‘China is all-out against us’: an interview with Lithuania’s foreign minister

On the 16th floor of a tower block in Vilnius, Lithuania, is an office with a nameplate so incendiary that it has started a trade war. The ‘Taiwanese Representative Office’ violates a rule that China imposes upon its trade partners: never allow Taiwan to open official offices. Call it ‘Taipei’, or anything, just not ‘Taiwan’. Lithuania recently decided that an important principle is at stake: should small countries be bullied by big ones? It thought not – and has allowed Taiwan to use its own name at what is regarded as a de facto embassy. This was Vilnius going out on a limb, saying it was time to defend democracies and support freedom, and it is now looking to build an alliance of like-minded countries. This has made Beijing very angry.

‘That gave China reason to go all-out against us,’ says Gabrielius Landsbergis, Lithuania’s foreign minister. ‘Our trade with China has been cut to basically 0.3 per cent of what we had.’ Beijing withdrew its ambassador and blocked imports from Lithuania, deleting it from its customs system. The European Union launched a World Trade Organisation case against China – but concerns about Lithuania’s actions were raised in some quarters, including by the German business lobby.

Landsbergis – a suave, sandy-haired politician who speaks with confidence when we meet at Lithuania’s embassy in Pimlico – is in London to meet with Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, who has spoken about building a ‘network of liberty’ across East and West. It’s a concept that Landsbergis supports. ‘It starts from the question: will the global security order remain the same as it was before 24 February [when Russia invaded Ukraine]? And people in Lithuania, in the Baltics or in the broader eastern flank of Nato would agree that it cannot.’

The UK, he says, is reshaping a new international order: it was the first to arm Ukraine and to offer a defence pact to Sweden and Finland.