Liz Truss, who polling suggests will be the next UK Prime Minister in six weeks’ time, has said the UK “absolutely should be cracking down” on companies like TikTok, and that China is only on course to become the world’s largest economy because the West has been “enabling” them.

Erstwhile chancellor Rishi Sunak and foreign minister Liz Truss, both hoping to be the next Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, discussed the China threat during a televised debate on Monday night, both strident in their remarks about Beijing.

Truss said the west had to learn the lesson of Europe finding itself unable to stand up to Russia over Ukraine because it had become dependent on Moscow for energy, a mistake that was being repeated with the west’s dependence on China for imports. Sunak called China a threat to national security in the debate, saying Britain had to stand up for its values.

The Chinese government itself responded to the leadership remarks in typical style, issuing an editorial in the party-controlled Global Times accusing both candidates of hyping up China as a threat to distract from domestic issues, labelling the race for the next Prime Minister an “absurd campaign”.

Responding to a direct question from a BBC host during the televised debate, contender Liz Truss — who polling has as the favourite to succeed Boris Johnson to the leadership — said she would crack down on Chinese software like TikTok. She told the audience: “We absolutely should be cracking down on those types of companies [Tik Tok] and we should be limiting the number of tech exports we do to authoritarian regimes.”

Challenged that China was soon to be the world’s largest economic superpower, Truss hit back that this wasn’t in fact inevitable and was the west’s doing. She continued: “I’ve been talking to our G7 allies about this, we collectively represent 50% of world GDP. I don’t think it’s inevitable that China will be the biggest economy in the world, in fact, we’ve been enabling that to happen.”

Looking to the future, Truss linked the situation with Russia today with a theoretical problem with China tomorrow, where western countries would be unable to respond to foreign aggression because they were totally dependent on imports from that nation. Such warnings may have struck a familiar tone: former U.S. President Donald Trump made similar warnings about Germany selling out its sovereignty to Russia for cheap energy during his presidency and was laughed at — literally — for it, yet his predictions have since come true.

Truss said on the BBC panel: “…we should not repeat the mistake we made with Russia. Of becoming strategically dependent on Russia. And we’re now facing the costs of that with energy. We can’t be strategically dependent on China… We have to learn from the mistakes we made of Europe becoming dependent on Russian oil and gas. We cannot allow that to happen with China. Freedom is a price worth paying.”

Sunak, who has generally been perceived as being weak on China during this race, also got involved and said that China was a threat to the UK. FOllowing a social media post his team published earlier in the day calling China “our number one threat”, the former chancellor said Monday night: “we do need to recognise that China is a threat to our national security, our economic security… we need to protect our values, stand up for our values, protect our country against threats.”

Sunak promised action against China if he was made Prime Minister. He said: “as Prime Minister, I’ll take a very robust view on making sure we do stand up for our values and we protect ourselves against those threats because that’s the right thing to do for our security.”

Despite the newly tough rhetoric on China — a real change in the United Kingdom where being slavishly pro-Beijing was the default setting in government during the David Cameron years — both Sunak and Truss have come to their scepticism on allowing China to buy Britain belatedly. As Sunak pointed out during the debate, Truss had praised a “golden era” in Anglo-Sino relations in recent years, and she addressed the 15th World Chinese Entrepreneurs Conference in 2019.

Sunak has plenty of such past form himself, and just days ago was backed by China’s Global Times as Beijing’s preferred candidate to be the next British Prime Minister.