he was ‘tricked’”.7

Both these stories are essentially confected with a view to promoting hostility to China and (the converse of this) increasing US (and in particular Republican Party) control of British politics.

The Chinese embassy as a security threat is one of those ‘doh!’ points: of course embassies carry on spying (and have done since the Renaissance); the local state carries on counter-espionage operations. In this case the Secret Intelligence Service (old MI6) and Security Service (old MI5) declined to object to the new Chinese embassy; if anything, centralising Chinese operations on a single site will facilitate UK securocrats’ surveillance on Chinese spies - a point made by a former MI5 head.8

The Tories and their press are certainly right that the agreements reached from Starmer’s trip, as reported by the government, are limited and vague. But … China is, in fact, the UK’s fifth largest nation-state trade partner after the USA, Germany, the Netherlands and France.9 Badenoch at PMQs admits that diplomatic non-engagement with China is not a serious option. What she claims to want is more aggressive engagement.

This is deeply unrealistic. The Chinese government faced down Donald Trump’s tariff war by ‘weaponising’ access to rare earths, but the UK has far less leverage than the USA to start with. Besides its military weakness, the UK is £47,996 million in deficit with China on goods trade, and only £9,389 million in surplus on trade in services. Hence the government - realistically - seeks to expand UK services’ access to Chinese markets, the subject of the majority of the reported (vague) agreements. For Starmer (or Badenoch imagining herself as PM; or Farage …) to take a more aggressive approach to China would thus result merely in a more complete brush-off from China.

There is one piece of reality among these fantasies. Trump’s “very dangerous” statement is not a warning of a Chinese threat to the UK: it is a US threat to the UK, that if it gets too close to China, the USA will retaliate. Since the USA is one of the few countries with which the UK is in overall trade surplus this threat is quite real. (Indeed, very minor alterations to US regulatory legislation could wipe out the British financial sector’s offshore business.)

Toward 1914

The pattern of fantasies of Chinese aggression reprises British ideology in the run-up to 1914. In 1903 Erskine Childers’ best-selling book The riddle of the sands was published. This told a story of holiday-making British yachtsmen uncovering a secret German plot to invade Britain across the North Sea, using a fleet of tugs and barges based in the East Frisian Islands. The plot is fantastical: Germany invading Britain with tug-drawn barges across 370 miles of the North Sea is a lot less militarily plausible than the unworkable 1940 plan, ‘Operation Sea Lion’ (to have been launched from Normandy); or than the ‘French invasion scare’ of 1859-60, or William Le Queux’s 1894 French invasion book The great war in England in 1897.

Nonetheless, The riddle of the sands dramatised for the British public the ‘German threat’. This was actually not a threat of a German invasion, but rather of German competition in arms and capital goods markets, plus competition in geopolitics for influence in Latin America and the Ottoman empire, and for colonial possessions in Africa and China. This was also reflected in German naval expansion, as well as unwelcome ‘interference’ like supplying arms and partial diplomatic backing to the Transvaal and Orange Free State before their conquest by the British 1899-1902 South African War (in which Childers fought). The ‘German threat’, as dramatised by Childers’ novel, supported political backing for British arms-budget expansion and for the reversal of British alliances, symbolised by the 1904 Entente Cordiale with France. The book was thus a landmark on the road to 1914.

In the 21st century there are too many thrillers and alternate-history fantasies out there for the open production of fiction to have this sort of political influence. The fantasies produced to cover real commercial and geopolitical motives instead take the form of official announcements and ‘intelligence reports’, like the cases made in 2002-03 for the Iraqi Ba’athist regime’s ‘weapons of mass destruction’, or the story of ‘Russian interference’ in the 2016 US presidential elections. The stories of the Chinese London ‘mega-embassy’ as a security threat, and of Starmer being ‘tricked’ or ‘capitulating’ in his China visit are fantasies of the same type.

Around 1900, the UK as a declining world hegemon was trying to defend its interests and to ‘contain’ a rising Germany. The policy of increasingly aggressive encirclement of Germany and Austria-Hungary that followed led at the end of the day to World War I.

But, though 1914-18 led to the destruction of the tsarist regime, the Kaiser-Reich, the Austro-Hungarian empire and the Ottoman empire, 1919-39 showed that it had failed to resolve the underlying problem of the global economy, which was the declining British empire as a vampire, sucking financial tribute out of the world. It took the destruction of the UK’s strategic global position, through the fall of France, the Low Countries, Denmark and Norway in 1940, to force the UK to agree in summer 1940 to hand over world leadership to the US. This destruction of British world hegemony permitted the ‘long boom’ of the 1950s-70s.

Since then, the UK has been very clearly a vassal state of the US. Not a colony or semi-colony: the king’s or feudal lord’s vassals were his military sub-tenants, not his serfs. Between 1956 and the 1990s the UK had quite significant military capability, though decreasingly practically independent of the US; it could be considered as a US attack-dog in the colonial world. In Afghanistan and Iraq the vaunted counter-insurgency capability of the British military proved to be a paper tiger, and Libya in 2011 only confirmed how limited UK military capability was. The UK has now become not a US attack-dog, but a US yap-dog: “Bark, bark, bark, bark … Until you could hear them all over the park.”10

From around 2000 the US’s policy has shifted, with GW Bush’s 2000 characterisation of China as a ‘strategic competitor’, Obama’s 2011 ‘pivot to Asia’,11 followed by Trump’s open protectionism against China and Biden’s continuation of that policy. This is now followed by sharper anti-China (and also anti-Europe) rhetoric under Trump 2.0.

