May set to present her post-Brexit vision

UK Prime Minister Theresa May starts her long-postponed visit to China today where she will present her post-Brexit vision of a "global Britain" that is open for business to the world beyond Europe.

All such high-level missions are as much symbolic as they are practical, and on that level she might discover that France's President Emmanuel Macron, who visited earlier in January, is a hard act to follow.

Macron reinforced his claim to a leadership role in the European Union's future relationship with China.

With an imperial Gallic flourish, the French head of state presented President Xi Jinping with the gift of a thoroughbred horse from France's Republican Guard, a reflection of China's own highly effective "panda diplomacy".

Britain's pro-Brexit Daily Telegraph noted that "Macron worked the charm from the moment he arrived".

May's visit is likely to be a much more nuts-and-bolts affair. Accompanied by a delegation of business leaders, she will examine the prospects of an enhanced economic relationship with Beijing.

The trip was first mooted almost one year ago, when May said she planned to visit Beijing "relatively soon" to define Britain's future trading relationship.

Welcoming Xi's landmark defense of globalization and free trade at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos last year, May clearly identified China as a potential partner at a time when the protectionist tendencies of the new Donald Trump presidency were emerging.

However, Trump got to Beijing first, with a visit in November that clashed with the dates of the planned trip by the UK prime minister.

She might have gone earlier but for her decision to try to win her Conservative party a bigger parliamentary majority on a snap election. As it turned out, the June poll deprived her of a clear majority and narrowed her options on Brexit and other issues.

A year and a half after Britain's historic referendum vote to quit the EU, and with just over a year to go before it formally leaves, many of the questions surrounding its future relationship with Europe, let alone the rest of the world, are unresolved.

Whatever the outcome of the UK-EU negotiations, China will be central to Britain's post-Brexit strategy. Anti-EU campaigners had held out the prospect of a confident, outward-looking Britain, independently exploiting the benefits of globalization, as one of the major advantages of a divorce from the EU.

From the perspective of the rest of the world, however, Britain's prospects may appear to have been diminished rather than enhanced by its decision to leave.

For trading partners outside Europe, the UK served as a reliable gateway to the wider continent. Beijing also saw Britain as more liberal on trade issues than some of its instinctively more protectionist European partners.

Beijing, like most nations and the British themselves, did not expect the British to vote to leave.

Premier Li Keqiang summed up the Chinese view that Brexit had increased uncertainty in the global economy, while affirming Beijing "would like to see a united, stable EU, and a stable, prosperous Britain".

But China has pragmatically accepted the reality and sought to underline the potentially positive factors. Within a few weeks of the vote, Liu Xiaoming, China's ambassador to the UK, said the referendum result had not dampened the enthusiasm of Chinese businesses for investing in Britain.

Win-win cooperation is at the heart of Xi's vision of a globalized world. China's trade negotiators will closely watch the British government's moves to take back anti-dumping powers from the EU, which in 2016 imposed punishing tariffs on imported Chinese steel.

Britain might be open to a more liberal tariff regime in the hope of attracting new investment and enhanced trade deals from China.

Both sides continue to cleave to the "golden era" of China-UK ties, adopted during Xi's state visit to Britain in 2015. One of the selling points, in the words of the then-prime minister David Cameron was that closer ties gave China access "to a country that is a leading member of the EU and has so many other contacts and roles in the world".

That vision has been revised.

UK business minister Greg Clark said during the visit to China of a high-level British delegation in December: "In the world after Brexit, Britain will continue to be a place that trades wholeheartedly with the rest of the European Union. For a lot of Chinese companies and investors being based in Britain, it is still a good place to be part of the European system."

May will likely use her visit to overcome the perception that she is less enthusiastic about closer relations than her predecessor. One of her first actions as prime minister was to delay a Chinese-funded project to build a nuclear power plant in the UK. It had been touted by Cameron as a sign of Britain's openness to foreign investment.

With the relationship back on course, the May visit is likely to produce positive headlines, not least in the pro-Brexit UK press.

The UK will look forward to a free-trade agreement with China but UK international trade minister Liam Fox dampened expectations on that front on his recent visit to Beijing.

"There are a whole range of tools in the box," he said. "And people tend to talk as though an FTA is the only tool we have available in terms of trade liberalization. It's not."