LONDON (Reuters) – Britain must take a hard-headed, transactional approach to its relationship with China, British finance minister Rishi Sunak said on Monday.

“I think with China we also need to be realistic and hard-headed and I’d say probably transactional in our approach to that relationship, rather than being starry-eyed about it,” Sunak told the Conservative Party’s annual conference.

“China is going to be a significant feature of the global economy, and only increasing in significance, so it would be wrong to ignore that.”

(Reporting by William James; Writing by William Schomberg; editing by Michael Holden)

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