Beijing's envoy to Britain prepares to wind up unusual, decade-long tenure

Beijing's envoy to Britain, Liu Xiaoming, a staunch defender of closer UK-China economic ties and the imposition of new security laws in Hong Kong, is standing down, The Guardian has reported.

This marks the end of an era in relations between the two countries that hit a high in 2015 but has since worsened markedly, The Guardian says.

He is being replaced by the vice-foreign minister, Zheng Zeguang, a former Cardiff University law student once tipped to become China’s ambassador to the US, and still seen as a candidate for that post in a couple of years’ time.

Liu, 64, has been ambassador since 2010, a marathon stint at a time when most ambassadors serve a four-year term.

He has been a fierce critic of the UK decision to ban Huawei Technologies from 5G networks, and also repeatedly denied that Uighur Muslims were being forced into detention camps in Xinjiang province.

The decline in UK-China relations was arguably under way before China imposed new sovereignty laws on Hong Kong, but the new laws, seen by Britain as a breach of the China-UK joint declaration, paved the way for a major change in relations.

Liu came to wider attention on BBC One’s The Andrew Marr Show when he was shown footage of Uighur Muslims blindfolded and kneeling, and  claimed the images were “fake”.

During the furore over Huawei, Liu said Britain might “bear the consequences” of treating China as a hostile country, saying: “It has become questionable whether the UK can provide an open, fair and non-discriminatory business environment for companies from other countries.”

He also accused the British government of making “irresponsible remarks on Hong Kong”, insisting at a series of fiery press conferences that protests in the former British colony were not about freedom, but had been stirred up by irresponsible foreigners.

In his last set-piece speech to the third China-UK economic and trade forum, he said the decline in political relations had not been matched by a slowdown in economic relations.

Liu said: “In 2019, trade volume between China and the UK hit a new record of US$86.272 billion [£64.4 billion]. In the first 10 months of this year, trade in goods between our two countries increased by 2.8 percent year on year, faster than the growth rate of China’s overall foreign trade in the same period.”

He was given the freedom of the City of London in 2018, a sign of the close links between British finance and China.