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Be alert to the China challenge, EU’s Borrell tells G7 foreign ministers
- Beijing poses strategic and ideological tests, including in the South China Sea, he says
- Chinese and US leaders have strong domestic reasons to keep up the rhetoric next year, analyst says
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The European Union’s top diplomat has branded China a “strategic and ideological challenge” as foreign ministers from the Group of Seven industrialised nations try to take a united stand against “malign behaviour” from Beijing and Moscow.
EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell made the remarks during the two-day gathering of top diplomats from the world’s richest nations in Liverpool, England, in their second in-person meeting of the year.
While the year-end meeting was dominated by Russia’s troop build-up on Ukraine’s border, China’s increasingly assertiveness, especially its challenge to Western democracies and fierce criticism of Washington’s Summit for Democracy, was also high on the agenda.
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“China represents today a challenge, a strategic and ideological challenge,” Borrell said on Saturday. “[We] have to be vigilant, gathering our forces in order to ensure, for example, the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea where 40 per cent of the exports of the European Union pass by these waters.”
Opening the year-end meeting, British Foreign Minister Liz Truss called for a show of unity among democracies “to stand up to aggressors who are seeking to limit the bounds of freedom and democracy”, without naming any countries.
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“To do this, we need to have a fully united voice. We need to expand our economic and security posture around the world,” she said.
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