Why Kemi Badenoch Thinks Britain Still Has Leverage Over China

This article directly rebuts claims made by Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader of the opposition, who argues that Britain still holds leverage over China and that Keir Starmer’s visit to Beijing amounts to weakness or “kowtowing.” It explains who Badenoch is, what she is arguing, and why her case rests on an unexamined belief in British inherited entitlement rather than on present day power realities. By grounding the debate in historical record and contemporary facts, the article aims to dispel a persistent illusion in British politics and bring realism to a relationship too often framed by nostalgia instead of evidence.

Kemi Badenoch’s attack on Keir Starmer’s visit to Beijing is revealing not because it is unusual, but because it is so familiar. It reads like an argument formed in a political culture where empire is treated as irrelevant, Britain’s past actions are politely forgotten, and British authority in world affairs is assumed rather than demonstrated.

That blindness is striking in a country whose modern political and economic structures were built during centuries of colonial rule across Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. The language Badenoch uses against China dependency, weakness, moral instruction, the need for leverage mirrors the language Britain once used to justify imperial domination, even as the memory of that history has largely disappeared from mainstream debate.

This absence is not accidental. It underpins the entire argument.

Badenoch insists that Starmer goes to China “from a position of weakness” and that a British prime minister must arrive in Beijing with leverage. What she never explains is why Britain should expect leverage over China in the first place.

China portrayed as a threat without comparison

Badenoch presents China’s size, wealth, and ambition as inherently menacing. But she never applies the comparison that any serious assessment requires.

China has not attacked Britain militarily. It has not seized British territory. It has not forced Britain to open its markets through war. It has not imposed unequal treaties on the United Kingdom. It has not occupied British land for generations.

Britain, by contrast, fought two Opium Wars in the nineteenth century to force China to accept trade it explicitly rejected, seized Hong Kong under the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, and ruled that territory for 155 years. In 1860, British and allied forces burned the Old Summer Palace in Beijing as a punitive act.

If China is described as threatening simply for pursuing its interests through trade, technology, and scale, then Britain’s own historical behaviour toward China was far more aggressive by any objective measure. The difference is not conduct but memory.

This is inherited entitlement at work. China’s rise is treated as suspicious by default, while Britain’s past dominance is treated as morally irrelevant.

The illusion of leverage

Leverage is not a moral possession. It is the product of dependency and asymmetry.

China does not rely on Britain for security guarantees, diplomatic recognition, or access to global markets. Britain relies far more on Chinese manufacturing, Chinese supply chains, and Chinese consumer demand than China relies on Britain.

To claim that Starmer “gave away leverage” before boarding a plane is to assume leverage existed. It did not. Britain cannot withhold what China does not need.

This belief is not realism. It is nostalgia for an era when Britain could dictate terms because it had the power to do so. That era ended with empire. Badenoch’s argument never confronts that fact.

The specific leverage claims and why they do not hold

Badenoch does not rely only on mood music about strength and weakness. She points to concrete, contemporary decisions and calls them leverage that Starmer allegedly surrendered before the visit. That is the strongest part of her case, and it deserves to be met directly.

The problem is that what she labels leverage is, on inspection, either symbolic, legally constrained, or strategically misdirected. It may be a legitimate domestic controversy. It is not necessarily a bargaining chip that can be cashed in against Beijing.

Start with the so called super embassy. Badenoch treats approval as an asset that could have been withheld to extract concessions. In reality, planning consent is not a clean instrument of statecraft. Once a government turns routine administrative permissions into an overt bargaining weapon, it invites legal challenge, diplomatic retaliation, and reputational damage. It also converts a local decision into a public humiliation ritual, which is precisely the sort of approach that hardens Chinese positions rather than softens them. If the aim is dialogue, the embassy is not leverage. It is infrastructure for contact. If the aim is coercion, it is the wrong tool.

Next, the Chagos Islands. Badenoch frames the handover as a strategic gift to a China aligned Mauritius, and therefore a surrender of bargaining power. But Chagos is not a bilateral lever over China. It is a UK Mauritius issue with significant American basing implications centred on Diego Garcia. Treating it as a chip in a UK China negotiation assumes Britain can trade far away sovereignty disputes for influence over Beijing. That is not leverage. It is narrative inflation. Even if one accepts that China seeks influence in the Indian Ocean, Chagos is not a switch that Britain can flick to force Chinese behaviour. It is a complex legal and diplomatic file, and its consequences run first through Washington, not through Beijing.

