With No 10 weighing trade with Beijing against mistrust, it's still proving a tricky relationship

Even Donald Trump was forced to accept scaling back his latest tariffs; China is just too big to ignore.

- Peter Walker

And so it is, on a much smaller scale, that yet another UK government is doing several contradictory things at once when it comes to Beijing.

This weekend was a particularly resonant example. On the one hand, the business secretary, Jonathan Reynolds, was hinting that British Steel's Chinese owner, Jingye, was to blame for neglect, if not worse, over the fate of the threatened blast furnaces at Scunthorpe.

At the same time, one of Reynolds' own ministers, Douglas Alexander, was attending a major consumer goods fair in Hainan, the tropical island on China's southern tip, before holding trade-linked talks in Hong Kong, a visit that was not promoted in advance.

Alexander was forced to mix some tougher politics in with the trade talks, relaying what was termed "deep concern" at China's decision to bar the Liberal Democrat MP Wera Hobhouse from visiting her son and meeting her three-month-old grandson in Hong Kong last week.