Dividing lines and clear blue water – in any election it’s crucial for candidates to find and exploits the distinctions between themselves and their rivals. Could China perhaps be one? It was the subject which Liz Truss chose to quiz Rishi Sunak about on Sunday and is seen by allies of the former as a weakness for the latter. The Foreign Secretary is keen to appear more hawkish than her rival; under Sunak’s Chancellorship the Treasury tried to restart multiple high-level financial dialogues with Beijing.
And it’s not just Truss pushing this line, for Penny Mordaunt has now decided to jump on board the China train. She declared last night that ‘We have been too soft on China. I won’t be’ after her campaign team briefed the Express about her plans for a new ‘China Strategy’ and a harder line on Beijing. It’s a not-so veiled swipe at Truss’s tenure at the Foreign Office and a savvy political move. China bashing is a good vote winner among both Tory MPs and Tory members; Beijing to Britain notes that the UK electorate view sthe rise of China as one of the country’s three most prominent security threats.
The problem is that, er, the UK already has a ‘China Strategy’ and one on the Indo-Pacific region too. The Express reports that Mordaunt ‘will pledge to conduct a full review of UK-China policy, across all Government departments’ yet this has been (slowly) ongoing for months now in Whitehall. Longtime China campaigner Luke de Pulford claimed that Mordaunt hasn’t shown much interest in the area before, saying ‘she hasn’t spoken in a single debate on Uyghurs, Taiwan, Hong Kong or Tibet – even when not a minister.’
Her pledge to hold Beijing to account for its actions in Xinjiang also should be seen in the context of her time at Trade, where she claimed that if ‘you want to “defend against authoritarianism, fight corruption and promote respect for human rights” then place trade at the centre of all you do.’ Mordaunt’s plan does contain some interesting ideas: sanctions for those implicated in the Hong Kong crackdown and the Xinjiang abuses plus greater monitoring of China’s investment in infrastructure.
But coming just hours before the 1:00 p.m ballot for the Tory leadership race, it might all be too late to save her from being eliminated from the final two. The question is, will Truss and Sunak also campaign on this theme? Or will China be overshadowed, once again, by other competing domestic concerns.
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