Policy makers, whoever they work for, whether it is business, government, NGOs, love scenarios, and building up models for how things might work out. It is work I have done a lot of over the last few years, either from within the Foreign Office, or at Chatham House, and then as an academic in both Australia and the UK. Sometimes this work involves taking a group of inputs – economic, social or environmental ones – and then working out what happens when there is a crisis or a problem. Usually one goes from worst case to best case, with a tendency to map out the middle ground, and suggest that this is the likely direction of travel. And indeed, often that is what happens, in the short term at least, until something wholly unexpected happens. Like Mike Tyson, the boxer, once shrewdly pointed out, most strategies work fine in a fight until someone lands a fist in your face! Then it is back to the drawing board.

While in full flow, giving my “three tier” scenarios for UK–China relations some years back, one of the people I was addressing politely coughed and said that while it was all very interesting, to paraphrase: “We are not really in the business of fiction. It’s all very Goldilocks, isn’t it, setting out these good, bad, and ok options. A bit like tasting one porridge and finding it too hot, and the next and finding it too cold, and the third and saying that’s fine. Isn’t it better just to focus on structures about how things are now – at least there is evidence for that, and it lets you map out how the whole machine might go forward, and what’s possible and not possible.” That struck me as a wise suggestion. So in this chapter, having already identified the nature of the problem, I will simply map out the structure of the present, and then set parameters for what, in the new field of opportunities we call Brexit, is and isn’t possible. Once we know the limits, we can start meaningfully making plans.

The mission was simple. Get the cavalcade of limousines and the associated bus-loads of officials, diplomats and assistants up the road to the traditional pub and have a pint and some fish and chips. But things were never going to be that straightforward. The first problem was the road – a narrow country lane, which could barely accommodate a large car, let alone a fleet of buses. The second was the pub – a pretty but modest venue, which meant only a few people would actually get to go inside when the delegation finally arrived. The third was the demand that a few realistic-looking local punters be sprinkled around the place to make it appear vaguely natural for the photographers and journalists when they snapped their photos.

The lead participants in this mini-drama were the British Prime Minister David Cameron, and the visiting dignitary he was entertaining – Xi Jinping. It was September 2015, and the event was the first state visit by a leader of the People’s Republic of China to the UK for a decade. The specific location was Cameron’s Oxfordshire constituency, at a pub he liked near one of his homes. There were other reasons to make a fuss about this event. From July 2012 to late 2013, relations between the two countries had hit a particularly rocky patch – relations that were never that straightforward given the disruptive role of the British Empire, at its peak in Chinese affairs for the century after the First Opium War (1839–41), and the prickly history over Hong Kong leading up to 1997. In May 2012, Cameron had met with the exiled Tibetan religious leader, the Dalai Lama, despite vehement protestations from Beijing. He had done so, on the pretext that the Dalai Lama was a spiritual personage, during a ceremony to confer a prize on the Tibetan at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. He may also have calculated that as London would later that year host the Olympics, after the Beijing games in 2008, the Chinese would refrain from any major response.

It was one of those large public debating festivals held usually during the warm months in Britain. A packed schedule of events over two days, addressing issues from the US election to the impact of artificial intelligence – a smorgasbord of argumentation and intellectual manoeuvring by speakers and their audiences. Panels with invited experts on specific themes spoke for a few minutes each and then there were moderated question and answer sessions with the audience. I was glad to have been invited just as an academic attendee. Academics were at least spared the full onslaught of public indignation and rage because we were regarded as experts present to give balance. Polemicists, controversialists, politicians, and self-publicisers were not so lucky. But then, in an odd way, brutal treatment by their audiences seemed to be what they were there for. They had Nietzsche’s famous dictum engraved on their hearts: what didn’t kill them was going to make them stronger; they seemed to be there to survive and then get more powerful.

Academics are supposedly custodians of neutrality. That is our claim about ourselves at least. And these days, the title “Professor” usually gives some pause for thought and restraint on whomever you are facing publicly and grants a little bit of mercy. My session was about the impact of the rise of China. The argument I used was one that I had deployed at similar events throughout Europe and the rest of the world over the previous months and years: like it or not, China is going to be part of our global economic future and probably our geopolitical and social one. Even if we are not going to it, it is coming to us – through investment, finance, students and tourists. This is a moment of historic change. For the first time in modern history, a power with a profoundly different cultural background and a very different set of values (ones that I will spell out in more detail later) is about to take centre stage. We (and throughout this work, when I use the word “we” I am referring to constituencies in the UK) need to adjust our mindsets, revise our vocabularies, and reset our standard maps of the world.

This is the twentieth book I have written since 2006. That mostly overwhelmingly happy and positive experience has taught me that it is a worthwhile investment to set out clearly, right at the start of a work, what it is not. To do so serves two purposes. It clarifies what the reader can expect (and all too often, the reader, as Virginia Woolf pointed out in one of her magnificent essays, is neglected or even forgotten, with writers making their lives harder, not easier) and it also insures one, at least a bit, from the more zealously purist reviewers who, from the title alone, start to build a narrative which, if the book fails to address this, irritates and upsets them. I prefer not to irritate and upset readers, or reviewers, and am grateful for the attention of anyone picking up something I have written and spending their hard-won time on it. So as a courtesy, right at the start, I will say what readers will not find in this short work.

