On July 16, Britain assumed full control of British Steel, a struggling steelmaker previously held by China's Jingye Group, in a bid to safeguard domestic industrial capacity. Within a day, Beijing responded with pointed condemnation, framing the nationalisation not as an internal economic measure but as a violation of bilateral investment commitments and a signal of hostility toward Chinese capital. The dispute, though rooted in a single company's fortunes, touches something larger: the fragile architecture of trust that holds international investment relationships together, and the question