The establishment favourite to succeed Boris Johnson as Prime Minister, former Goldman Sachs banker and World Economic Forum acolyte Rishi Sunak has received the tacit backing of the Chinese Communist Party this week, with Beijing’s top English-language propaganda newspaper declaring him the candidate to have the most “pragmatic” stance towards China.
Rishi Sunak, one of the wealthiest members of Parliament as a result of his marriage to Indian businesses heiress Akshata Murty, is currently in the lead among support from other Conservative MPs in the contest to replace Boris Johnson as the leader of the party and therefore Prime Minister.
In addition to the Westminster establishment, Sunak received praise from the Global Times, the typically belligerent foreign mouthpiece for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The state-run newspaper described the former Chancellor of the Exchequer as “the one candidate with a pragmatic view of developing balanced ties with China,” as opposed to other candidates such as Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Tom Tugendhat, both of whom have taken a harder line on Beijing on issues such as Hong Kong and Taiwan.
While the paper quoted international affairs “expert” Wang Yiwei of Renmin University as saying it is unlikely that UK-China relations will return to the so-called “golden era” under former prime minister David Cameron and his chancellor, George Osborne, he said that the “elites in London will eye emerging economies like China and India to make up their losses in Europe after Brexit.”
Going on his past statements, it is perhaps correct of Beijing to assume that Sunak would be the most friendly prime minister towards the communist regime, having said in 2020: “I think with China we also need to be realistic and hard-headed and I’d say probably transactional in our approach to that relationship, rather than being starry-eyed about it.”
“China is going to be a significant feature of the global economy, and only increasing in significance, so it would be wrong to ignore that.”
In his Mansion House speech in 2021, Sunak said that it will be important for Britain to take advantage of the emerging financial services sector in China through partnerships with the City of London, and for the United Kingdom to partner with the totalitarian state on “global issues like health, ageing, climate and biodiversity.”
This January, the then-Chancellor is reported to have been pursuing a “complete sea change” in relations with China ahead of the reopening of trade dialogues with Beijing after two years of quiet during the Wuhan virus crisis.
A key backer of Sunak’s campaign, anti-Brexit former Foreign Secretary Jeremy Hunt, has also come under criticism for his close ties to China, with even his wife, Lucia Guo — a Chinese native — previously serving as a presenter for a propaganda project produced by Chinese state-run television.
Sunak’s father-in-law, N. R. Narayana Murthy, one of the founders of Indian tech giant InfoSys, a listed partner of the World Economic Forum (WEF) whose president Mohit Joshi has praised China in an article on the WEF’s website for pairing digital identity with access to business loans.
The former Chancellor of the Exchequer, once a key ally of Boris Johnson who turned Brutus and sparked the downfall of his government, has nevertheless been seen as the candidate most closely aligned with Johnson’s ‘Build Back Better’ green agenda. While Communist China is the world’s top polluter, the East Asian powerhouse benefits massively from Western governments’ obsession with so-called green energy and net zero.
Indeed, up to 40 per cent of Britain’s solar farms were reportedly constructed on the backs of slave labour in the region of Xinjiang, where millions of Uyghur Muslims and other ethnic minorities have been interned in concentration camps. China is also a major producer of the rare earth minerals required to operate the allegedly clean sources of energy. Cancer rates have soared in the surrounding areas of mines in China for neodymium, a magnetic material used in the production of wind turbines.
Despite this, Sunak appeared at the World Economic Forum’s Green Horizon Summit in 2020 to push the idea of a “whole of economy transition” to “green energy” sources.
“The challenge of climate change is clear and it is urgent,” Sunak said. “We need to ensure a positive and fair transition to Net Zero and protect our environment.”
Sunak, a former Goldman Sachs banker, has also been at the forefront of a key goal of both the World Economic Forum and the Chinese Communist Party, namely the transition to a cashless society through the implementation of CBDCs (central bank digital currencies).
Unlike Bitcoin, which operates on a decentralised basis with no one person, entity, or government having control over its value, CBDC’s are essentially a digital form of traditional fiat currencies, as they are produced and issued by central banks and are therefore ultimately a continuation of the current monetary system — except without the privacy protections inherent in cash or other hard forms of money.
In 2021, Sunak ordered the Bank of England to begin reviewing how it could offer a CBDC, which he described as a “digital form of money, a bit like a digital banknote” and act as a “compliment” to cash banknotes. With the already diminishing role of cash in British society the trackable CBDC could eventually replace cash and coins altogether.
Besides the ability to track every transaction, there have been concerns raised within the Bank of England itself that CBDCs could be used in a similar fashion to the Chinese social credit score, with director Tim Mutton noting that they could be “programmable” by central banks, meaning that the government could ultimately decide how and on what citizens spend their money.
Communist China itself became the first major economy to introduce a CBDC, the Digital Yuan, which has seen over a quarter of a billion people sign up to use. The inherent privacy risks of using such a currency were demonstrated during the Beijing Olympics when the United States warned its athletes to not use the Digital Yuan for fear of the CCP spying on American athletes through the cryptocurrency.
Follow Kurt Zindulka on Twitter here @KurtZindulka
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