hen it is fully open later this year, the Londoner Macao hotel will be a kitsch recreation of tourist Britain, with a facade modelled on the Houses of Parliament, actors in bearskin hats performing the changing of the guard, and an English fried breakfast served at a restaurant called Churchill’s Table. The new casino resort in China is one of the more tacky examples of the country’s fondness for British culture. Alongside the US and the Gulf, China is a crucial overseas market for English Premier League football broadcast rights. Britain’s heritage attractions, private schools and designer brands are immensely popular with China’s elite. The UK is also a favoured destination for higher education: numbers of Chinese students at UK universities soared by 56% from 2015 to 2019. The strength of these connections makes the recent decline in the Sino-British relationship all the more painful. After the UK ordered a ban on the Chinese telecoms company Huawei last year, the Chinese foreign ministry was happy to point out that Britain’s share of the world market was “relatively small”, and the decision would thus have little effect on Huawei’s growth. Last week, the Chinese foreign ministry summoned the UK ambassador, Caroline Wilson, for a dressing down over an article she wrote defending international media coverage of the country. As Britain makes an increasingly vocal defence of Hong Kong’s threatened freedoms, Beijing has warned London sternly against interference in its “internal affairs”. Beijing’s waspish slapdowns of Britain disguise an uncomfortable reality. Like it or not, China needs Britain’s goodwill more than it cares to admit. From an Asian perspective, the UK remains a significant military power, with a willingness to project force overseas. That will be underlined later this year, when Britain’s new aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth sails to the Pacific on her maiden voyage. This is a part of the world where China has become increasingly assertive, building military facilities on disputed islands in the South China Sea and making regular incursions into Taiwan’s air-defence zone. The Chinese response to the planned deployment was to characterise Britain as an interloper, warning against “countries outside this region sending their warships thousands of kilometres from home to flex muscles”. Alexander O’Neill, who runs a strategic advisory consultancy in Singapore, told me: “China will work hard to make this foray difficult for the Royal Navy. I think that means harassing the strike group as much as possible.” Perhaps most irritating of all for Beijing is the fact that the warship is likely to sail through the region at a time when the Chinese Communist party is celebrating the centenary of its founding. China has become a great power in military terms, with the world’s largest navy and a vast missile arsenal. Its economic rise may just have been accelerated by skilful handling of the pandemic – it was the only major economy that did not shrink last year. But it is also a lonely power. Along its eastern borders, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are all US allies. To the south, there is a military buildup on the border with India, following a brutal low-tech clash last year that left at least 20 Indian soldiers dead. It has few reliable friends in the region beyond its allies Pakistan and Cambodia (which is effectively a Chinese client state). The most remarkable decline in relations has been with Australia, which incensed China by calling for an investigation into the origin of the Covid-19 pandemic. China responded with tariffs and import restrictions on Australian beef, and increasingly cantankerous and undiplomatic language. This belligerence has been met with solidarity from the Five Eyes – the group of English-speaking countries that make up an intelligence partnership. In November, the five countries – the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – issued a joint statement criticising China’s disqualification of pro-democracy legislators in Hong Kong. For all of China’s economic and military might, this is an uncomfortable position to be in. Britain’s cultural cachet in China co-exists with a state-led nationalism which emphasises the UK’s history as an imperialist aggressor. The “patriotic education” promoted in the country’s schools since Tiananmen Square reminds children of the 19th-century opium wars, when the west forced China to open up for trade, including the sale of opium. The shattered masonry of the Yuanmingyuan, the imperial palace in Beijing pillaged and burned by British and French troops in 1860 at the end of the second opium war, is preserved as a memorial to China’s national humiliation. This has led to a paradoxical relationship that combines avid consumption of western sports and fashions with intense sensitivity to slights: a case in point is the blackout of NBA games after the manager of the Houston Rockets basketball team tweeted in support of Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protests. Over the past century and a half, Britain’s economic and military strength has declined while China has emerged as a superpower. The era in which London could impose its will on Beijing is, fortunately, at an end. But the awkward relationship between the two countries is a reminder that hard power alone is insufficient at building ties between nations. Rather than making it more secure, China’s belligerence and relatively weak cultural soft power is driving other countries closer together in the face of a perceived threat. Britain’s foreign and defence review, with its tilt to the “Indo-Pacific” region, was greeted with gibes this week by China’s state-run tabloid Global Times. The newspaper described the post-Brexit reordering of priorities as “London’s fantasy of reviving its past glory as a world superpower”. Reflexive chauvinism is a hard habit to break. Jeevan Vasagar is the author of Lion City: Singapore and Invention of Modern Asia