Hong Kong pro-democracy activists living in the UK have criticised the Government’s decision not to label China a threat in an updated review of UK foreign policy
Last year, then-Prime Minister Liz Truss had been set to formally designate China a “threat” to national security for the first time in what would have signalled a tougher approach to Beijing.In October, a pro-democracy Hong Kong protester was dragged into the Chinese consulate grounds in Manchester and beaten up. Earlier this year, the Chinese government was found to havei:“Other than the delaying of the PM’s promise that he would close all the Confucius Institutes when he becomes the PM.
Finn Lau, a leader of the Hong Kong protest movement who came to the UK in 2020, said: “It is disappointing to see that the Chinese Communist Party regime is being designated as a “systemic challenge” rather than threat only, given the escalating geopolitical and economic coercion imposed by China upon democratic countries like the UK, Australia and Lithuania in the recent years.
Simon Cheng, co-founder of expat group Hong Kongers in Britain and a former official at the British Consulate in Hong Kong who was granted asylum in Britain in 2019, said he was “grateful” to the Government for stressing the importance of education to counter threats to liberal democracies.But he said: “We still see the Government may not be fully aware of the threat from autocracies such as the CCP regime that could challenge multi-faceted areas beyond ‘economic security’,” he said.
“What I focus on more, as you can see, is that they emphasise the fact that the threat from the CCP regime would be more about economic coercion. And I think that is not enough to say that is economic coercion. Threat, definitely would, I think, be more on the path of reality.”
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