The new policy of the US is not a return of the ‘cold war’. That was a regime of ‘containment of communism’, on the basis of the long boom made possible by the destruction of British world hegemony, by a combination of siege warfare with concessions to the working class in the ‘west’ and to national capitals in the ‘south’. There is no new long boom, and no mass communist parties in the west; concessions to the working classes, and to national capitals in the ‘south’, continue to be withdrawn.

Rather, China’s policy of deploying capital for development has led it quite inevitably to entanglement in competition with the USA for overseas investments and for access to overseas raw materials. Whatever the subjective aims of its leaders, China is objectively driven towards the global position of the Kaiser-Reich in the late 19th to early 20th century, and the USA is objectively driven towards the policy of aggressive encirclement of China (like the UK’s aggressive encirclement of Germany), leading to a new 1914.

Independent

The workers’ movement needs an independent foreign policy. This is no novelty, but a point already made in the 1864 inaugural address of the First International.

In 1914, the Second International split along national lines: the major parties, with some exceptions, becoming tails and supports for their own national capitals. The former left wing of the Social Democratic Party of Germany split three ways. The modern far left memorialises the honour of the element round Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, who opposed the war, and the betrayal of the SPD majority. It quietly fails to discuss the ex-left Die Glocke group round Alexander Parvus, which argued that a victory for the Kaiser-Reich would be historically progressive.12 And it identifies Karl Kautsky solely with his refusal to split the SPD (until 1916) and omits that in 1917 he came to believe in the justice of the Entente’s cause through seeing national self-determination as primary:13 hence Kautsky’s opposition to the Russian October revolution, as weakening the common front against Austro-German aggression.

These choices to tail-end one side or the other - ‘national capital’ against the world-hegemon or ‘democratic capital’ against what the liberal media calls tyranny - are still with us. The Morning Star’s Communist Party of Britain imagines China as a new USSR, but the practical effect is to follow the Die Glocke approach of preferring the challenger state. The January 31-February 1 Star carries a three-quarter-page article from Yubin Du, a journalist for the Chinese state-owned English-language television station, CGTN, under the headline, “In an age of strategic fragmentation, Britain and China should choose cooperation”. The content is an argument for the complementarity of capitalist UK with capitalist China - not any hope for socialism. Communists should not be defenders of the Chinese regime any more than Social Democrats should have been defenders of the Kaiser regime - which was also really in many respects more progressive than Britain in the late 19th to early 20th century, as the Die Glocke group argued.

Meanwhile, on the other side, the Mandelite Fourth International has followed the Kautsky of 1917 into becoming a political tail for ‘liberal’ imperialism, through prioritising national self-determination over the recognition of inter-imperialist conflict. Ukraine is the centre of this political collapse, but the same line has now appeared on defencism towards the US semi-colony of Taiwan.14

Since it is our state and the empire of which we are vassals which seek to mobilise self-determination talk in the service of a war drive to defend US hegemony, this is less like being Kautsky (a Czech resident in Germany): more like Henry Hyndman or Arthur Henderson in 1914-18. We cannot be advocates, on the one hand, of the general liberation of humanity and, on the other hand, tail-end our own state’s war propaganda.

Our watchword needs to be Karl Liebknecht’s “The main enemy is at home”15.

  1. www.ftbchambers.co.uk/news/news-view/permission-granted-by-secretary-of-state-for-chinese-embassy (January 27). This includes a link to the decision letter.↩︎

  2. Eg, parallelparliament.co.uk/debate/2026-01-26/lords/lords-chamber/chinese-embassy (House of Lords debate, January 26); www.youtube.com/watch?v=zShWwjaBpIw; bisi.org.uk/reports/london-approves-new-china-mega-embassy-amid-protests-and-security-concerns.↩︎

  3. www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-unlocks-new-opportunities-for-british-businesses-in-china.↩︎

  4. www.euronews.com/2026/01/30/trump-says-very-dangerous-for-uk-to-deal-with-china-as-starmer-arrives-in-shanghai.↩︎

  5. www.youtube.com/watch?v=MolFWmG-IVY.↩︎

  6. Eg, www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/retread-scare-trump-and-other-republicans-evoke-another-era-by-calling-democrats-communists (June 19 2023); www.theguardian.com/global/commentisfree/article/2024/sep/05/communism-meaning-republicans (September 5 2024).↩︎

  7. Numerous hits on googling ‘Starmer China visit tricked’, date-restricted to last week.↩︎

  8. www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/china-super-embassy-london-lord-evans-b2902712.html.↩︎

  9. Figures for 2023 at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_partners_of_the_United_Kingdom (See Note 1). This leaves out the EU as a whole, which is way ahead of all other trade; here the comparison would be EU: £807,155 million, USA: £302,091 million, China: £92,676.↩︎

  10. TS Eliot: allpoetry.com/Of-The-Awefull-Battle-Of-The-Pekes-And-The-Pollicles.↩︎

  11. www.brookings.edu/articles/the-american-pivot-to-asia (2011); and foreignpolicy.com/2016/09/03/the-legacy-of-obamas-pivot-to-asia (2016).↩︎

  12. See, for instance, M Macnair, ‘Die Glocke or the inversion of theory: from anti-imperialism to pro-Germanism’ Critique Vol 42 (2014).↩︎

  13. K Kautsky Die Befreiung der Nationen (www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/kautsky/1917/befnat/index.html); Serbien und Belgien in der Geschichte (www.marxists.org/deutsch/archiv/kautsky/1917/serbelg/index.html).↩︎

  14. Eg, internationalviewpoint.org/Preliminary-Theses-on-the-Taiwan-Strait-Crisis-and-Taiwanese-Self-Determination; compare also Duncan Chapel: redmole.substack.com/p/taiwan-is-not-israel-the-morning.↩︎

  15. www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-k/works/1915/05/main-enemy-home.htm.↩︎