Truss pressures PM over China ‘threat’
FORMER PM Liz Truss will urge her successor to brand China a “threat” to UK security today.
In a speech in Taiwan, she will challenge Rishi Sunak to deliver on the language he used during the Tory leadership contest.
Last year, Mr Sunak declared China “the biggest long-term threat to Britain” and pledged to close Beijing’s 30 UK Confucius Institutes promoting its culture.
In her address to the Prospect Foundation in Taipei City, Ms Truss will say: “He was right and we need to see those policies enacted urgently.”
As Prime Minister, Ms Truss wanted to officially declare communist-ruled China a threat to national security. But her premiership collapsed after only 44 days.
When Mr Sunak updated the UK’s integrated review on foreign and defence policy in March, it said only that China represented an “epoch-defining and systemic challenge”.
Ms Truss, who was greeted in Taiwan yesterday by its foreign minister, Joseph Wu, is also expected to compare tensions between China and Taiwan with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
She will say: “There are still too many in theWest who are trying to cling on to the idea that we can co-operate with China on issues like climate change, as if there is nothing wrong; that there are bigger issues than Chinese global dominance or the future of freedom and democracy.
“But without freedom and democracy there is nothing else. We know what happens to the environment or world health under totalitarian regimes that don’t tell the truth.”
Taiwan and China split in 1949, following a civil war which ended with the Communist Party in control of the mainland.
The island has never been part of the People’s Republic of China, but Beijing says it must unite with the mainland – by force if necessary.
Ms Truss is thought to be the first ex-UK premier to visit Taiwan since Margaret Thatcher in the 1990s.