China should be designated as a threat to the UK, Dame Priti Patel said as she accused Sir Keir Starmer of seeking closer ties to Beijing because the Government is “desperate for foreign money”.

The shadow foreign secretary said Xi Jinping’s country should be put in the enhanced tier of the forthcoming foreign influence registration scheme, a status reserved for nations that pose a risk to the safety of the UK’s interests.

But she suggested the Prime Minister and Chancellor Rachel Reeves – who is expected to visit China in the new year for talks with the Beijing government – were putting the economy before security.

This, to me, smacks of a desperate government having literally done terrible things to our economy, with economic growth now going down, being desperate for foreign money

She told the Sunday Times: “We’re dealing with an extraordinary regime that for over a decade, quite frankly, has had all sorts of incursions in our country through national security, intellectual property, right down to cyberactivity and misinformation.

“During the Covid period, misinformation, disinformation, was absolutely significant. And then, of course, spies.”

Sir Keir met the Chinese leader at the G20 summit in November, the first time a prime minister has met the president since Theresa May in 2018.

Ms Reeves is expected to fly to China in January for talks with vice premier He Lifeng to restart the economic and financial dialogue between the two countries.

Dame Priti said: “The case that we’re speaking about now is about a spy in the heart of Whitehall and within our institutions and yet we have a government that is saying ‘there’s nothing to see here’.

“So much so that they’ve booked all their plane tickets to go over to China, to resume the economic financial dialogue. This, to me, smacks of a desperate government having literally done terrible things to our economy, with economic growth now going down, being desperate for foreign money.”

The renewed focus on the Government’s approach to China comes after Yang Tengbo, a businessman who forged close ties to the Duke of York and met senior politicians including Lord Cameron and Baroness May, lost his appeal against being banned from entering the UK on security grounds.

Mr Yang has insisted he has done nothing wrong and it was “entirely untrue” to claim he was a Chinese spy.

Judges also recently ruled that MI5 had “legitimate reasons” to warn MPs about Christine Lee, a lawyer accused of working for the Chinese government.

The Security Service said it believed she had engaged in “political interference and activities” for a branch of the Chinese Communist Party in an alert that came in January 2022 after a series of donations to Labour MP Barry Gardiner.

Ms Lee said she believed the interference alert issued about her was for a “political purpose” to benefit the Tories.