Insight: Dispute over China’s embassies
LONDON, July 12 (Reuters) – It started as a local dispute over China’s plans to build a new embassy next to the Tower of London – pitting the world’s second biggest superpower against an inner-city borough that blocked the project.
Just over seven months later, it is escalating into a diplomatic standoff that, officials from both countries told Reuters, is undermining efforts to repair their badly damaged relations.
Two Chinese and three British officials told Reuters the Chinese government had expressed its frustration over the failure to grant planning permission for its embassy at official-level meetings.
That has led officials in Britain, which is trying to forge deeper economic ties post-Brexit, to fear it could also halt their own plans to rebuild its embassy in Beijing. Space is already running short on the existing cramped site. One visitor said a squash court had to be turned into an office.
The officials say the embassy spat has undermined attempts by British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak to forge a new approach to China, one which would balance London’s national security interests with better cooperation on trade and climate change.
It is a far cry from 2015 when former Prime Minister David Cameron and President Xi Jinping shared beer and fish and chips at an English village pub and declared a “golden era” for London-Beijing relations.
China first announced plans in 2018 for a 700,000-square-foot embassy on the former site of Britain’s the Royal Mint – the official maker of British coins – its biggest mission in Europe, almost twice the size of its one in Washington.
It bought the land – around 4 miles from its current base in central London – for about 255 million pounds ($311 million). But while unelected planning officers accepted the proposal, local elected councilors overruled them, rejecting it.
