George Osborne is travelling to Shanghai, the “epicentre” of China’s summer stock market meltdown, in a show of solidarity today to declare: “Britain and China — we will stick together.”
Mr Osborne’s five-day mission to China has seen the chancellor press on with his strategy of embracing Beijing as he attempts to prove Britain is “China’s best partner in the west”. The chancellor insists he raised China’s human rights record in private meetings with senior government ministers in Beijing yesterday but his public utterances have been highly supportive and uncritical.
Mr Osborne is making his main address of the tour at the Shanghai stock exchange to say he deliberately chose “the epicentre of the volatility in financial markets this summer”.