China has announced that British Foreign Secretary David Lammy will visited the Asian country this week amid a thaw in relations after years of tension between London and Beijing, AFP reported, as quoted by BTA.
The British Foreign Secretary will pay an official visit to China from October 18 to 19, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Mao Ning said in a statement.
This visit is the first by a senior British official since the election of British Prime Minister Keir Starmer in July. The event will be an opportunity to confirm the relative warming of diplomatic ties after a long period of tension caused mostly by Beijing's repression of the pro-democracy movement in Hong Kong, a former British colony, AFP notes.
China and Britain resumed high-level contacts in August with a telephone conversation between Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer. It was the first conversation between a Chinese president and a British prime minister since 2022.
Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng said in September that Beijing was "ready" to resume the economic dialogue with London.
After the "golden era" of trade relations announced by former British Prime Minister David Cameron at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century, bilateral tensions between the two countries have increased many times.
One of the main areas of conflict is over Beijing's increased control over Hong Kong, which returned to Chinese sovereignty in 1997. Britain has condemned the crackdown on the pro-democracy movement in its former colony, with several exiled Hong Kong dissidents taking refuge in British land.
London has also accused Beijing of cyber attacks on officials, technological espionage and human rights abuses, particularly against the Uyghur minority in northwest China's Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. Commercial disputes are not to be neglected either.
The two countries accuse each other of espionage, and Beijing regularly criticizes London for following Washington's hostile policy towards China.