Jingye demands compensation from Britain. A 1986 treaty may not let it argue why.

The treaty gives Jingye no shortcut. Article 7 lets either side refer a dispute to arbitration only after “a period of six months from written notification”. Jingye’s own 21 July statement dates its consultation over the nationalisation to on or before that day, which puts the earliest the clock could run out at some point around January 2027. Nothing found for this article shows a Notice of Arbitration having been filed, and the treaty’s own timetable is a fuller explanation for that than any reluctance on either side’s part.

• 6 monthsthe treaty’s own wait before either side may refer a dispute to arbitration

Article 5(1) sets the substantive standard: an investment “shall not be expropriated, nationalised or subjected to measures having effect equivalent to expropriation or nationalisation … except for a public purpose … and against reasonable compensation,” that compensation to equal the investment’s “real value” immediately before the taking became public knowledge. Article 7(1) is the clause the whole dispute turns on, and it says less than either side’s public statements suggest: a dispute “concerning an amount of compensation which has not been amicably settled after a period of six months … shall be submitted to international arbitration.” Read on its own, that sentence submits the size of the payment to arbitration. It does not say, in so many words, whether the same tribunal may also decide the question the size depends on — whether Britain’s actions counted as an expropriation at all.

Clauses shaped exactly like this one have reached arbitral tribunals before, under other Chinese investment treaties, and the tribunals have not agreed with each other. Two read a narrow clause broadly: in Tza Yap Shum v Peru (2009) and Beijing Urban Construction Group v Yemen (2017), tribunals held that a clause covering “the amount of compensation” also reaches the question of whether an expropriation happened at all. Two read the same shape of wording narrowly: in Beijing Shougang v Mongolia (2017) and AsiaPhos v China (2023, over a dissent), tribunals held that only the amount is arbitrable, and that whether an expropriation occurred belongs to the host state’s own courts — because those two treaties say so explicitly. One detailed analysis of the UK–China treaty’s own wording, published by Kluwer Arbitration Blog in May 2025, points to a fact that could matter here: unlike the two treaties read narrowly, the UK–China BIT never says where the “did it happen” question goes if not to arbitration. There is no domestic-court fallback clause to point to. On that reading, a tribunal weighing this specific treaty might have less reason to read Article 7 narrowly than the tribunals that had an alternative forum written into the text in front of them — a possibility, not a prediction; no tribunal has yet ruled on this treaty.

The treaty carries a second clause that rarely makes the news coverage: Article 3 requires each government to treat the other’s investors no less favourably than it treats investors from any third country. In investment-treaty practice generally, a most-favoured-nation clause has sometimes been used to import a broader dispute-settlement provision from a different treaty the same state has signed elsewhere — a technique tribunals have themselves disagreed about, in other cases entirely. Whether that route is open to Jingye, by pointing at a different UK investment treaty with wider arbitration language, is not something any published analysis found for this article has argued specifically for British Steel. It sits at the treaty as a genuine possibility, untested and unclaimed.

The day after Jingye’s compensation demand, Keir Starmer resigned as Prime Minister and Andy Burnham formed a government; within his first cabinet, Jonathan Reynolds replaced Peter Kyle as the minister responsible for British Steel, in a department merged and expanded. Nine days later, China’s commerce minister Wang Wentao raised the case directly with Reynolds by video call. Reynolds’s own reported answer did not move the government’s position: the UK would “engage a third-party assessment agency to conduct an independent assessment” and “strictly abide by the assessment results and provide reasonable compensation” — the same commitment made on the day of nationalisation, now repeated by a different minister to a different government.