In his first major foreign policy speech since taking office, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak on Monday said China represented a “systemic challenge to our values and interests,” but fell short of classifying China as a “threat.”
Sunak was critical of China’s crackdown on protests over its strict COVID-19 policy, including its arrest and alleged assault of a BBC journalist covering the protests in Shanghai, and said the challenge presented by China “grows more acute as it moves towards even greater authoritarianism,” The Guardian reported on Monday.
However, British lawmaker and former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith — who has been vocal in his criticisms of the Chinese government, and has been sanctioned by China for doing so — said Sunak should take more concrete action.
“China has demonstrated an endless litany of bad behavior posing a threat to us/our allies. How is it yesterday the PM, who’d previously said China was a systemic threat, has now moved to systemic challenge,” he wrote on Twitter on Tuesday.
“Our approach of ‘robustly pragmatic’ won’t worry the Chinese Govt one bit,” he added.
The UK’s relationship with China has been worsening over the past several years, and Taipei should seize upon the opportunity to work more closely with the British government on countering the threat of Chinese authoritarianism.
The arrest of the BBC journalist was preceded by Chinese Communist Party (CCP) actions taken on British soil. Spanish civil rights group Safeguard Defenders revealed last month that China has been running “overseas police service stations” in several countries — including in the UK — that work to intimidate Chinese living in those countries into being supportive of the CCP and returning to China.
Chinese Consul-General in Manchester Zheng Xiyuan (鄭曦原) in October allegedly dragged a Hong Kong protester onto consulate grounds and violently assaulted the man. British Labour Party lawmaker David Lammy at the time demanded that the Chinese ambassador to the UK be summoned to answer for the incident.
“The UK stands for freedom, the rule of law and democracy. The quashing of peaceful protest will never be tolerated on our streets,” he said.
Hong Kong Free Press on Tuesday last week reported that MI5 Director-General Ken McCallum expressed concern over the incident. However, no arrests have yet been made, and rather than apologizing for the behavior, Zheng has defended his actions, saying it was “his duty to react” when protesters insulted the Chinese leadership.
The CCP defies diplomatic standards whenever it interacts with democratic governments. This is why British officials such as Lammy and Duncan Smith must be heeded, and why Sunak must be encouraged to take a tougher stance on China. If the CCP is allowed to act with impunity — particularly on British soil — it will be emboldened to take ever greater steps toward the full-scale erosion of the UK’s democratic institutions.
Sunak has said the so-called “golden era” of relations with China is over, and democracies worldwide have mostly come to realize that trade with China comes at a high cost, and are questioning what can be salvaged from their toxic relationships with Beijing.
As the UK takes the lead among global democracies in curtailing deference to Beijing, it would be in Taiwan’s interests to assist those efforts by bolstering closer economic and security ties with such nations — the UK in particular. Such mutual assistance would help Taiwan decouple economically from China as well.
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