Name: What happened on the UK Prime Minister's trip to China? | BBC Newscast
Uploaded: 2026-01-30T16:58:57.000Z
Duration: 27 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

And Sarah Montague and James Landau also here in the studio.

I was very tickled to see that Keir starmer got exactly 18 minutes of coverage on the Chinese news last night.

Laura Bicker was telling me from Beijing.

So I'm thinking we could maybe give his trip to China about.

Well, is that some sort of proportional calculation?

That's just a bit of a target to aim for, isn't it a nice little challenge a lot.

Well, how many is that half an hour program he got?

Yeah, it's half an hour and it's the main, like state sponsored news.

And it sounds like it was more than either Mark Carney or Emmanuel Macron got when they went.

Quite hard to obviously to be a judge on that.

James, you must have been to China as a journalist a few times.

You know, there's nothing new about that.

And there are always problems with comms, getting a VPN to work and things like that.

I mean, the first time I ever went to China was a very, very long time ago.

And I can remember, you know, even, you know, if you were thirsty, you would say to your, your friend in the hotel room, I'm really thirsty.

Then five minutes later a nice person would turn up at the door with a freshly boiled.

Because they've been listening like that and there'll be.

There would be some sort of air duct or something and then literally there would be a, you know, sort of 1970s style microphone with a little tripod that sort of sticks with a very long thick cable.

And you know, so the surveillance is certainly not new.

Well, Chris Mason used his burner phone to send us this little message From Beijing.

Hello, newscasters, My rather parky Beijing.

You know, when I'm doing the television news, they don't like things like hats, but

flip a neck, I'm putting it back on because it is cold.

I'd have the snood on as well if I could, but

it would get in the way of the microphone.

So day two of the Prime Minister's trip to China.

This was the big day, really, meeting the President, meeting the Premier, the second in charge politically, all of the talk about warming up the relationship between the UK and China and a couple of case studies the government would point to in doing that.

So this idea of visa free travel for trips of under 30 days coming soon.

We don't have a date yet, but the government hopes it'll be signed off as soon as possible.

And then halving the tariff, the import taxes on whiskey that is sold from the UK into China from 10% to 5%.

What would you like to hear about a trip that goes a little beyond what you might hear on the main television news or radio news or whatever?

It's a wonderful kind of privilege, really lucky to get to go on trips like this.

We've just been in a great restaurant down the road.

However, one of the things on the spinning Susan thing, lazy Susan, that's the phrase in the middle of the table, was duck head, duck head.

You've actually got to say that quite carefully, haven't you?

You've got to eat it quite carefully as well because it's incredibly chewy and it's something of an acquired taste.

The rest of the dish was absolutely fantastic.

There's been a lot of focus today on this bit of the Prime Minister's trip about the business deals and this huge bus of CEOs that the Prime Minister took with them.

Obvious they went on a plane first and then a bus around Beijing and you were speaking to some of them on the World at One.

Well, we've done, we've done quite a lot of it through the week, but

today, having spoken to business people yesterday, today we sort of thought we should speak to some of these cultural figures because actually about a third of the 60, 50, 60 delegates are people from culture and sport.

The head of what you call it, table tennis England, the rsc, there's a whole.

Some museums visit Britain and we were just trying to get a sense of what they were doing and kind of what the, the idea and I guess it's sort of soft power as well.

I mean, you know, to hear Chris there sounding quite excited about the jolly.

We've all been on those trips where you people calls it a jolly and you think it's not, it's a hard work.

But it does sound like they're having a complete laugh such that I almost said, I sort of said, are you.

I said, so what are you singing at the back of the bus?

Yes, yes, they've been singing at the back of the bus.

But Alex, isn't that interesting that the fact that there can be a British trip to China where there's some levity, some jollity which suggests it's not that China's a massive security challenge or a massive security risk or a big problem for Britain.

I think that number 10 will be quite aware of the potential optics around that because if you listen to the messaging that's come from Downing Street, Keir Starmer, everybody else, of course, that they are talking qu openly about their desire to warm up the relationship or to improve the links that might lead to better trading relationships or economic benefits or whatever, but

they are also caveating that quite carefully with the notion of being clear eyed and aware of the security implications and some of the challenges in the relationship with China, not least around the things that we're familiar with about human rights.

Kirstama says he's raised those in his discussions with the Chinese Premier.