- Tuesday, March 11, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
WITH the race in the Conservative Party to pick the next prime minister of Britain getting intense and Rishi Sunak, one of the two candidates, taking a tough stance on China ahead of his television debate with Liz Truss on Monday (25), Beijing has reacted saying the British politicians were trying to “solve their own problems by criticising China”. It also warned that such ploys would not work.
Zhao Lijian, the spokesperson of the Chinese foreign ministry said at a briefing on Monday, “I will not comment on the participation in the election of the British Conservative Party representative [Rishi Sunak], but I would like to advise individual British politicians … not to solve their own problems by criticizing China. This will not work.”
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The Chinese diplomat said the words that the British politicians uttered while trying to inflate the theory of the so-called Chinese threat “should be considered irresponsible statements”, Russian state-run TASS news agency reported.
China’s belligerent tabloid Global Times also lashed out at the British politicians in an article dated Tuesday (26) in which it said citing Chinese analysts that “the China policy in countries like the US and the UK won’t be changed dramatically with the changes of leaders, and the act of hyping the “China threat” remains one of the best options for those incompetent politicians to cover up their failures in pushing effective reform to solve domestic problems, even though they know China has nothing to do with their internal messes, and especially their economic problems, that their voters care about most.”
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It expressed shock that Sunak, who in the past has vowed for the UK’s better relations with China, changed his stance ahead of the debate saying he was doing so to win the most conservative and grass-root Tory members since Truss was having more support among those voters.
The article, titled ‘UK PM candidates race for toughness against China ‘to cover domestic mess”, cited Yin Zhiguang, a professor at the School of International Relations and Public Affairs under Fudan University, as saying, “With the increasingly serious economic problems, elites like Sunak and Truss could become more interested in using the ‘external threat’ to divert domestic attention from their incompetence and failure in making meaningful reforms to fix their problematic social and economic systems.”
On Sunday (24), Sunak came up with a series of anti-China tweets in which he called China Britain’s “largest threat” and vowed to limit China’s influence in the UK if he became the prime minister. He also promised to shut down all UK Confucius Institutes and said that British politicians favored China for too long and overlooked its machinations and ambitions.
