Did the King object to the coronation wristbands made in China? No! How could he?

As Prince of Wales, Charles was famous for observing many years ago that the aged men of the Chinese Politburo, with their identical dark suits and dyed hair, looked like “ghastly old waxworks”.

More recently, in 2015, he declined to attend a state banquet held for Xi Jinping.

Yet when it comes to matters of statecraft, things are different. Nowhere was this illustrated more clearly than at the coronation concert at Windsor Castle, hosted by the King.

One of the highlights was when a sea of red, white and blue LED wristbands worn by the crowd lit up the night sky in patriotic style. The wristbands were made in China. Did our sinophobe monarch object? No, because they spared the royal purse. Han Zheng, China’s vice-president, who oversaw the crackdown on civil liberties in Hong Kong, attended the coronation. Did the monarch object to that? Not publicly, at any rate.

This, it could be said, perfectly sums up Britain’s confused – and conflicted – relationship with China.

The plain fact is that the UK needs China as a source of componentry and value-for-money consumer goods – and as a huge potential market to replace the one we lost access to when we left the EU.

The “golden age” of Sino-British relations heralded by David Cameron and George Osborne a decade ago may since have turned sour, but that doesn’t mean we can avoid the Chinese in economic terms. It certainly doesn’t mean that the UK, a fraction of the size of China in both military and industrial terms, can throw its weight around in east Asia, because Britain is no longer a superpower (or even a regional power).

Someone should tell that to Liz Truss, whose disastrous intervention in Taiwan over the past few weeks has been condemned by the Chinese and British political elites alike.

When she was international trade secretary, she struck few trade deals – and the ones she did sign were done in a hurry for presentational purposes (to claim Brexit was working). They were bad ones, especially for British farmers.

When she was prime minister, she blew up the gilts market and insulted Emmanuel Macron, just for lols. Lest we forget she once held the highest elected office in the land, she lasted for all of 49 disastrous days. Now, as a backbencher with the (undeserved) grand title of “former prime minister”, she has been in Taipei stirring up trouble. She has pledged British military support for the island (something that is no longer in her gift), raised tensions, and generally wound up Beijing.

Aside from the small additional risk to peace in the region from her characteristically reckless contributions, she is cutting right across the official policy of the government. Rishi Sunak, presiding over a stagnant post-Brexit economy and with few options to boost trade and growth, understands that the UK needs China economically, and that we have to maintain good terms with the world’s second-largest economy. Even Boris Johnson, who can be as silly as Truss when he has a mind to be, has publicly denounced the sinophobes in his party.

There is a balance in Britain’s relationship with China that needs to be struck, and Truss is doing her best to wreck it.

The people who run China have persecuted the Muslim Uyghur people. They have suppressed freedom in Hong Kong, and broken the international treaty that guaranteed the territory’s autonomy and way of life. They have suppressed human rights everywhere in their own country, not least with the extreme and deeply flawed “zero Covid” policy (at a point when vaccination offered the way out).

They spy on other countries. They are all too willing to turn a blind eye to Vladimir Putin’s atrocities in Ukraine. They are no one’s idea of an ideal friend, let alone an ally. They deserve condemnation and sanctions.

Yet there is more to it than that. The relationship with China has to be one that also protects the British national interest and makes our influence stronger in Beijing. That is the difficult path Johnson and Sunak (and indeed Blair, Brown, Cameron and May before them) have had to take in recent years.

That is where Truss is, frankly, deluded. She thinks, and presumably has persuaded her Taiwanese hosts, that she has enormous influence in the UK (which she doesn’t) and that the UK is prepared to fight a war with China in an effort to defend Taiwan (which it isn’t).

There is also the important point that, unlike Ukraine in its relationship with Russia, Taiwan is legally and legitimately an integral province of China, and has never been an independent state. It broke away in 1949 after the communists won the civil war, and the Chinese nationalists fled there and claimed lawful government of the mainland. Now it is de facto independent, but it remains a part of China, a fact too seldom mentioned.