Harborough MP says China is becoming 'increasingly aggressive and dictatorial' as the country cracks down on Hong Kong

Harborough MP Neil O’Brien has launched a stinging broadside at China as the country cracks down on Hong Kong.

Neil said President Xi Jinping is clamping down hard on freedoms within China while pursuing a much more belligerent policy overseas as it flexes its muscles.

“The crackdown in Hong Kong is just the latest in a series of aggressive moves by China’s increasingly dictatorial government.

“Xi Jinping declared himself president for life in 2018.

“Since then he has sparked a military conflict with India, launched a trade war on Australia, taken two Canadian citizens hostage to try and secure the release of a Huawei official arrested in Canada and engaged in diplomatic bullying of other allies such as Sweden and Denmark,” the Conservative MP told the Harborough Mail.

“Within China there has been a dramatic clampdown on freedom with a journalist arrested nearly every week over the last year.

“Human rights lawyers have been imprisoned and up to a million long-suffering Uighur Muslims have been imprisoned in so-called ‘re-education camps’.

“Now Beijing is tearing up the agreement they made with the UK before the hand-over of Hong Kong that there would be ‘one country, two systems’ and freedoms and the rule of law would be maintained.”

Neil, who’s helped to set up the new China Research Group in Parliament with fellow Tory MP Tom Tugendhat, said Bejing has “bypassed Hong Kong’s legislature”.

“China has imposed a new ‘security’ law.

“People in Hong Kong were not even allowed to see this so-called law before it entered force.

“People are being arrested under its Draconian new powers on the very first day.

“Britain is right to say that people in Hong Kong with British passports should be able to see refuge here from the dictatorship in Beijing,” insisted Neil.

“But we also need to take action to protect our economy and values from a new more aggressive Chinese regime.

“That could mean targeted sanctions, but should definitely mean action to address unfair competition.

“China bans free trade unions and has rock bottom environmental standards.

“It engages in all kinds of unfair economic policies.

“It gives its businesses massive unfair industrial subsidies to undercut ours.

“It uses discriminatory standard setting and procurement to build up national champions - and it engages in industrial espionage in even the most sensitive fields.

“We should stop tolerating a situation in which China blocks investment in its economy while buying up whatever strategically important technologies here.

“We badly need a much less one-sided relationship with China.”

Neil said Prime Minister Boris Johnson has now got to urgently re-set the UK’s entire diplomatic, economic, financial and military relationship with Beijing.

“The repression we are seeing in Hong Kong should be a serious wake-up call about the nature of the new China and its real intentions towards Britain and our democratic allies,” warned the Harborough MP.