Editorial丨Disgraced Truss' Taiwan trip takes the biscuit

If the 10 days when her government's business was suspended during the period of national mourning for the passing of Queen Elizabeth II was deducted, Liz Truss actually served as the United Kingdom's head of government for only 39 days, rather than 49 days. That makes her the shortest-serving prime minister in the UK's history. It is a record that will be hard to beat.

Despite her short tenure, she managed to inflict her own damage on the country. To tackle inflation and energy shortage, her government introduced an energy price guarantee policy to cap energy prices, and a mini-budget program of large-scale borrowing and tax cuts. These caused financial instability, and all of them were criticized and quickly reversed. What advice then could Truss, who famously lost out in comparison to a lettuce, offer to the authorities on the island of Taiwan except how to cause chaos.

What the Taiwan authorities hope to gain from Truss' five-day visit starting from Tuesday is anybody's guess. Allowing the island to become a catwalk for disgraced Western politicians desperate for the public eye only serves to expose the nature of these visits as marriages of convenience.

Such collusion is nothing but a "dangerous political show", as China's embassy in the UK said.

The speech Truss gave on Wednesday proved the point, as it showed that the former UK leader, who proved unfit for office, intends to take advantage of the visit to do nothing but parrot Washington's words to pour oil on fire over the Taiwan question.

To give Truss her due, she has been consistent in acting as a mouthpiece of Washington. In a speech titled "The Return of Geopolitics" in April 2022, Truss, then the UK's foreign secretary, called on the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to be ready to tackle global threats by working with Japan and Australia to ensure order in the Pacific, saying: "We must ensure that democracies like Taiwan are able to defend themselves".

It is clear that Truss has nothing of any value to offer for the peaceful resolution of the Taiwan question. Her trip is motivated by her desire to earn some personal political capital from it. But in doing so, she is playing an ugly role inciting the Taiwan secessionists to further their collusion with external forces to turn the island into a geopolitical tool for them.

The number of visits some "distinguished guests" from the West have made to the island lately has laid bare the fact that it is these Western politicians playing the "Taiwan card" for their own narrow ends that threaten the peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, and that are taking the initiative to try and change the status quo of the Strait via brinkmanship.