London (CNN) — A humdrum office that stood next to an Amazon warehouse on an industrial estate in Oxfordshire, southern England, was for many years a crucial line of defense in Britain’s national security. “The Cell,” as the office was known, allowed the UK government to keep a careful eye on the operations of Huawei, the Chinese tech giant, as it built out Britain’s mobile networks.

Owned by Huawei but staffed by British cybersecurity experts with the highest levels of security clearance, “The Cell” was tasked – at Huawei’s expense – with checking every piece of hardware and software for strings of code that could be exploited for malicious purposes.

In the end, however, that unusual arrangement failed to salve Britain’s wariness about how the Chinese government could use Huawei’s equipment. After a decade of allowing Huawei to build a footprint in the country, the British government announced in 2020 that it would ban Huawei from the country’s 5G network, as a parliamentary inquiry concluded in the same year that there was “clear evidence of collusion” between Huawei and the “Chinese Communist Party apparatus.” The company’s 5G equipment already installed must be removed by next year.

“The Cell” now stands as a monument to the difficult trade-offs that Britain faces in navigating its relations with China, as it struggles to balance the security concerns of its intelligence agencies with the private sector’s desire for cheap technology and the government’s hope for economic uplift.

Analysts and former diplomats told CNN that successive British governments have failed to strike the correct balance on China, resulting in a policy characterized by mistrust, skittishness and incoherence.

The question of the UK’s relationship with China has become more pressing amid US President Donald Trump’s upending of the US-dominated world order, which has spurred some Western allies to seek to diversify their trading partners and reduce their reliance on the United States. As more and more Britons question the value of the much-vaunted “special relationship” with Washington, Prime Minister Keir Starmer will on Wednesday become the first British leader to visit China in eight years.

In an interview with Bloomberg News ahead of his departure, Starmer said he would not be obliged to “choose” between relations with the United States or China. Although the UK will keep “close ties” with the US on business and security, Starmer said that “sticking your head in the sand and ignoring China… wouldn’t be sensible.” He said his visit to the country could bring “significant opportunities” for British firms.

A spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry said Starmer’s visit provides Beijing “an opportunity to enhance mutual trust” with the UK, and could “open a new chapter of health and stable development in UK-China relations.”

Starmer’s trip comes a week after Britain green-lit plans for China to build a “mega” embassy close to London’s financial district. The decision was delayed for months due to fears among lawmakers that the sprawling complex, which will sit near fiber-optic cables carrying sensitive data for financial firms, could pose security risks.

Britain’s intelligence agencies issued no specific warnings about the embassy, but have long warned of the threat that China poses more broadly.

“Do Chinese state actors present a UK national security threat? The answer is, of course, yes they do, every day,” Ken McCallum, the head of the domestic spy service MI5, said in October. A 2023 review termed China an “epoch-defining challenge” to Britain.

Despite these fears, Starmer’s Labour government came to power with a pledge to put UK relations with China on a firmer footing. In its 2024 manifesto, Labour pledged to end “14 years of damaging Conservative inconsistency over China,” offering instead a “long-term and strategic approach to managing our relations.” To that end, the government commissioned an audit of what it called “our most complex bilateral relationship.”

When the audit was finally unveiled – behind schedule – lawmakers were left none the wiser as to the key details of Britain’s approach to China.

“Much of the audit was conducted at a high classification and most of the detail is not disclosable without damaging our national interests,” then-Foreign Secretary David Lammy told parliament in June.

The result is a policy of “omertá,” meaning a code of silence, according to Charles Parton, a former British diplomat who spent more than two decades working on China.

“If you want to have a proper strategy which people understand and pull in the same direction, then they need to know what your strategy is – and they haven’t revealed it,” Parton told CNN.

The tradeoffs, he said, remain invidious: “There are four things they’re balancing: National security, which they declare as their number one priority; economic prosperity; environmental concerns; and public and parliamentary opinion. You’re never going to get cheers from all of those four sides.”

