George Osborne arrived in Beijing on Sunday to proclaim the advent of “a golden decade” in Sino-British relations, strengthening his role as a leading advocate of China and its slowing economy.

While geopolitical tensions have soured relations between China and the US, Mr Osborne sees his five-day visit as an untrammelled opportunity to boost British trade and secure investment.

Asked if Mr Osborne would raise the Chinese military build-up in the South China Sea, cyber-hacking or the recent devaluation of the renminbi, the chancellor’s allies suggested any uncomfortable messages would be delivered in private.

“This visit is primarily focused on our annual economic and financial dialogue, but these are of course important issues that are raised in the appropriate way,” said an aide to the chancellor.

Mr Osborne, accompanied by a cluster of fellow ministers, business leaders, council chiefs and cultural figures, wasted no time in playing down the significance of China’s stock market crash over the summer.

The chancellor said he would travel to the Shanghai stock exchange this week as a signal of his support and his certainty that China would continue to be an engine for world growth.

“In our estimation the spillover effects in other financial markets has been relatively limited,” he told a group of tech entrepreneurs in the Chinese capital.

“Even if the Chinese economy isn’t growing in double digits, it will still be creating an economy of at least the size of the United Kingdom’s in the next five years,” he said.

“China is undergoing a very important economic transformation — a transformation that its government wants to see [and] that its people want to see — from that investment-led economy of the past to a consumption-led economy of the future,” he added. “When that happens, you are going to find that challenging.”

Mr Osborne was accompanied by fellow Treasury minister Jim O’Neill, who coined the term Brics to describe emerging economies; Lord O’Neill said the Chinese slowdown was predictable but needed to be put in perspective.

The chancellor’s tour of China has the trappings of a prime ministerial visit and was accompanied by a display of British soft power on the opening day, as UK cultural institutions including the Tate and Royal Opera House joined the charm offensive.

Chinese renditions of the National Theatre’s War Horse and the Globe’s Richard III were performed, while Mr Osborne announced £750,000 to fund the display of the British Museum’s “A History of the World in 100 Objects” in China.

The British library is to display handwritten manuscripts and early editions from Shakespeare to Arthur Conan Doyle, while the Southbank Centre will receive £500,000 over three years to promote cultural links with China.

The main purpose of Mr Osborne’s mission is to persuade China that “no economy in the west is as open to Chinese investment as the UK”, as witnessed by his offer to China to take a big stake in Britain’s nuclear power revival.

The chancellor hopes to drum up business for the City of London on his visit to Shanghai on Tuesday but a bigger focus is winning Chinese investment for his northern powerhouse project ahead of a state visit to the UK by President Xi Jinping in October.

To illustrate his point about the need for investment outside traditionally powerful cities, Mr Osborne will also take his delegation to Chengdu and Urumqi in the west of the country.

Mr Osborne’s clear-eyed focus on the economic opportunities offered by China is in contrast to more strained relations between Washington and China, as President Xi prepares to visit the US this week.

Senior US officials privately complained about Britain’s “constant accommodation” of China last year after Mr Osborne signed up to become a founding member of its new Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank, although President Obama later insisted that reports of US irritation were wrong.

Mr Osborne’s willingness to open up a sector as sensitive as nuclear power to Chinese investment is a sign that political considerations are taking a secondary role to commercial interests.

Britain’s foreign direct investment flow from China of $11.8bn was the highest in Europe — more than France and Germany combined — but UK exports to China remain weak at just 3.6 per cent of the total.