The Brexit trigger that changed the world
Our British Defence Secretary John Healey keeps up the Labour government’s war-on-China schtick with a “we’re ready to fight” battle-cry that was widely mocked. Was Britain always this aggressive and desperate for war with China? Anna Chen analyses how it got this bad after so much promise.Britain scored a victory in Beijing in 2010, ushering in a “golden age” collaboration that was mutually profitable & peaceful, uniting the Eurasia landmass in Belt and Road trade. What followed was a concerted effort by the declining US to stop the prosperous stabilisation of Europe and Asia at all costs and stifle the emergence of BRICS. The results have been tragic and avoidable.
Article first published 30 July 2025: How the US wrecked Britain and China’s “Golden Age”
“Ready to fight,” blustered British Defence Secretary John Healey, heady on the new car smell rising from a lone HMS Prince of Wales aircraft-carrier docked in Australia at the weekend.
To widespread mockery, Healey delivered his oration on the fantasy threat to Taiwan the moment Prime Minister Anthony Albanese stepped on Yellow Peril turf on his diplomatic trade mission to China.
Were Healey's lurid suggestions of China invading its own province designed to inject steel into an Oz government wavering under an AUKUS lash-up now shrunk to AUK?
Some Australians finally twigged the folly of an existential war with their biggest trade partner (not to mention regional superpower). It’s no surprise, therefore, to see them seeking an off-ramp. If only the same could be said of the UK.
Britain wasn’t always so aggressively determined to wage war on China. Certainly not since the Cold War or even the Hong Kong handover. What changed?
BBC: China, Britain and the Nunzilla conundrum
In 2010, the BBC allowed me to make another programme for Radio 4: China, Britain and the Nunzilla Conundrum. It pointed out that China’s days of making our tat were over and the new kid on the block was about to transition into a world-leading technological, giant.How they laughed. What, with all those suicide factories?!
The timing turns out to be most telling. 2010 is the year of Obama’s Pivot to Asia (announced November 2011), following declaration of his status as the first Pacific President in a gargantuan territorial-pissing statement of intent.
Hillary Clinton kicks off the all-change with her incendiary speech at the ASEAN Regional Forum in Hanoi on 23 July 2010. She initiates the “smart power” strategy: stirring up enmity using carrot and stick to get the rising superpower’s neighbours on board to “contain China.”
Dubbing the Chinese end of the Pacific the “Western Pacific,” the US will later rename it the “Indo-Pacific,” removing China’ presence from its own coastal territory in favour of another Asian country completely round the corner. And as round the bend as Trump’s much-sneered-at renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America”.
All despite China saving the global economy from America’s greed-fuelled Great Crash of 2008 only two years previously. Oh, yes, who was it who did the damage? And who came to the rescue?
The BBC green-lighting my programme was a clear signal that, at that time, Britain had no intention of torpedoing their lifeboat and growth engine just on Obama’s say-so.
“Expect proxy wars and monstering of China in the supine media as we all get programmed to cheer World War Three and a Half.”
Anna Chen, 17 November 2011 after Obama’s Pivot to Asia
Britain not on the “contain China” bus
US and UK divergence is confirmed later that year after China floats the world economy out of danger.In November 2010, Prime Minister David Cameron and his trade team score a victory in Beijing, ushering in a “golden age” with China. A collaboration that is mutually profitable, peaceful and helps knit together the Eurasia landmass end-to-end in Belt and Road trade.
Remember not so many years ago when food was cheap and plentiful? Interest rates were near zero? And supply chains were mwah!
In the geopolitical Three Body Problem of Europe, China and the US, Italy signs up to BRICS. Duisberg shapes up to become Europe’s busiest port. Crimea is granted pole position as a major BRICS hub, while China invests heavily in Ukraine’s agriculture. The first freight train from China running the entire length of Eurasia arrives in east London in 2017.
Ominously, a declining America, still on the naughty step for its global malfeasance, finds its influence jeopardised. What with being so well protected by two oceans that it’s cut off from the rest of the Northern hemisphere where all the action’s happening. And so dependent on sea and air. If only it had terrific High Speed Rail like that lot over there. What, not even one kilometre of HSR? And those pesky oceans keep getting in the way.
So g’wan, guess what happens next. Maybe America accepts China’s invitation to join in and keep the party going, as asked by ambassador Cui Tankai?
Nope.
Check out my Shakedown Timeline, compiling articles, analysis and programmes over two and a half decades as it happened.
Made in China 2025
Europe and China have stabilised Eurasia following recession and the near-fatal US crash harshing everyone’s economic mellow. The global economy is rising in sync and there are very few flashpoints to blow up. Slow and steady as it goes.In 2015, Premier Li Keqiang signs Made in China 2025 (MIC 2025), announced by President Xi to great fanfare. This strategic plan aims to lift China out of its role as world’s factory by upgrading manufacturing and innovation, turning itself into a technological powerhouse, and earning a place at Top Table with the Big Boys.
We’ll make you so proud of us, they think naively. I remember shuddering a bit and wondering, did you get an okay from the alpha male? Not that you should be asking permission, but America might not be the proud parent you’re hoping for. You can feel the frisson of fury in the West as MIC 2025 throws the spotlight onto China’s beautiful cities, shrinking poverty, a growing middle-class and numerous achievements.
Oh, well, you must know what you’re doing.
Britain and the China Golden Goose
Britain continues to resist pressure to give up the Golden Goose they accessed in 2010. A big yah-boo-sucks to Obama’s neocon Pivot. Yay, bring on the Chinese tech. C’mon Huawei and your gorgeous 5G. Rah, Hinkley Point C nuclear power, you are so gonna make us world class. We might even get a Chinese built High Speed Rail.China is throwing money at us, investing in lil old Britain because it loves us. It loves our style, our queen. Our status as former biggest empire the world has ever known. Forget the pokey embassy in Portland Place up the street from the BBC. We’re gonna need a bigger base. Let’s have us the Royal Mint as home from home.
And then … and then …!
2016. Prime Minister David Cameron snatches defeat from the jaws of victory and caves in to right wing pressure to hold a referendum to leave Europe. Brexit: just the move that would fracture Europe and halt progress in its tracks.
“In order to bring China to heel, Trump would have to break the European Union first. That affects Britain, too. Once we’re out of the EU, it’s unlikely that Trump will allow Britain to trade with China … What was that about Brexit ‘taking back control’?”
Anna Chen, What’s Donald Trump’s trade war with China REALLY about? 13 November 2018
Boris Johnson – London mayor (2008-16), Foreign Secretary (2016-18) and Prime Minister-to-be (2019-22) – and the Brexit bus promise to fund the NHS from money saved, 2016.
Brexit wrecks it
American-born Boris Johnson, who doesn’t care about anything except his own interests, is pulled both ways. He eventually campaigns for Brexit in front of a red London bus bearing the promise to save £350 million a year for the NHS.Later, Peter Thiel’s Palantir and Cambridge Analytica, Facebook and the Donald Trump campaign (close to Nigel Farage) are all suspected of links to the outcome. Far from taking back control, 37% of Britons have voted to leap out of the EU frying pan and into the US fire, nailing us to the USS Titanic. Not burning but drowning.
Still, not to worry. Everyone knows it’s only a non-legally binding referendum to take the temperature of national opinion and not an actual deciding vote.
Over to you, leader of the opposition who is our last ditch defence against such xenophobic madness. Whatever you do, don’t press that big red Article 50 button.
Clown car reverses gear
The deed done, we may be losing the huge European market, as well as considerable political influence in the EU, but at least we have China as backup.Taking us completely by surprise, however, unforeseen by everybody except those of us paying attention, the Right and far Right float to Europe’s surface, emboldened by the wave of xenophobic reaction sweeping the continent.
In Britain, Farage reverses sharply from using trade with a rising China as a bribe for leaving the European Union: “Look at lucky Iceland, able to make lucrative deals with China! Leave the EU and we can too”.
Overnight, post-Brexit vote, China is morphed from strategic partner to competition bogey man. Preaching conflict with China, Farage’s new pet project, sits in alignment with US neocons and isolationists like his hero, presidential candidate Donald Trump.
Britain hangs on to benefits
However, Boris Johnson isn’t blind to China’s great wealth. A massively overflowing trough, it awaits the likes of clever men like the Prime Minister to free up all that moolah. In addition to the benefits the country enjoys from our golden age relations, Johnson’s family has financial interests in China. Johnson holds out manfully.In his 2005 Telegraph article, in which he scoffed at the Chinese for being incapable of original thought, he wrote: “It has become a cliché of geopolitical analysis to say that China is the next world superpower, that the 21st century will belong to Beijing, and that we had better get in tutors to teach our nippers Mandarin if they are to make it in the new world order.”
Boris Johnson writing on China in the Telegraph, September 2005
Britain has invested around £7 billion in Huawei 5G infrastructure which will secure our place ahead of the pack in the modern tech era. Helping our energy independence now that the North Sea is running out of oil (unfortunately privatised and no longer owned by the nation), there are several nuclear power stations in the pipeline, including Hinkley Point C, a third owned by the Chinese who are investing billions in the UK.
