China’s abuse of human rights and intensifying crackdown on Hong Kong will provoke a major international backlash, according to one of Beijing’s closest partners in Europe.
“If China sticks to its new course, the Western world will react more decisively,” Swiss Foreign Minister Ignazio Cassis told local media.
That rebuke may carry outsized symbolic significance given that Switzerland was the first European country to establish diplomatic ties with the Chinese Communist Party after the regime came to power in 1949. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi touted Beijing’s relationship with Switzerland as “a model for friendly exchanges” between China and democratic nations, but Cassis’s comments suggest that the heightened focus on Beijing’s totalitarian policies has taken a toll.
“The rule of law and human rights have always been part of our dialogue,” he said. “Now we realize that the story is more turbulent than we thought. Human rights violations are on the increase. We want to protect these rights.”
Those comments, published Sunday, drew a protest from the Chinese Foreign Ministry. “Such remarks are groundless and not constructive,” spokesman Wang Wenbin told reporters on Monday. “We hope the Swiss side will cherish the sound momentum in bilateral relations and abide by basic norms governing international relations.”
The dispute is the latest example of how China’s reputation has deteriorated in Western countries over the last several months. Swiss officials have declined to “fuss too much about human rights violations in China,” as the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Joseph de Weck put it in May. Yet the new tone coincides with a hardening attitude toward China in other major European capitals, including London and Berlin.
“The leadership of the authoritarian, one-party state passes up no opportunity to drive a wedge between the EU member states and weaken them,” German Minister of State for Europe Michael Roth wrote in a new opinion column directed at European Union allies. “It compromises our credibility and weakens us all if individual members are prepared to undermine European human rights policy for the sake of a supposedly lucrative bilateral ‘deal’ with China.”
Cassis and Roth’s comments — the German official emphasized the EU’s past recognition that China is a “systemic rival could bode well for Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s effort to rally European allies as the U.S. rivalry with China intensifies.
“Most importantly, on China, we see the Chinese Communist Party also for what it is: the central threat of our times,” Pompeo told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week. “Our vigorous diplomacy has helped lead an international awakening to the threat of the CCP.”
