A FAST, eight-car motorcade ploughs a furrow through the Beijing rush hour. Police lights blink in the smog. Officers guard the junctions, arms raised to hold back the cars. Hardly braking, the convoy sweeps past hutongs and luxury clothes shops, over gridlocked motorways and under the gaze of Chairman Mao (and the security cameras, six to a lamppost) in Tiananmen Square. Such is the style in which George Osborne, who arrived in China for a five-day tour on September 20th, treads the boards of the world stage.

Usually the Chinese authorities reserve the jiaotong guanzhi, or traffic controls, for Politburo members and foreign heads of state. But Britain’s urbane chancellor of the exchequer is no mere finance minister. He is David Cameron’s closest ally and, in all but name, deputy prime minister, foreign secretary and chief re-negotiator of Britain’s membership of the EU. In the past three years he has made the British economy dynamic, the Conservative party electable and himself liked—or at least tolerated—by voters who used to loathe him. His odds of succeeding Mr Cameron have never been better.

That is welcomed in China, for Mr Osborne is perhaps the West’s most pro-Beijing statesman of his stature. He is clearly exhilarated by the country’s boom. Sitting down with Bagehot in the British ambassador’s residence, the chancellor animatedly describes his spell backpacking around China in the early 1990s; contrasting the “staid and dull” capital of that era to the buzzing metropolis of today, in the trendy, high-tech corners of which “you could be in San Francisco”. Since 2012, when Mr Cameron’s meeting with the Dalai Lama froze relations between the countries, the chancellor has been the face of the thaw. Britain should be “China’s best partner in the West”, he argues, promising a “golden decade” of co-operation. His hosts, too, issue encomiums; Shi Yaobin, the vice-minister of finance, says that Mr Osborne’s “positive and remarkable” deals in Beijing pave the way for the state visit of President Xi Jinping to London next month.

Not everyone in Whitehall shares the chancellor’s brio. Liberals argue that Britain should confront China’s noxious human-rights record more vocally. Hawks fret about its cyber attacks and intellectual-property violations against Western states and firms. Lefties see Chinese money as inferior to investment by the British state. Yet Mr Osborne believes that a happy moment has come in which the interests of the two countries align like never before. China’s growth is slowing, but its emerging middle class and welfare state mean it hankers less for commodities and machinery from Australia, Brazil and Germany and more for the services and posh consumer goods in which Britain specialises. China’s foreign reserves, meanwhile, give it the wherewithal to finance Britain’s acute infrastructure needs. Thus the chancellor used the trip to hail, among many other agreements, the forthcoming issuance of yuan-denominated bonds in London, new licences for British banks operating in China and a guarantee for up to £2 billion ($3 billion) of Chinese investment in Hinkley Point, a nuclear power station in Somerset.

This stance entails three gambles—economic, political and diplomatic—that together comprise a sort of Osborne Doctrine. The first bet is that binding Britain to the Chinese economy is worth the risk of violent shocks to British banks and infrastructure projects if the world’s second-largest economy experiences a hard landing after its mighty boom. The second is that British voters are liberal enough not to mind foreigners owning swathes of their country. Mr Osborne cites their relaxed attitudes towards the Indian takeover of their leading car producer and Chinese stakes in their sewers, concluding: “The UK is coping with globalisation a lot better than most other European countries.” The third bet is that China responds better to the carrot than to the stick. The chancellor is no foreign-policy dove, yet believes that the best way to influence Beijing is to increase trade and disagree only behind closed doors. Britain’s reluctance to back the prodemocracy protests in Hong Kong last year and its unilateral decision in March to join the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, which angered the French and Americans (who see it as a rival to the World Bank) exemplify this new posture.

Kowtow if you want to

That this shift is so little discussed in Britain is remarkable. It could transform the country’s role in the world. The Foreign Office is already diverting resources from Europe to China; from political desks to trade ones. Britain’s growing friendship with Beijing appears to be losing it pals in Washington. Its new commercial links hardwire its economy into that of a vast partner whose stockmarket has fallen by almost 40% in the past three months. Mr Osborne points out that Britain is bound to the EU, too. But it is about to have a year-long debate, followed by a referendum, about that relationship. Where are the parliamentary wrangles over China? The prominent sinologists in Britain’s public life? The headlines about the intrusions on British sovereignty by the economic giant to which Britain is, for better or worse, tethering itself?

Though unconvinced that stern words in private will stop Beijing from being beastly to its liberals and minorities, Bagehot otherwise accepts the chancellor’s main argument: that China is now too big a power for a global entrepôt like Britain not to embrace. But the country is doing so by default; a change from which much of its establishment (let alone its electorate) is disengaged. As it plunges into a bunfight about its membership of the EU, it is up to the likes of the chancellor to forge a parallel debate about its much less certain, but increasingly close, relationship with the world’s new superpower.

A full transcript of Bagehot’s interview with George Osborne can be read on Bagehot’s blog: www.economist.com/blogs/bagehot/2015/09/britains-foreign-policy