No matter who wins Thursday's fiercely contested general election in Britain, Sino-British relations will remain stable and shift only at the margins, if at all. That was the assessment of various analysts as British voters prepared to cast their ballots in a race that was looking increasingly likely to result in a hung parliament. Beijing would be at ease irrespective of the outcome because Sino-British ties were based more on economic considerations rather than political calculations, with the major parties in Britain acutely aware of the importance of the China market, analysts said. Ding Chun, director of the Centre for European Studies at Fudan University, said that in terms of policy towards China, it made almost no difference if the Conservatives or the Labour Party formed the next government. "There will not be any substantial change in the current British policy towards China," Ding said. He said the new government would follow precedent in seeking to improve economic ties with China. "So there is not much for the Chinese government to worry about," he said. "The foreign policies [of the major parties], including those dealing with China, will be more or less the same." Kerry Brown, director of the University of Sydney's China Studies Centre, agreed that a change in government in London would have little immediate impact on China. British political parties were relatively bipartisan on China policy, Brown said, with Prime Minister David Cameron following in the footsteps of former prime ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. "Britain's influence on China declines by the day. Policy will continue to be driven by economic self-interest with the occasional hollow gestures over Hong Kong which will not be backed up by meaningful direct political action simply because there is nothing Britain can do," Kerry Brown said. "Labour tends to be even less assertive on human rights issues than the Conservatives. A coalition government for its own internal stability will therefore be even more likely to follow the tried-and-tested track of economic collaboration, attracting Chinese investment, getting Chinese students and having more tourists to come spend their money." That view was echoed by Zhao Chen, deputy chief of the department of European politics at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Zhao said the Conservatives and Labour were consistent in how much they valued the Chinese market but there could be "some small changes in Labour's China policy on the environmental front". Zhao said the latest polls pointed to a hung parliament, with neither major party appearing to have the numbers to govern on its own. SEE ALSO: The Chinese candidates taking part in the UK election The election may be coming down to the wire in Britain but in China the race has caused hardly a murmur, with almost no one paying attention to the contest. A search of microblogs and other online social networking forums yielded no group chats about the election, a sharp contrast to the lively online debates already generated by the upcoming presidential polls in Taiwan or the United States, which are still months away. There is also little coverage of the election in Chinese media and the few reports there are have been written by academics or experts in British or European relations. Analysts said the near-silence on the issue showed that the focus of the central government's European policy was elsewhere - in Germany and France. Sino-British relations also went through a rough patch when Cameron met the Dalai Lama in 2012, and last year when Britain sought to intervene in Hong Kong affairs. "But with Britain leading other European nations in joining the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, the central government is expected to pay more attention to Britain," Zhao said. Zhao also said Beijing used to see London as a bridgehead for the European market but China's development of ties with individual European countries meant that was no longer the case. Nevertheless, London's role as an international financial centre would be of greater interest to China as Beijing expands its global activities. "It means that in addition to Germany and France, Beijing will further improve its cooperation with Britain."
