Boris Johnson has all but confirmed that the UK will suspend an extradition treaty with Hong Kong owing to a national security law imposed by Beijing, bringing another clash with China following last week’s decision over Huawei. Speaking on a visit to a school in Kent, Johnson said Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary, would explain later on Monday “about how we are going to change our extradition arrangements to reflect our concerns about what’s happening with the security law in Hong Kong”. Raab is due to address the Commons on Monday afternoon and is widely expected to suspend extradition to Hong Kong in light of the law, which effectively criminalises most political dissent and can even target actions outside of Hong Kong or mainland China. The US, Canada and Australia have already taken similar actions over extradition to Hong Kong. Earlier on Monday a spokesman for China’s foreign ministry, Wang Wenbin, said such a move by the UK, plus other mooted plans such as actions against individual Chinese officials due to rights abuses, would harm relations between the two countries. “These HK-related remarks turn a blind eye to the basic facts that the national security law is for the sustained success of one China, two systems,” Wang said, referring to the system by which Hong Kong has been governed since it returned to Chinese rule in 1997. “We strongly condemn these actions. We urge the UK to take no more steps down the wrong path, so as to avoid further damage to China-UK relations.” The government said last week it would strip the Chinese telecoms firm Huawei of any role in the UK’s 5G network from 2027 owing to security concerns, which also enraged Beijing. Johnson, during the school visit, said he did not seek confrontation with China, but the UK had grave concerns about Hong Kong and widespread reports of mass repression and rights abuses targeting the Uighur population in China’s north-western Xinjiang province. These have included accounts of forced sterilisation of Uighur women and the incarceration of huge numbers of people in what appear to be concentration camps. “There is a balance here,” Johnson said. “I’m not going to be pushed into a position of becoming a knee-jerk Sinophobe on every issue, somebody who is automatically anti-China. But we do have serious concerns. We have concerns about the treatment of the Uighur minority obviously, about the human rights abuses. He added: “China is a giant factor of geopolitics, it’s going to be a giant factor in our lives and in the lives of our children and grandchildren. You have got to have a calibrated response and we are going to be tough on some things but also going to continue to engage.”
The UK government is considering whether to take action under so-called Magnitsky laws against individual Chinese officials over the situation in Xinjiang, which rights groups have said shows signs of being a cultural genocide. Interviewed on the BBC on Sunday, China’s ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, insisted the Uighur people live in “peaceful and harmonious coexistence with other ethnic groups”, as he was confronted with footage of shackled prisoners being herded on to trains in Xinjiang. Johnson is under pressure from a number of Conservative backbenchers to take a more robust line over Huawei. On Sunday evening the chair of parliament’s defence select committee, Tobias Ellwood, said Britain has “been duped over the last couple of decades” by China.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Westminster Hour programme: “I really want to see a reset of our entire foreign policy, bearing in mind that we are sliding towards a cold war. We can’t do this on our own, we need to work with our allies. “We turned a blind eye to what was going on with the Uighur population, we turned a blind eye to the uneven trade situation whereby Chinese companies could operate quite liberally within the UK and elsewhere but our companies couldn’t operate within China and now I think it’s time to say enough is enough.” The UK has already promised that up to 3 million Hong Kong residents will be offered the chance to settle in the UK, and a path to permanent citizenship, in the wake of Beijing’s imposition of the national security law on Hong Kong. China will be high on the agenda when Raab meets his US counterpart, Mike Pompeo, in London this week.