Trust and respect are vital to establish deeper understanding

My fellow countrymen and women will be unsure as to whether a knock on the door over the remaining few days of the election campaign might be carol singers or someone canvassing their vote.

The United Kingdom goes to the polls on Dec 12 in what will be the closest-to-Christmas-Day-held general election for more than a century.

The main interest for the rest of the world is whether the election resolves the issue of Brexit.

If Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservatives win a majority, the UK will almost certainly leave the European Union within a few weeks, if not days, of the poll.

One of the motivations for leaving the EU is for the UK to establish closer links with countries like China.

I have therefore spent some of my reporting time over the last month gauging what people in China think about that. It is actually quite a mixed picture.

Some like Peter Batey, an eminence grise of the British business community in China, thinks those advocating the big benefits of a future UK-China free trade agreement are just "building castles in the sky".

The founder and chairman of Vermilion Partners, a strategic advisory company which has advised on some major Chinese acquisitions in the UK, insists that being a member of the EU does not act as a barrier to trade and investment flows between the two countries.

The 61-year-old, who has been in China since the 1980s, perhaps has a unique perspective on this since he used to be political private secretary to Sir Edward Heath, the prime minister who took the UK into Europe in 1973 and who was also instrumental in China's opening up to the West.

Others such as Chris Yang, chairman of the Hampton Group, a Beijing and London-based consultancy, believes there is a potential new synergy between the UK and China.

China has a hunger for services as it rebalances its economy, and the UK is the largest exporter of them after the US. Yet with the current trade conflict between the United States and China, China's other trading partners might not react well to the UK being given a special deal on services.

From the tone of what some leading UK politicians say about China, one wonders if there is any seriousness about building any new relationship, trade or otherwise.

Whether the UK actually knows how to build a deep relationship with China came up in an interview I did with the Kerry Brown at the Friendship Hotel in Beijing.

He is director of the Lau China Institute at King's College London and used to be First Secretary at the British embassy in Beijing.

He said British prime ministers should make a point of visiting Beijing once a year, like they currently diarize visits to Washington.

Currently, he said, they only seem to come on huge circuslike trade missions every few years, bringing with them any flunky they can find from business.

According to Stephen Roach, senior fellow at Yale University who I also recently caught up with, it is not just the UK which gets this wrong.

He would like a special permanent secretariat to be set up in a neutral country to cement a strategic partnership between the US and China.

For the moment, it is the UK who will be looking for new friends if its winter election delivers the brave new post-Brexit world some hope for.

China offers a lot of opportunities for the UK, not least the potential of fully embracing the Belt and Road Initiative and for London to be an important financial hub for the world's second-largest economy.

This will not come about, however, without mutual trust and respect and a deeper understanding, which currently seems lacking.