Is China our enemy or our ally? Is it an adversary or a partner? The trading relationship is huge, but so are the security risks.

In the City, China means big business. Last year the UK exported £30bn worth of goods and services to China while we bought £70bn worth from them. But we exported £3.5bn less to China than we did in 2024 and we bought £3bn more. So, it’s a big relationship – but it’s not a balanced one.

We sold China nearly £3bn worth of financial and business services last year, up about 30 per cent on the year before, so it’s no wonder that global business leaders here in the Square Mile want to keep that tap turned on.

But behind this economic relationship lies an uncomfortable and seemingly contradictory reality: China is hostile to us. The head of MI5 has warned that Chinese spying against the UK is carried out on “an epic scale.” The UK’s top spook, Ken McCallum, says “Chinese state actors present a national security threat to the UK every day”, including cyber espionage, clandestine technology acquisition, and covert influence campaigns.

China has hacked into our Electoral Commission, deployed spies in Parliament,........

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