The former prime minister Liz Truss is to visit Taiwan next week, where she will deliver a speech likely to anger Beijing and potentially upset the UK government’s careful approach to China relations.
Truss said on Tuesday: “Taiwan is a beacon of freedom and democracy. I’m looking forward to showing solidarity with the Taiwanese people in person in the face of increasingly aggressive behaviour and rhetoric from the regime in Beijing.”
The former Conservative leader’s office said on Tuesday that she was also expected to meet senior members of the Taiwanese government.
When the US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, visited Taiwan last year, China claimed it had put its army on “high alert” and announced targeted military operations including missile tests.
The UK Foreign Office is understood to be “aware” Truss is travelling to Taiwan. The government has been attempting to deal with Beijing’s growing economic and political reach, with other influential Tory MPs also pressing the prime minister and his cabinet to take a harder line.
The trip follows recent speeches by Truss on China – in Tokyo in February and to the Heritage Foundation, a rightwing US thinktank, in Washington DC last month – where she began setting out how she believed free western democracies should toughen their stance on Beijing.
She is expected to deliver the Taiwan speech in the early hours of the morning UK time at an event organised by the Prospect Foundation thinktank. It was among groups China imposed sanctions on last month in retaliation for Pelosi’s meeting with the Taiwanese president.
A Chinese government spokesperson said at the time that the thinktank was under sanctions for its involvement in promoting Taiwanese independence.
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Truss, who has begun efforts to revive her career after her short-lived tenure in Downing Street by focusing on foreign relations, used her 2023 Margaret Thatcher Freedom lecture in Washington last month to assail “wokeism”, praise Ronald Reagan and portray herself as the victim of a vast political conspiracy.
However, the UK government will be listening carefully to how she expands on her views about China in Taiwan. She used her US visit to condemn the French president, Emmanuel Macron’s recent trip to Beijing to ask for support in ending the war in Ukraine as a sign of weakness.
The trip comes after a warning by the foreign secretary, James Cleverly, that Britain should not “pull the shutters down” on China, as it would be counterproductive to the national interest
In a warning to Conservative hawks, he told the Guardian that there was not a binary choice to be made between treating China as either a threat or an opportunity, and said the UK’s approach needed to be more nuanced.
