High And Rising Political Price Of China's UK Investments

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British Steel was also a target. Sold in 2019, it is now owned by a private company, Jingye, which in April 2025 moved to shut down operations at its Scunthorpe site by not supplying the raw materials required for its blast furnaces.

In response, the UK government took emergency control of production in a scramble to stop the furnaces from going cold.

That incident should have served as an urgent reminder to the government that it needs to be wary of the effect Chinese companies can have on the UK.

Early signs, however, are not reassuring. Business secretary Jonathan Reynolds commented that Jingye was not acting in the“rational way” he would expect of a company in a market economy.

But the government should know that when it comes to strategic decision-making, Chinese companies do not operate in ways that others consider rational. Put simply, they are not comparable to their equivalents in Britain or other liberal-market economies – because they are effectively controlled by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

According to the CCP's data, by 2017, it had established a formal presence inside 92% of larger private companies and 73% of all private companies in China. Those figures will certainly be higher now. And, as with the digital-technology firm Huawei, senior CCP members are often on a company's boards of directors .

So, while Jingye almost eliminated British Steel as a viable company, it can be reasonably assumed that a decision of such strategic and geopolitical importance would not have been taken by Jingye's executives alone. They would have been“guided” by the CCP .

Influence and infrastructure

And, of course, it's not just steel production that the UK should be concerned about. Chinese ownership now extends across many vital sectors.

There's the Chinese state-owned company Beijing Construction Engineering helping to build a new science and innovation park next to Manchester Airport. And the private Hong Kong company CK Infrastructure, which owns water companies serving northeast England, Essex and Suffolk.

China Investment Corporation (state-owned) owns part of Heathrow , while China Huaneng (state-owned) operates Europe's largest battery storage facility in Wiltshire. Meanwhile, wind turbine producer Mingyang (privately owned and reputedly linked to the Chinese military) is the preferred bidder for a new Scottish wind farm, despite being barred from a similar Norwegian development .

All of these companies, irrespective of formal ownership, are likely to be subject to varying degrees of CCP influence and control (comment on the issue from Chinese companies is rare).