Free nations must commit themselves to a free Taiwan and must be prepared to back it up with concrete measures, Liz Truss has said in a keynote speech in Taipei, in which she called for an “economic Nato” to tackle Beijing’s growing authoritarianism.
The former British prime minister said she had come to show support for Taiwan, which was “on the frontline of the global battle for freedom”, under threat from a totalitarian regime in China. Truss arrived in Taiwan on Monday for a five-day visit, and is expected to meet senior government officials.
Truss, who was prime minister for 44 days in 2022 after serving as foreign secretary for the year prior, is the most senior British politician to make the trip since Margaret Thatcher, and drew a rebuke from China’s UK embassy, which said the visit was “a dangerous political show which will do nothing but harm to the UK”.
Beijing claims Taiwan as a province of China, and Xi Jinping has not ruled out using force to achieve what he terms “reunification”. Taiwan’s government and people overwhelmingly reject the prospect of Chinese rule, and a potential conflict and its fallout are of key concern to the global community.
“We cannot pretend we have meaningful deterrence without hard power,” Truss said in a speech and panel discussion for a Taiwan thinktank, the Prospect Foundation, on Wednesday. “If we’re serious about preventing conflict in the South China Sea we need to get real about defence cooperation.”
Truss said the world could not rely on the UN security council or the World Trade Organization, and instead called for a “network of liberty”, with free nations working together to develop an “economic Nato” to coordinate pushback against Beijing.
She said the G7 – which will meet this weekend in Hiroshima – needed to coordinate economically against Chinese economic coercion, saying “bullying on a major scale” was taking place across the international area.
Truss said Beijing was using Taiwan’s international participation as a strategy, and called for Taiwan’s membership of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership to be fast-tracked and approved – and China’s denied.
Truss is a hawkish member of the British Conservative party, and her speech appeared to rebuke comments made by current members of government and their European counterparts. Last month the UK foreign secretary James Cleverly singled out climate change as an area in which engagement with China was needed, saying it would be a mistake to isolate Beijing.
On Wednesday Truss said there were “too many mixed messages from the free world”, which she blamed on a “false idea” that the west could still cooperate with China on some issues.
The current prime minister, Rishi Sunak, must make good on earlier comments when he declared China “the biggest-long term threat to Britain”, she added. She called for the shutting down of UK-based Confucius institutes, and for the UK to rule out the resumption of economic dialogue with Beijing, saying: “We cannot have more integration with the Chinese economy.”
She said Beijing was already working to make itself economically self-reliant “whether we want to decouple from the economy or not”.
Truss also appeared to swipe at recent comments by the French president, Emmanuel Macron, saying it was “completely irresponsible for European nationals to wash their hands of Taiwan because it’s a long way away or not a core part of our concerns”.
Her speech was critical of the Chinese Communist party’s rule over China, referring to the Tiananmen massacre, human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and the crackdown in Hong Kong.
Truss is the latest in a long line of foreign dignitaries to arrive in Taiwan, often drawing rebuke from Beijing, which objects to any action that appears to give credence to Taiwan’s sovereignty.
After the then US speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan in August, Beijing drastically increased its military harassment of the island, setting a “new normal”, the head of the Prospect Foundation said before Truss’s speech.
Asked whether she considered the potential for her visit to worsen the security situation in Taiwan, Truss said Taiwan’s government had invited her and they were “best placed to understand what will help”.
“[Beijing] are trying to limit visits, trying to silence Taiwan’s supporters and intimidate people internationally,” she said. “I think we need to stand up to that bullying.”
An editorial in the Chinese tabloid Global Times on Tuesday night repeated a criticism by Alicia Kearns, the chair of the UK foreign affairs select committee, that Truss’s visit was “the worst example of Instagram diplomacy”.
“These types of ugly performances are attracting fewer and fewer audiences,” the Global Times said.
Chi Hui Lin contributed to this report
