LONDON — Britain wants its financial industry to continue profiting from China’s economic development despite political hostility in the U.K. towards Beijing.
Katharine Braddick, the U.K. Treasury’s director general for financial services, said Wednesday that officials on both sides are cooperating on measures to open up China’s finance sector to foreign investment.
“We continue to work very closely with Chinese authorities to ensure that we are engaging to be a partner in the liberalization of their financial system,” she told a webinar held by Afore Consulting in Brussels. She was responding to a question about the U.K.’s priorities for the industry after Brexit.
Braddick’s comments underscore how the government is prioritizing the financial sector’s access to foreign markets after Brexit raised barriers to London financiers working in the EU27.
The remarks also come a day after the government resisted the inclusion in a trade law of a reference to “genocide” by the Chinese government against the Uighur minority in the western region of Xinjiang.
Financial links between the U.K. and China are strong. The largest U.K. bank, HSBC, is a market leader in Hong Kong, and it was recently criticized by politicians for its unapologetic enforcement of a Chinese crackdown on democracy activists in the ex-colony.