From 'golden era' to 'ice age'

Britain once, however, thought it could have it all. Starting in 2010, the Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron and his finance minister, George Osborne, heavily courted Beijing and placed what has since been termed a geopolitical “bet on China.”

Osborne, who visited Beijing regularly, attempted to position London’s financial district as a gateway for Chinese money into Europe and helped secure investment in British nuclear power stations. By 2015, ahead of Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s state visit to Britain, Cameron proclaimed a “golden era” of relations with Beijing. During the visit, the prime minister took Xi for a pint at a 16th-century pub near his official country retreat in Buckinghamshire, west of London.

But things soon began to unravel. Osborne’s hope of turning London into a European clearinghouse for the yuan was dented by Britain’s vote in 2016 to leave the European Union. Beijing’s 10-year “Made in China 2025 project,” which sought to reduce China’s reliance on foreign technology and make the country a global high-tech leader, also dampened British exports to China.

China’s growing crackdown on Hong Kong further strained relations, and spurred then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson to offer citizenship for up to 3 million residents of Hong Kong, a former colony that Britain handed back to China in 1997.

By 2020, some trends began to go into reverse. Johnson announced the Huawei ban in July of that year, having initially approved the use of its equipment. In 2023, China halted funding for one of the nuclear stations it had begun to build.

In his Bloomberg interview, Starmer conceded that Britain had for years “blown hot and cold” on China. “We had the golden age, which then flipped to an Ice Age. We reject that binary choice.”

Surveying the past decade of relations, Osborne’s “bet on China” had “categorically” not paid off, said George Magnus, an associate at the China Centre at the University of Oxford.

Magnus said the wager had “opened the doors wide to dependency on China” on now-paused nuclear financing, on real estate, on Chinese financial influence in the City of London, and on “Chinese interference in academic, business and governmental institutions.”

“And all for what? Very little in terms of trade and economic benefit for the UK,” he said. “I’d call this period – for the UK at least – the ‘fool’s golden era.’”

A thaw?

But the increasing unpredictability of the US, which has imposed heavy tariffs on its allies, has prompted Starmer and other Western leaders to look again to China. French President Emmanuel Macron visited Beijing in December, while Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney visited earlier this month. After Starmer’s visit this week, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz is expected to visit in February.

The British public may also be starting to mellow on China. A poll by YouGov this month found that 27% of Britons view China as a “friend and ally,” or a “friendly rival” – up from 19% in October.

Meanwhile, trust in the US is cratering. YouGov found that about as many Britons (23%) see the US as a major threat to Britain as they do China (25%), following Trump’s recent threats against Greenland.

While a tentative tilt toward China is understandable, Parton, the former diplomat, called for clearer thinking about the supposed economic benefits of closer ties with Beijing. Although lawmakers often tout that China is Britain’s “third biggest trading partner,” Parton said this matters little for the economic growth Britain craves. The focus should instead be on British exports to China, he said, which have long been in decline.

China recorded the world’s largest ever trade surplus in 2025 – more than $1.2 trillion – which has deepened fears among countries that a flood of Chinese goods could further hollow out their domestic industries.

Parton said Britain should not go cap-in-hand to China and that Starmer should refuse to be pushed around. He noted that British exports to China increased in 2012 despite Beijing’s outrage over the exiled Tibetan Buddhist spiritual leader Dalai Lama’s visit to Britain that year, and exports fell during the supposed “golden era.” “Doesn’t that make a point that, actually, politics aren’t really that important to trade?” he asked.

Magnus, of the University of Oxford, also cautioned that while Beijing may be a more predictable partner than the US at present, that does not mean it is a more reliable one.

“How can (the Chinese Communist Party) be reliable, except to pursue its own interests?” he said. “This doesn’t mean don’t trade, but it does mean don’t be naive.”

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CNN’s John Liu contributed reporting.