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From @TelegraphNews: Mike Gallagher, the chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), said Emmanuel Macron’s stance on #China is a “dumpster fire” which risks undermining Western support for #Taiwan. telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/…
He said he was “shocked” by the French president’s approach towards Beijing.
“Macron’s trip and comments were what we describe in the United States as a dumpster fire. I was shocked at some of those comments,” Mr Gallagher told the Telegraph.
“They sent precisely the wrong signal, particularly to our friends in Taiwan. We don’t want to allow the CCP to drive a wedge between America and Europe.”
The Republican member of Congress said the UK also needs to “do more” on Hong Kong and should classify China’s actions in Xinjiang as genocide.
He added that Western countries need to start cutting economic ties with Beijing, but acknowledged there was debate on both sides of the Atlantic on how to do so.
“When it comes to economic decoupling, what’s the right policy? It’s extraordinarily complex, it’s what makes this new Cold War much more complicated than the old one,” he said.
“These are very hard problems, but there is no scenario in which we successfully win this competition without being on the same page as our friends and allies in the UK.”
Sir Iain Duncan Smith, a former Tory leader who led the British delegation of parliamentarians, said Mr Sunak was going too soft on China.
“We talked distinctly about the huge threat that China poses not just to us conventionally in military terms but hugely in economic terms and in cultural terms,” he said.
“Here in the UK we think the Government has not gone far enough and refuses to call China a threat even if it’s only a potential threat. We need to change that.”
He added that he was “deeply disappointed” that the Prime Minister had “backed down” on banning Confucius Institutes from operating at British universities.
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