LONDON: Britain and China toasted a “golden age” of relations on Tuesday with a state visit festooned with regal pomp and pageantry but overshadowed by concerns about national security, human rights and economic rivalry.

Chinese President Xi Jinping’s trip, years in the making, aims to cement deals giving Britain a vast new pool of investment and China greater access to European markets. But as Xi was welcomed as an honoured guest at Buckingham Palace and the UK Parliament, critics warned that Britain was taking a risk by courting Beijing so aggressively.

“If you act like a panting puppy, the object of your attention is going to think they have got you on a leash,” James McGregor, a China expert at consulting firm APCO, told the BBC.

Some British politicians, businesspeople and union members are alarmed by growing Chinese investment in key sectors of the British economy, and by Chinese competition in areas such as steel production.

Prime Minister David Cameron is under pressure to raise the issue of China selling steel at a loss on world markets to secure its own market share, which has helped push British steelmakers into a crisis.

Hundreds of UK steel layoffs were announced on Tuesday, the first full day of Xi’s four-day visit.

China’s leader was welcomed to London with tradition and military pomp — a genre at which both Britain and China excel.

Xi was greeted with a 41-gun artillery salute before being driven to Buckingham Palace, where he and his wife Peng Liyuan will stay, in a gilded carriage drawn by white horses.

Thousands lined the route to see Xi go by. Demonstrators from human rights and pro-Tibet groups jostled with a much larger group of Xi well-wishers, whose chants of “China! China!” drowned out their rivals’ shouts.

Later Xi made a short speech to both houses of Britain’s Parliament, an honor that has been given to visiting politicians including US President Barack Obama and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

Britain and China have a long and sometimes antagonistic history that includes the 19th-century Opium Wars and decades of Cold War tension. But Xi quoted William Shakespeare — “What’s past is prologue” — and urged the two nations to “join hands and move forward” toward peace and development.

Britain’s Conservative-led government has been courting China, the world’s second-largest economy, for years. When Xi’s predecessor, Hu Jintao, paid a state visit to Britain in 2005, the countries announced $1.3 billion in trade deals. This time, Britain said the two nations would sign 30 billion pounds ($46bn) in business agreements.

Treasury chief George Osborne, a champion of closer ties, has said he wants China to be Britain’s biggest trading partner after the United States by 2025.

In an interview before the visit, Cameron told China’s CCTV television that this was a “golden age” of UK-China relations. He said Chinese investment was good for Britain and that China benefited from “having access to a country that is a leading member of the EU, and has so many other contacts and roles in the world”.

Published in Dawn, October 21st, 2015

On a mobile phone? Get the Dawn Mobile App: Apple Store | Google Play