- Tuesday, March 11, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
The two-month long prime ministerial race in the UK saw China becoming an integral part of with both the contenders — Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak — targeting the Asian power in different points of time. While the duo disagreed on several other issues, they in a way were united when it came to perceiving China. While Sunak called it the biggest threat for the UK, Truss, who eventually won the race on Monday (5), has plans to declare Beijing as a threat to London’s national security.
The Chinese side has slammed the UK in retaliation, saying its political class was clueless to resolve the country’s real problems and was diverting the attention towards Beijing.
On Sunday (4), the country’s belligerent Global Times took a dig at the UK again, this time by emphasising on the recent revelation that it lost its place as the world’s fifth-largest economy to India, one of its former colonies.
The Chinese publication said that the news was set to give the UK’s incoming prime minister a “bitter reminder” of the “bleak economic outlook” which the country is facing and said the European power needed to be “pragmatic” and “courageous” to deal with its real issues.
“According to the GDP figures from the IMF (International Monetary Fund), India already overtook UK in the final three months of 2021, and its lead over the UK widened in the first quarter this year. On an adjusted basis and calculated in US dollars, the size of the Indian economy reached $854.7 billion (£742.4 billion) in the first three months of this year, while that of the UK was only $816 billion (£709 billion). The IMF projected that India would overtake UK on an annual basis in 2022,” the Global Times piece said.
Taking further dig at the UK, it said while the Indian media has for a long time accused the UK of pointing fingers at its foreign policy and domestic issues with “colonial arrogance”, the South Asian economy’s leap over the British one could be seen as a historic development and give a blow to those who are still connected to colonial dreams of the bygone era.
It said while there was certain inevitability for India to surpass the British economy, the timing of the news was delicate.
The UK is facing high inflation at the moment and a number of societal problems caused by an economic decline and the new prime minister will have quite a challenge in dealing with rising energy prices and cost of living crisis.
