Last week in Washington, a group of international parliamentarians from 30 countries met to discuss what to do about the increasing global threat of the People’s Republic of China. This legislative summit introduced to the United States the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China, founded in 2020, a potentially important forum to coordinate policy responses to Beijing.
Iain Duncan Smith, former leader of the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party and a driving force behind IPAC, has long warned of China’s dangerously expanding influence and sought to rouse a global audience to the risks. Duncan Smith has significant experience in China-related matters, and, for his good work, Beijing has sanctioned him, along with several other House of Commons members. Such interference in sovereign legislative deliberations (what our Constitution protects for Congress under the “speech or debate” clause) awakened British politicians across party lines who, like many in America and across the West, were slow to see China’s rising threat.
U.K. political leaders have been on a fast learning curve regarding China. Although later overruled, Sir Lindsay Hoyle, speaker of the House of Commons, barred Beijing’s representatives from entering Westminster Hall, where Queen Elizabeth was lying in state. Xi Jinping did receive an invitation to attend the Queen’s funeral, which Duncan Smith blasted as “Project Kowtow all over again.” He called on Prime Minister Liz Truss’s new government to rescind the invitation to Xi, although the matter likely rested with King Charles III to decide.
Having declined a place in the Truss Cabinet, Duncan Smith is being urged to seek election as chairman of the House of Commons’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee. This would bring his assertive policy leadership to a visible, potentially powerful post, thereby aiding his efforts to inform British politicians and citizens about Beijing’s spreading threat. His aim is not to add another office of state to his resume but to embolden a U.K. establishment, business and political, too long asleep as the threat level has risen, all too similarly to the situation in America.
Hence IPAC.
The Washington session drew personal appearances from Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL). Rubio is vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Their presence, along with numerous recent congressional visits to Taiwan, most notably that of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), demonstrate the depth of legislative support for strong American policies to counter China — on Taiwan and more broadly. (On Sept.19, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee approved Sen. Menendez’s proposed Taiwan Policy Act by a bipartisan 17-5 vote over Biden administration qualms. Nile Gardiner, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Margaret Thatcher Center, helped organize the conference, encouraging the considerable Hill support for the gathering.
IPAC attendees, of course, heard from Taiwanese parliamentarians but also from a Fijian legislator recounting the serious threat China poses among the South Pacific island states. Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksandr Merezhko strongly supported IPAC’s objectives, stressing that, despite ambiguous public comments by some Chinese officials, Beijing was supporting Russia’s invasion of his country and providing political support at the U.N. and elsewhere.
The IPAC summit concluded with a detailed “campaigning blueprint to confront Beijing.” Strikingly, this detailed policy document included recommendations not just on subjects such as Taiwan and Hong Kong, but on Ukraine, demonstrating that the IPAC legislators understand the global nature of Beijing’s challenge. Globally, they called for “reducing strategic dependency” on Chinese products and supply chains and advocated “constructing mechanisms to mount collective response against coercive trade practices.”
The blueprint’s specific policy recommendations take on China’s most objectionable recent behavior. On Taiwan, for example, and in light of Beijing’s belligerent reaction to the Pelosi trip, delegates concluded that “our countries’ relations with Taiwan are not the PRC’s to determine. We will resist the PRC’s attempts to subvert the free conduct of our foreign policies.” IPAC stressed the importance of “greater deterrence against military or other coercive PRC action against Taiwan” and comparable economic approaches to ensure Taiwan’s continued flourishing.
On Ukraine, the IPAC legislators rejected the rhetoric of some Western leaders that China was distancing itself from Russia’s invasion: “IPAC is gravely concerned by the support given by the PRC to Russia’s economic, military and disinformation strategies following the invasion of Ukraine.” Concretely, the delegates called for economic sanctions, including asset freezes, against Chinese entities supporting Russia’s defense-industrial complex or its international propaganda and disinformation strategies.
Some governments are well along in implementing these and other IPAC proposals, but even these steps are only the initial, minimal steps required. The key point is that, while many Western foreign policy establishments and foreign ministries have been slow to perceive Beijing’s threat, national legislators have begun acting instead. In the coming years, IPAC could be the forerunner of more substantive economic and politico-military alliances, and a communications channel among like-minded states that fully deserves U.S. congressional and policy community support.
John Bolton was the national security adviser to President Donald Trump between 2018 and 2019. Between 2005 and 2006, he was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
