As they compete to succeed Boris Johnson as head of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss have also started sparring over communist China.
The People’s Republic of China has come under fire from Sunak, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, who published a lengthy Twitter thread detailing how he would “face down” the communist nation.
Mr. Sunak declared over the weekend that China’s influence was the “number-one threat” to both internal and international security and that measures would be taken to counter it.
The thread included an image of a poster that read “CHINA IS OUR NUMBER ONE THREAT” and showed the world engulfed in a menacing red aura.
The Confucius Institutes, which have sprung up all throughout the United Kingdom with the pretence of promoting cultural interaction and teaching Mandarin but in reality as a means of introducing Chinese influence, will be closed down, according to the Brexiteer.
Additionally, he has suggested creating an alliance in the NATO style to contain China, providing protection for “key British assets” that China may purchase, and giving the Security Service (MI5) more authority to “provide greater support to British businesses and universities to counter Chinese industrial espionage.”
In response to Rishi Sunak in their first head-to-head debate in the contest to succeed Boris Johnson as UK prime minister, Foreign Secretary Liz Truss vowed to crack down on Chinese-owned businesses like social media juggernaut TikTok Inc.
“We absolutely should be cracking down on those types of companies, and we should be limiting the amount of technology exports we do to authoritarian regimes,” Truss said Monday during the debate on BBC TV.