Then there is energy and supply chain dependency. Badenoch is right to identify a structural vulnerability. Britain does rely on Chinese linked supply chains for key renewable components and batteries. But vulnerability is not leverage. Dependency without credible substitutes is the opposite of leverage. It is exposure. Calling it a bargaining tool mistakes a constraint for an advantage. If Britain wants autonomy, it requires industrial policy, domestic capacity, and diversified supply. It does not require performative toughness. Until alternatives exist, describing dependency as leverage is rhetoric, not strategy.

Taken together, these examples reveal the deeper flaw. Badenoch assumes that Britain still possesses decisive levers that can shape Chinese behaviour through denial or permission. In other words, she assumes Britain remains the gatekeeper. That assumption is exactly what inherited entitlement looks like when it is translated into contemporary politics. Britain may have choices. It does not have command.

Trade and dependency with causality reversed

Badenoch argues that China has made Britain economically dependent through cheap imports and offshored production. This reverses cause and effect.

Britain dismantled much of its own manufacturing base over decades, prioritising finance, property, and consumption over production. Governments of both parties presided over this shift. China did not compel Britain to deindustrialise. China became the world’s manufacturing centre while Britain chose not to remain one.

To describe this outcome as Chinese domination is to avoid responsibility for British policy choices.

Strength described, provocation omitted

Badenoch repeatedly calls for Britain to “stand up” to China, as if Britain were a passive observer in the relationship.

In practice, Britain has taken overtly confrontational actions. Royal Navy warships have sailed through the Taiwan Strait, the most sensitive sovereignty dispute in East Asia. HMS Richmond transited the strait in September 2021. HMS Spey did so in June 2025. HMS Richmond transited again later in 2025 alongside a United States Navy destroyer.

These were not defensive movements. They were deliberate military signals, sent thousands of miles from British waters, in alignment with American pressure on China.

China has not responded in kind. It has not sailed naval vessels through the English Channel or Irish Sea to signal displeasure with British policy. It has not inserted itself militarily into Britain’s own territorial or constitutional disputes.

This asymmetry is central, yet Badenoch ignores it entirely.

The embassy controversy and loss of control

Badenoch presents the approval of a large Chinese embassy in London as a catastrophic surrender, citing warnings from former intelligence officials about espionage risk.

London already hosts embassies from rival and sanctioned states. Intelligence activity is an accepted feature of international diplomacy, not a uniquely Chinese phenomenon.

What makes the embassy politically unsettling is not intelligence alone, but symbolism. A large Chinese diplomatic presence in central London reflects parity, not submission. It signals that Britain is no longer the gatekeeper deciding which powers may operate at scale.

That loss of control is rebranded as loss of leverage.

Values asserted without memory

Badenoch closes her argument with appeals to democracy, freedom, and values. These are legitimate concerns. What undermines them is the absence of historical awareness.

China remembers Britain as the power that fought wars to impose the opium trade, destroyed imperial cultural sites, seized territory, and governed Chinese land for generations. From Beijing’s perspective, British moral instruction arrives without acknowledgement of that past and therefore without credibility.

This does not place China beyond criticism. It means criticism without memory is not moral clarity. It is historical amnesia.

The underlying weakness

Badenoch’s article is not flawed because it is too confrontational toward China. It is flawed because it is too casual about Britain.

It assumes authority without reckoning, entitlement without power, leverage without leverage. That mindset once sustained empire. It no longer corresponds to reality.

China is not a subordinate state awaiting British approval. It is an ancient civilisation that endured a relatively brief but traumatic period of foreign domination, with Britain playing a central role. Its return to global prominence is not an anomaly but a reversion to historical norms.

To describe diplomacy as “kowtowing” is to reveal an inability to accept equality.

Britain does not need to submit to China. But it does need to abandon the belief that it still has the right to command it. Until that inherited entitlement is confronted, British claims of leverage will continue to sound confident in London and empty in Beijing.

That, not Keir Starmer’s itinerary, is the real weakness on display.