This is not a comprehensive overview of UK–China relations, nor, even remotely, a history of that relationship. Strangely enough, there is, as yet, no definitive book along these lines, and although I would be tempted and would love one day to write such a book, the urgency of the subject I do intend to discuss here – the structure of UK–China relations at a time of potential great upheaval because of Brexit and what this relationship, and how it might develop, means for the wider world given the immense importance of understanding China’s new global impact – means that project is for another day. A comprehensive history of British–Chinese relations would be a huge undertaking largely because it would embrace much of the colonial history of Britain from the early nineteenth century onwards, when China first started to properly figure in its world, and the development of China from the fading years of the Qing era onwards. Scholars, such as Robert Bickers, have addressed parts of this history in their excellent studies, which are referred to in the Further Reading.

After all the razzmatazz, and high-level engagement, a relationship between countries boils down to the interaction of individual people at different levels and with different orders of complexity. Products and services between countries are traded, sold and delivered. But people sit at the core of this activity with their ideas, emotions, aspirations, attitudes, negative and positive prejudices, and above all their own motivations.

The EU and China recognize this with what is called a “people-to-people” strand of dialogue. There are formal events, memoranda of understanding and all the usual paraphernalia of diplomacy. But underneath, the main action boils down to getting people from European countries and people from China to sit on planes and travel across the world to meet and have direct interaction with each other. The more that happens, the more we can really talk about a healthy, multifaceted relationship. In the era of Maoist enclosure, Chinese people did not figure much in the daily lives of the British, nor of any other western country. Those Chinese that were in the UK largely came via Hong Kong, and were one of the smallest ethnic groups. The novelist Timothy Mo wrote in the 1980s an account of a young Chinese wife newly arrived in Britain to be with her husband, dealing with the bewilderment of coming to terms with a new bureaucratic system. The title of his work, Sour Sweet, captures one thing well: the ambiguity of the British-Chinese experience of being tolerated and yet never quite being accepted. In the UK people of Chinese ethnicity, even those born and brought up in the country have had to handle clichés and misperceptions about them in the society they call home. When I attended primary schools in Kent in the 1970s, I was taught that the Chinese are introspective and keep to themselves. The structures of the Cold War world seemed to confirm this. There were places where one might encounter Chinese – Chinese restaurants for instance, or Chinatowns in major cities – but rarely anywhere else. People of Chinese ethnicity did not appear much on television, nor in the media.

What does China want? It is a commonly asked question by business people, politicians and commentators not just in the UK, but throughout the world today as they engage with this newly emerging power. Throughout Asia, North America, Central Asia, the Middle East, and into Eastern, Central, and finally Western Europe and the rest of the world, figuring out China’s plans and desires towards itself and the outside world are of central concern. Interpreting these desires correctly, working out how to leverage them or gain benefits from them, and whether to see them as benign or more assertive and threatening – has become the work of diplomats, business people, analysts and politicians the world over.

China’s statements about its own plans and desires are not unproblematic. Under Hu Jintao, the main Chinese leader from 2002 to 2012, an increasingly heavy silence reigned. The most the world got were statements of “peaceful rise” and “harmonious co-operation”. Such soporific rhetoric was hard to work with, particularly as China’s actions – aggression in the South and East China Sea, and shrill declarations of hurt feelings when criticized over matters like Xinjiang or Tibet, which it considered domestic ones – often seemed completely at odds with its muted language when addressing international relations. Demands in the United States and elsewhere that China make a clearer statement of its intentions became unavoidable when confronted with the burgeoning size of the country’s economy. From 2002 to 2012, despite the negative impact of the world financial crisis in 2008, China quadrupled its GDP from $1.4 trillion to $8.5 trillion.1 Other economies like that of the United States managed less than double that growth. China could no longer hide its size and significance on the world stage, even if it wanted to.

With Xi Jinping, from 2012, there was a major corrective. He asked his fellow politburo members to tell the China story. He also asked his diplomats to be proactive. The Belt and Road Initiative was amongst the most important of these new statements of intent: the grand geopolitical idea first articulated by Xi in 2013 as “The New Silk Road” and attempting to map out a Chinese vision of how it engages with the world around it on balanced, mutually beneficial ways.

Not many years ago, a visiting politician made an important speech in Paris. His words are worth recalling:

The man who uttered those words was Xi Jinping, the president of China.

I can’t think of any British business or political leader who could visit China and demonstrate the same level of understanding – or even interest – in the Chinese civilization. And yet this detailed level of knowledge about Western culture is not unusual for a Chinese politician. When Wen Jiabao, the Chinese premier, came to visit David Cameron, he brought a copy of a book by Adam Smith. But he did not bring Smith’s Enquiry into the Wealth of Nations, where he famously likened the market to an “invisible hand” determining prices. Instead, Wen brought The Theory of Moral Sentiments – much less well known in the West – which suggests proper limits on the market, and he quoted from it at length. Wen’s first request was to visit Stratford-upon-Avon where he asked to see a performance of King Lear: “I read and re-read many of Shakespeare’s plays as a young man,” he said, “such as Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Othello and King Lear. His works were not to be read only once or even ten times. They must be read up to a hundred times to be fully understood.” The Wall Street Journal thought that Wen was making a wider point, when it reported: