There is widespread frustration at the British government’s muted initial response to China’s plans to impose new security laws in Hong Kong, raising the perennial questions about what the UK can realistically do to persuade China to protect the territory’s cherished freedoms. Johnny Patterson, the chief executive of Hong Kong Watch, described the UK’s response so far to the planned crackdown as “limp, inane and could have been copied and pasted directly from their previous statements”. “It was utterly inappropriate given the gravity of the situation,” he said. “Beijing’s decision to impose the worst kind of draconian legislation without consulting the [Hong Kong] legislative council is a direct breach of the handover agreement. Given Britain’s moral and legal duties as co-signatories of that settlement, the prime minister should be leading the way in calling it out and drawing together like-minded countries to coordinate a joint response.” A subsequent UK, Canada and Australia statement issued on Friday was tougher in tone. Arguably, the chances of forcing China to rethink are dependent not on the UK government – which handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997 under a 50-year form of semi-autonomy known as one country, two systems – but largely on the reactions of others, notably the markets, the people of Hong Kong and the US Senate. The UK, as former colonial power and joint signatory of the 1984 Sino-British joint declaration, could seek to persuade Chinese diplomats that the destruction of Hong Kong’s freedoms will destroy its economic value to China. It could also warn that the measures will provoke the kind of street protests that forced China to shelve a clampdown the last time this was attempted, in 2003. Months of new protests would only damage Beijing’s image, already tarnished by allegations of a coronavirus cover-up and negligence. The UK Foreign Office could privately lobby the US to end Hong Kong’s preferential trading status by declaring it is no longer an autonomous jurisdiction. Moves to this effect are already under way on a bipartisan basis in the US, and could become a focus of revived plans for a G7 leaders’ meeting in Washington next month. The UK foreign affairs select committee chairman, Tom Tugenhadt, applauded the tough initial US response, saying: “Beijing is killing the one country, two systems model followed by all President Xi’s predecessors. He’s turning his back on the past.” Apart from that, the UK in extremis could offer sanctuary to as many as 150,000 British national overseas passport owners in Hong Kong – something the Home Office has resisted but which has support from the liberal internationalists on the Tory benches. But the government is leery of confronting China or enlisting in Donald Trump’s trade war on the country. At both official and business level, cooperation between China and the UK remains intense. In recent weeks the chancellor, the health secretary and the deputy national security adviser have all spoken with the Chinese ambassador to London, Liu Xiaoming. The golden era hailed by the former prime minister David Cameron may be over, but the UK does not favour Trump’s economic decoupling. The UK is the number one European destination for Chinese foreign investment, which in the past five years has equalled the sum in the previous 30 years. China is also the UK’s third largest market. Trade has slumped in recent months but may rebound. Indeed Liu, speaking to 1,500 CBI members in a webinar on Wednesday, portrayed the UK and China as “the flagbearers for free trade and globalisation beyond Covid-19”, contrasting that alliance with Trump’s protectionism and flouting of a rules-based order. In the view of Nicolas Veron, of the Brussels-based thinktank Bruegel, it is almost as if the UK, weakened after Brexit, could become a site of competition or testing ground between China and the US as they each seek the UK’s allegiance. The ambassador seemed confident that the UK government was not about to turn against his country. “We heard some politicians spreading this argument for ‘decoupling’, and some even go so far as to preaching the cold war rhetoric against China, and that is very harmful. I had webinars with the Chinese business community because they are very concerned. They do not know how pervasive, how massive and how influential this rhetoric is. I had good conversations with British secretaries and senior officials, and they told me these words did not represent the UK government position, and I believe that.” He was speaking before the Chinese Communist party made its move on Hong Kong, but it was a reminder of how the UK today has more at stake than the civil rights of its former colony. It looks like the first true test of Boris Johnson’s Global Britain.