Since the British decision to leave the European Union, scholars have been busy with assessing the impacts of Brexit. Existing assessments focus mainly on the impacts of Brexit on the United Kingdom (UK)(eg the British constitution, devolution, and party politics), and the European Union (EU)(eg integration, institutions, and governance). Few of them, however, assess how Brexit may affect an emerging global power like China. A handful of exceptions exist. Summers, Yang, and Yu assess how Brexit will affect China-EU relations. Whereas Yang (2020) argues that China holds ‘an optimistic attitude’towards a post-Brexit EU and China-EU relations, Summers and Yu argue that the importance attached by China to the EU will decline, and the post-Brexit China-EU relations will continue to be hindered by the dispute over issues such as market economy status (Summers, 2017; Yu, 2017). While these existing assessments provide insights into the impacts of Brexit on China-EU relations, they suffer from several limitations. First, these assessments focus exclusively on the implications of Brexit for China-EU relations. Brexit will significantly affect China’s relations with the EU when the Union loses one of its key members. But so do China’s bilateral relations with the UK, and China’s ‘strategic environment’in which the US, Japan, and Russia will change their policies because of Brexit. Second, within the existing assessment, the focus is mainly on the economic consequences. 2 Trade, investment, and finance have taken centre stage of the existing assessments. Other significant issues such as China’s strategic aim of pushing for ‘multilateralism’(ie understood by the Chinese government as equivalent to ‘multipolarity’), however, are marginalized in the discussion. Third, the existing assessments say relatively little about what different segments of China make of Brexit. Except for Yang, these assessments make relatively little effort to present various Chinese perspectives on Brexit and its influences.

In this chapter, we seek to provide an assessment of Brexit’s impact on China that distinguishes itself from existing ones in three respects. First, we seek to broaden the focus from China-EU relations to China’s relations with the UK and China’s broader foreign relations. As we will show below, Chinese assessments of Brexit are sophisticated because China is not only concerned with the ‘direct’impact of Brexit on China-EU relations and China-UK relations, but also the ‘indirect’impacts on the US-UK relations, UK-Japan relations, and UK/EU-Russia relations that will in turn shape China’s ‘strategic environment’. For China, Brexit’s influences are felt through many channels and relationships. Second, we seek to broaden the focus from the economy to other fields such as global order, great power politics, security and strategy. With the China-US strategic rivalry and many