Deep State Demands: Foreign Office Postponed Taiwan Visit to Mollify China

The British Foreign Office blocked a planned visit by former Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen because it could imperil a minister’s visit to China next month which they evidently valued more highly, a report claims.

Tsai Ing-wen stood down as President of the Republic of China, Taiwan, in May of this year and is due to embark on a tour of European nations in the coming weeks but won’t include the United Kingdom on that itinerary, as it claimed to have been hoped. A report by The Guardian claims plans to welcome former President Tsai were blocked by Britain’s Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) because they were worried how the Chinese Communist Party might take it.

One person said to have been involved in the planning told the paper: “We got a note from the FCDO via the Taiwanese representative to the UK… It said: ‘Please can you defer this for a while because the foreign secretary is about to make a “goodwill visit” to China and this would absolutely put the kibosh on it.”

David Lammy, the new British Foreign Minister is due to visit China next week reports state, on a visit Bloomberg says is meant to “improve ties” with the industrial power. While UK-China relations enjoyed what was euphemistically called a “golden age” in the last decade under the fervently Sinophile David Cameron — George Osborne Conservative government, subsequent Tory administrations were decidedly more skeptical about the wisdom of opening up too much to Beijing.

The visit for former President Tsai was being organised by the British-Taiwanese all-party parliamentary group (APPG) and was due to take place this month, The Guardian states. They cite multiple — but unnamed — sources who state the government used its power to deny  support to the visit, making it unviable.

Of course, the United Kingdom has a long history of deferring to China on the Taiwan question, having ceased to recognise it officially as a country in the 1950s and withdrawing its diplomatic office in the 1970s. Even if the UK government doesn’t wish to engage with Taiwan as a country, it still does a great deal of trade with it, valued at billions of pounds a year.

This kowtowing to Beijing to build bridges with China comes just months after it was blamed for a massive hack of British government defence ministry computers, putting the details of hundreds of thousands of servicemen at risk.

China has also been seriously accused to running a major operation in British politics to influence Members of Parliament, but also to cultivate a whole new generation of British politicians from their earliest days as candidates. The highest profile scandal related to these operations was over a Labour Member of Parliament who was hauled before the security services in 2022 to be told one of his best friends and benefactors, a Chinese lawyer, was being declared a security threat.