UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak appears to be abandoning plans to label Communist China as a “threat” to the security of Britain.
British plans to label China as a “threat” to the country’s security appear to have been left by the wayside, with UK Prime Minister refusing multiple times to describe the country as such a threat at the G20 summit in Bali.
As tensions worldwide grow amid the ongoing Ukraine War, security services and politicians in Britain have expressed a desire to push on the ever-increasing power of the Communist nation.
Ultimately, while Tory party bigwigs had previously vowed that they would see China labelled as a “threat”, Sunak appears to be strongly hinting that the policy would be the subject of yet another government U-turn.
According to a report by POLITICO, When asked if he would be going ahead with the plan, Sunak initially described China as being a “systemic threat”, before quickly correcting himself and watering down his statement.
“My view on China is straightforward,” the Prime Minister remarked. “I think that China unequivocally poses a systemic threat — well, a systemic challenge — to our values and our interests, and is undoubtedly the biggest state-based threat to our economic security, let me put it that way. That’s how I think about China.”
Sunak then went on to add that, despite viewing the communist country as a “challenge”, it nevertheless constituted an “indisputable fact of the global economy”, adding that “we’re not going to be able to resolve shared global challenges like climate change, or public health, or indeed actually dealing with Russia and Ukraine, without having a dialogue with them”.
Pushed on the issue further, Sunak said that his view that the country was a “challenge” rather than a “threat” was widely in alignment with the UK’s western allies.
“If you look at the U.S. national security strategy that was published just a couple of weeks ago, and if you look at how they describe their view of China and how to deal with it, I think you’ll find that it’s very similar to how I’ve just described it,” arguing that both Australia and Canada view things the same way.
UK PM Liz Truss to Formally Designate Communist China a ‘Threat’ for First Time: Reporthttps://t.co/dQvyImWgsY
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) October 13, 2022
While Sunak has not outright announced that he is abandoning plans to see China classified as a threat to the United Kingdom, his reluctance to classify the Communist nation as such has already prompted criticisms from those within his own party.
“This is a cop-out,” lambasted former party leader Ian Duncan Smith. “The saddest part of this is that President Xi Jinping will see this about-turn as a sign of weakness by the PM.”
Sunak’s attempt to justify his decision by referring to Canadian and Australian foreign policy will likely not help things, considering that both nations have come under criticism for falling ever further under Chinese influence over the last number of years.
For example, only last week it was claimed that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was warned by his nation’s intelligence services that China was now funding political candidates in his country.
One source even claimed that the Chinese Communist Party was looking to “punish” politicians who spoke out against China with their involvement in the country’s politics.
A Canadian broadcaster has claimed that Canadian Prime Minister just Trudeau was allegedly informed that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was directly funding at least eleven candidates in the 2019 federal election.
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) November 8, 2022
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