PM must confront the Chinese threat

AMAZING as it now seems, the West once trusted Stalin’s Soviet Union, and treated it as a friend and ally even as it imposed harsh secret-police regimes all over central Europe.

When Winston Churchill warned of an Iron Curtain descending across the continent in 1946, his words were not welcomed in many foreign ministries.

So it is now with the Chinese People’s Republic, a state which has never renounced its Communist origins and which still reveres Mao Zedong, probably the most bloodstained ruler of the whole 20th Century.

It has become fashionable to politely overlook Beijing’s recent and current crimes, from the Tiananmen Square massacre to the crushing of Tibet, the suppression of law and freedom in Hong Kong and the racist confinement of Muslim Uighurs in appalling concentration camps. Many in the West treat China’s leaders as if they were the respectable government of a normal country. But it simply is not so.

As the former Defence Minister Tobias Ellwood argues eloquently in The Mail on Sunday today, China is a far greater danger than the Soviet Union ever was – richer, stronger and more subtle.

And because of its wealth and recent respectability, China has been able to lobby and seek influence in the UK’s elite, in a way that Stalin’s agents could never have dreamed of.

This has gone on too long. The warnings are clear for all to see. If Britain must once again be the leader of a new realism, then let it be so.

Boris Johnson should emulate his hero Churchill, and speak out against this new threat to the world’s liberty, prosperity and peace.