Former British Prime Minister and current Conservative MP Liz Truss said on Wednesday that China poses an economic and political threat to the West, at the start of a four-day visit to Taiwan.
Truss is the first former British Prime Minister to visit Taiwan since Margaret Thatcher in the 1990s. Beijing considers the island part of its territory and threatens violent reunification if Taipei formally declares independence.
Liz Truss joins a growing list of elected officials and former officials from the United States, Japan and European countries who have visited Taiwan in recent years in response to China’s attempts to isolate the island from the international community.
Beijing sees Taiwan’s international contacts as initiatives towards the island’s formal independence.
“There are those who say they don’t want another Cold War. But this is not a choice we can make. Because China has already started a campaign of self-sufficiency, whether we want to secede from its economy or not,” Truss said in a speech in a hotel in Taipei.
“China is expanding its navy at an alarming rate and is conducting the largest peacetime military buildup in history,” he said.
Beijing “has already made alliances with other nations that want to see the free world crumble. They have already made a choice about their strategy. The only choice we have is between appeasing and accommodating or taking measures to prevent conflict,” he argued.
Truss praised his successor, Rishi Sunak, for describing China as “the biggest long-term threat to the UK” and for calling for the closure of cultural centers run by the Chinese government, the delegations of the Confucius Institute, which were accused of as propaganda channels of the Chinese Communist Party.
China’s relations with the UK and most other Western democracies have deteriorated rapidly in recent years, largely due to disputes over human rights, technology, trade and Beijing’s territorial claims in the South China Sea.
Relations between Beijing and London are particularly acrimonious because of China’s crackdown on free speech and other civil liberties in Hong Kong, a former British colony that pledged to keep its freedoms after transitioning to Chinese rule in 1997.
China said a major bilateral deal on Hong Kong no longer applies and dismissed British expressions of concern over developments in the region as “interference in the internal affairs” of the Asian country.
China has also protested a joint agreement between Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, known as AUKUS, which provides for the supply of nuclear-powered submarines to Australia, in part to counter China’s growing influence in the Pacific.
Truss also said China cannot be trusted to meet its trade or environmental obligations.
She praised Taiwan as a “lasting rebuke to totalitarianism” and said the area’s fate was a “core concern” for Europe.
“A blockade or invasion of Taiwan would undermine freedom and democracy in Europe. Just as a Russian victory in Ukraine would undermine freedom and democracy in the Pacific,” he argued.
“We in the UK and the free world must do everything we can to support” Taiwan, he said.
The Chinese press has criticized Truss’s trip in recent hours, with analysts quoted by the Global Times newspaper assuring that the visit “will not bring any substantial benefit to the island”. Based on information circulated by the British press, the Chinese Communist Party’s official newspaper said Truss will receive tens of thousands of pounds for his lecture.
At the end of World War II, Taiwan became part of the Republic of China under the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek.
After the defeat by the Communist Party, in the Chinese Civil War, in 1949, the Nationalist government took refuge on the island, which to this day maintains the official name of the Republic of China, unlike the People’s Republic of China, on the mainland chinese, communist.
The area underwent democratic reforms in the 1990s and is now one of the most vibrant democracies in East Asia.
Source: DN
