Xi’s Global Power Push Tested By Battle Over London Mega-Embassy

On a spring afternoon in 2018, Chinese ambassador Liu Xiaoming held a small ceremony outside the Royal Mint Court to celebrate Beijing’s £255 million ($342 million) purchase of a London landmark. Playing with the building’s acronym, he declared that RMC now had a new meaning: The Right Monument of China.

The symbolism couldn’t have been clearer. Beijing was declaring its coming of age as a global power by turning a building that once minted the British pound — the world’s reserve currency when the British empire plunged China into its “century of humiliation” — into a sprawling embassy. Since taking power in 2012, President Xi Jinping has made it his mission to show Beijing could no longer be pushed around by foreign powers.