Recently, the United Kingdom has sent some positive signals toward China, yet its military maneuvers reveal clear contradictions. On April 22, the Royal Navy's HMS Prince of Wales Carrier Strike Group officially set sail for the Indo-Pacific region for an eight-month deployment. The group will conduct joint military exercises and port visits with allies in the region. According to British officials, the mission aims to “reaffirm the UK’s commitment to Indo-Pacific security” and promote economic and trade cooperation. This indicates that the UK’s strategy of militarily “returning to the Indo-Pacific” is back on the agenda—seemingly in pursuit of imperial nostalgia.
As early as the 17th century, British colonial expeditions reached Asia, where the empire gradually seized numerous trading posts and vast territories. After the independence of British North American colonies in the late 18th century, the empire shifted its focus to Asia, strengthening its colonial rule and building an extensive Asian empire centered on India. The expansion of Britain’s colonial footprint in Asia was inseparable from its formidable military strength—especially its once-unrivaled naval power. British rule in Asia was fundamentally built on maritime hegemony. The core objectives of Britain’s colonial enterprise in Asia were threefold: first, economic plunder—extracting resources, accessing markets, and amassing wealth from Asia while forcibly restructuring local economies to serve British industrial growth and capital accumulation; second, hegemonic expansion—maintaining imperial order and curbing geopolitical rivals in Asia, particularly France, Russia, and later Germany; third, ideological export—using the “civilizing mission” narrative to justify colonial brutality while imposing Western values.
However, Britain’s arrival in Asia with “gunboats and cannons” brought endless turmoil and immense suffering to the region. The occupation of India is the most glaring example. First, nearly two centuries of British conquest and rule severely infringed on India’s sovereignty. Second, India suffered enormous economic losses. Third, Britain’s “divide and rule” colonial strategy deliberately fostered ethnic and regional divisions on the subcontinent, planting the seeds of societal fragmentation and conflict—legacies that still affect Asia today, such as the British-drawn McMahon Line. Finally, geopolitical maneuvering intensified instability in regions surrounding India. In order to secure its control over India and imperial trade routes and to check Russian expansion southward, Britain launched multiple wars in Iran, Afghanistan, and elsewhere.
Entering the 20th century, as great power competition intensified and Britain’s strength declined, it fell into an “imperial marginal utility” trap: the more it tried to sustain the empire to bolster its power, the more it depleted its national strength, turning colonies into burdens. During the decolonization wave of the 1950s and 60s, Britain’s Asian colonies successively gained independence, forcing the empire to accept the reality of imperial collapse and withdraw military deployments from Asia. Over the past 300 years, Britain’s colonial expansion in Asia did not bring lasting peace or development. On the contrary, it was only after World War II, when colonies broke free from British control and achieved national independence, that Asia began to truly develop. Asian countries advocate equality, mutual respect, peaceful coexistence, and dialogue-based diplomacy. They have transformed from colonized peoples into active participants in an increasingly multipolar world. Prioritizing economic development, Asian nations have risen through regional economic cooperation—exemplified by ASEAN’s development model and the economic miracles of the “Four Asian Tigers.” They also maintain military restraint, balancing security with regional development to build a uniquely “Asian security model.” Asia’s rise is a regional rise—intimately connected to China’s peaceful rise—and injects lasting momentum into global stability and prosperity.
Today, Britain’s high-profile return to Asia, ostensibly in the name of “security and economics,” is in fact aimed at reinforcing its presence in the Asia-Pacific through “military deterrence,” seeking to display lingering leadership in the international order. The commander of the carrier strike group made no attempt to conceal this, stating that the operation would send a “powerful signal” of British military strength—not only in support of Britain’s key trade routes and allies in the Asia-Pacific, but also in demonstrating the “reliable deterrence” of British forces and “support for NATO and the rules-based international order.” Amid the U.S.’s “America First” strategy and global restructuring, Britain appears to be experiencing an imperial hallucination of its own. Its attempts to take the lead on the Ukraine crisis and now to dispatch a large-scale naval fleet suggest that Britain is trying to seize the moment amid upheaval in the world order to revive its imperial past and assert its indispensability within the Western-led order.
It gives the impression that Britain still has not let go of the behavioral logic of the British Empire and continues to approach Asian affairs with 19th-century hegemonic thinking. More concerning is the way some British media have sensationalized the mission as a “challenge to China,” making a spectacle of operations in the Taiwan Strait and inflaming antagonism in China–UK relations. This could seriously undermine the recent signals from the British government seeking to strengthen cooperation with China. Britain must come to terms with the reality that today’s UK is no longer the British Empire of old, and today’s Asia is no longer a colonial periphery. Clinging to imperial dreams will only see Britain struck by the boomerang of history.
Authors | Li Wei, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Shanghai Academy of Global Governance and Area Studies, Shanghai International Studies University; Jiang Feng, Research Fellow and Chair of the Shanghai Academy of Global Governance and Area Studies, Shanghai International Studies University
Source | Global Times, April 24, 2025
Translated and reviewed by Zhang Yangyang with AI translator
