In September 2015, during his ministerial visit to China, George Osborne tweeted: “China and Britain stand on brink of golden decade of cooperation. No economy in world as open to Chinese investment as UK. #UKChina.”
The former chancellor’s words have not aged well. Less than five years later, the “golden decade” has ended (as Isabel Hilton writes in this week’s NS). The UK government is set to announce the removal of the Chinese tech giant Huawei from Britain’s 5G network, and has offered citizenship to 350,000 British National Overseas passport holders in Hong Kong (with a further 2.6 million residents eligible), in response to China’s draconian new security law in the region.
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