The British are very good at pageants and ceremony, and over the five days of the visit of China’s President Xi Jingping they have been laying it on with a trowel. Red carpets, serried ranks of marching men, speeches to parliament, gilded state coaches, and beds and banquets in Buckingham Palace ... Enough to turn the head of any dyed-in-the-wool communist. And in case Londoners didn’t feel sufficiently enthused to flood the streets to cheer Mr Xi, the Chinese embassy laid on crowds of its own citizens to wave red flags and banners, mysteriously imported from Beijing.
All a bit over the top, some say. China, after all, is a strategic and economic rival with a very poor human rights record about which HMG is doing its best to remain silent. But it's hardly surprising when 100 contracts estimated at some €42 billion are at stake – as the Guardian put it, "nearly one for every salvo in the 103-gun royal salute".
PR efforts in Britain were soured, however, by the news that more than 4,000 jobs are in jeopardy at steel plants across Britain because of the flooding of the market by cheap Chinese imports.
But on this side of the Irish Sea, we are not in a position to be sniffey about obsequiousness or kowtowing. In 2012 after prime minister David Cameron met the Dalai Lama, prompting a furious Chinese diplomatic protest, Ireland benefited from a surprise and very welcome visit from Mr Xi, seen as a way of showing China's interest in developing economic links with an Anglophone euro zone country, but also as a snub to Britain. Irish leaders were notably restrained on Beijing's human rights record, as was indeed the usually voluble President Higgins on his visit to China last December.
And Britain is not alone in its courtship of Beijing: Germany's Angela Merkel will be going to China next week, while France's François Hollande will be following in her wake next month.
Among the week’s major projects, China on Wednesday nearly doubled a bilateral currency swap agreement with Britain to 350 billion yuan (€48 billion), part of Beijing’s efforts to spur more use of the yuan abroad. It is also exploring ways to link the London bourse with Shanghai.
And of particular interest to Ireland is the largest deal, in which China General Nuclear Corporation (CGN) will take a one-third stake in the planned €25 billion Hinkley Point nuclear plant owned by France's EDF and expected to be the most expensive ever built. It is 150 miles from the Irish coast and due to start operating by 2025, the first European nuclear plant to be built since Japan's Fukushima disaster in 2011.
In October last year, the European Commission approved the state financing of the plant which had been the subject of an unsuccessful An Taisce case in the British courts over London's failure to consult Dublin about its construction.