But there’s a new sheriff in town, a new clown in the driving seat, a giant bluebottle in the ointment. Choose your own metaphor and stir until shaken. Meet President Donald Trump, a throwback to 1950s nostalgia for a powerful America, Jim Crow and war on everyone who won’t bow down. Or am I confusing him with Nero or Caligula or Eric Cartman? Whatever, the prognosis isn’t looking good for anyone.
Superman versus Kryptonite
Brexit Day, 3 February 2020. Prime Minister Boris Johnson gives his famous Superman speech at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich about future trade agreements and championing free trade now that he’s lost us our key neighbouring market.He has ignored US demands on several occasions, including from Mike Pompeo only the previous month, to drop Chinese investments such as Huawei’s 5G, to which Johnson had just given limited approval, excluding it from military and nuclear sites and keeping it to the uncontroversial phone mast system.
The cheeky monkey even has the temerity to comment that America’s trade war on China has been “letting the air out of the tyres of the world economy”. This will be the last time Johnson ever shows evidence of a spine.
A few days later, Johnson feels the wrath of Trump in a phone call.
US Vice President Mike Pence says that the Trump administration had made its disappointment with the UK “very clear to them”. According to the Sunday Times account of the White House delegation’s visit to London in May 2019, the GCHQ team whose detailed intelligence and technology assessment exonerated Huawei, was given the hairdryer treatment for five hours. Former British ambassador to the US, now Lord Kim Darroch, says there were no “compelling technical arguments that undermined GCHQ’s case” and that the US case was “political”.
Nevertheless, Johnson ditches Huawei in June 2020 after Trump bans the company from using US-made chips. Neither Theresa May nor Johnson gets a post-Brexit trade deal with the US out of this.
“The people who brought us AUSTERITY, then sold us BREXIT on the promise of a trade deal with China beyond the dreams of avarice, are the same Empire Crusaders who now want a war with it. China is the newly rich kid who’s strayed onto mafia turf and is about to be rolled.”
Anna Chen, The Sleep of Reason produces monsters from the West’s own id, 13 January 2021
Eurasia land mess
A far cry from the optimism of 2017, and in contrast to the pre-Trump era, Europe is shooting down the swannee.The world is stuck between Scylla and Charybdis. Had Trump not won the 2016 election, the US might not have doubled down on Obama’s Pivot to China quite so fast. But had Hillary won, Russia would be back where it was after Gorbachev and Yeltsin sold out their own country. Pensioners going unpaid, children addicts living in sewers. Really bad Christmas-style jumpers being the height of fashion in Moscow. And quite possibly flattened.
With a four-year Trump pause, they’ve had time to build up defences against predatory NATO schemes.
In the Middle East, the Democrats have already shown their appetite for ruthless cruelty against the Palestinians, so no advantage there.
Ukraine is a proxy-war tragedy. “F**k the EU,” said Victoria Nuland to the US ambassador in Kiev just before their 2014 Maidan coup, as I am fond of reminding everyone. And they certainly did.
Europe, your nine lives are up
The EU bankrupts itself, throwing money at Zelensky even as he takes the anti-corruption agencies under his control. Germany is deindustrialised by the loss of cheap Russian energy, accepting the Nordstream pipeline being blown up by allies. Mertz wants a replay of Stalingrad with Russia and neglects domestic matters.Ursula von der Lyen has more lives than a cat. She’s survived accusations of grift, dodgy Pfizer deals, war-mongering galore, and a humiliatingly bad deal with President Trump. A $700b commitment over three years to buying America’s expensive LNG even though declining supplies make fulfilling orders unlikely. A $600b “investment” tribute to Trump, and “only” 15% tariffs. What a bargain.
France has been shafted before by the US, previously over the AUKUS nuclear submarine deal. Ursula’s agreement that the EU market be prised open for US aggrobiz has not pleased French farmers.
NATO chief Mark Rutte calls Trump “daddy” and dreams of fighting China. Presumably from the depths of a luxury bunker while the rest of us fry.
It would be ironic as well as suicidal for Britain to now rejoin the EU. Brexit did the damage. Is there really any point jumping into it as it circles the drain?
BRICS is now the largest trade bloc on the planet.
How the US wrecked Britain and China’s “Golden Age” is also published at Anna’s Substack
About Anna Chen: Writer, presenter and broadcaster: BBC and Guardian before the pivot to China; ResonanceFM. She has written for Asia Times, Tribune, Morning Star, New Internationalist, South China Morning Post. TED speaker, Orwell Prize shortlisted, cultural outrider.
