Cleverly
During his August 2023 visit to China, British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly avoided any public comments on the Chinese regime’s brutal totalitarian policies, making nice with the authors and implementers of those policies. Meanwhile, something better happened back home in Britain with respect to Britain’s China policy: the British parliament referred to Taiwan as an “independent country.”
In an official document.
That it did so, risking China’s ire—for allegedly “reversing right and wrong and confusing black and white,” per a right-and-wrong-reversing Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman—is apparently a first for a UK parliament report (“UK parliament calls Taiwan ‘independent country’ as Cleverly visits China,” Politico, August 30, 2023).
The parliamentary report, published by the foreign affairs committee of the House of Commons, says:
Taiwan is already an independent country, under the name Republic of China. Taiwan possesses all the qualifications for statehood, including a permanent population, a defined territory, government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states—it is only lacking greater international recognition.
May all government and other public entities around the world also exhibit the same degree of courage and fortitude required to forthrightly state the obvious.
