A senior palace aide has signalled that King Charles could make a historic state visit to China, which would make him only the second British monarch ever to set foot in the country. The aide said royal officials would think “very carefully” about any request from the Government to send the monarch to Beijing, speaking in the wake of the King's nine-day tour of the Caribbean.
The remarks come 40 years after the late Queen Elizabeth II's landmark state visit in October 1986, which remains the only trip a reigning British sovereign has made to China.
Palace Would Weigh China Request Carefully
The aide said: “If the government said, ‘Will the King go to China?’ We (would) think about it very carefully. China is a hugely important country. It's a very complex country. It would pose a lot of complexity in putting a programme together.”
Despite no visit to Beijing being in the diary, the Royal Visits Committee, which includes members of the King's senior team and senior government officials and meets twice a year, is understood to be open to such a tour taking place.
Charles's Limited Record on China
As Prince of Wales, Charles never made an official visit to mainland China. His one major engagement on Chinese soil was in Hong Kong in July 1997, when he read his mother's farewell speech at the handover of the colony.
His private journal of that trip, titled The Handover of Hong Kong or The Great Chinese Takeaway, was leaked to a Sunday newspaper in 2005. It showed he had called the ceremony an “awful Soviet-style” performance and branded Chinese officials “appalling old waxworks”. Charles won a case at the High Court to stop more extracts being published.
He was accused of snubbing the state banquets for Chinese presidents Jiang Zemin in 1999 and Hu Jintao in 2005, and he stayed away from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, with his long friendship with the Dalai Lama widely presented as the reason. When Xi Jinping came to Britain in 2015, the last state visit by a Chinese leader, Charles again missed the Buckingham Palace banquet. He and Camilla did host the president at Clarence House for talks on climate change and clean energy.
Prince William is the only senior royal to have visited China since 1986, touring Beijing, Shanghai and Yunnan province in March 2015.
The Queen's 1986 Landmark Visit
The Queen's six-day visit in 1986, with the Duke of Edinburgh, came at the invitation of President Li Xiannian and two years after Britain and China agreed the return of Hong Kong. She met Deng Xiaoping, walked the Great Wall, saw the Terracotta Warriors in Xi'an and hosted a return banquet on board the Royal Yacht Britannia in Shanghai. She later received Chinese premier Li Keqiang at Windsor Castle in 2014 and hosted President Xi the following year.
Former Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer became the first prime minister in eight years to visit China in January, and Downing Street left the door open to President Xi coming to the UK. Andy Burnham, who succeeded him in July, told Xi in their first phone call in September that he would engage “frankly and constructively”, and raised the case of jailed pro-democracy campaigner Jimmy Lai.
How Charles Has Changed the Monarch's Role
The aide also said the King had changed the role of the sovereign. Where the late Queen was content simply to “be”, Charles had found a way to keep “doing” as monarch.
“As Prince of Wales he clearly took the view that if [his mother's] job was to be, then his job was to do until such time as he became King,” the aide said. “And one thing I spent a lot of time thinking about before accession was would the doing role just be a being role when the crown came to him, or would there be a way to blend the two? And I hope what we found is a way to blend the two.
“In a completely constitutionally compliant way, and with full support of the government, the King does still engage in issues, not anything which is party political, certainly, but where there is consensus, there is an agreement now that it is perfectly reasonable for the sovereign to do that.”
The aide was with Charles when the Queen died at Balmoral in September 2022, and said they saw a change in him “within five minutes”.
Recalling the King's state visit to the United States in April, the aide added: “I remember sitting in the Oval Office with the King and the President, where it was very striking that there was absolutely a frankness in the conversation, but a warmth in the conversation.”
That approach was tested over the past fortnight in the Caribbean, where calls for apologies for slavery and demands for reparations followed the King through the Bahamas, Guyana and Antigua and Barbuda. Charles opened the tour by recognising the “great suffering of the past in these islands and beyond”. He stopped short of the formal apology Caribbean leaders had demanded, and faced calls from island nations to become republics.
Aides insist the King will not fight a growing tide of republicanism and will look for new partnerships “without rancour”, as he did when Barbados became a republic in 2021. A senior palace aide said: “The King and the royal family are there to serve the people of these regions for as long as they wish. But if they don't wish it anymore, then we really are fully open to that. The family serves when it's wanted and if not, then a new arrangement can be found.”
