Foreign Minister Joseph Wu says that China is ratcheting up tensions with the outside world in order to distract its citizens’ attention from domestic issues. Wu was speaking Tuesday in Bratislava, Slovakia, during an interview with AFP.
Wu’s ongoing trip to Slovakia is the highest-level visit by a Taiwanese official to the country since Taiwan opened up a representative office there in 2003. Wu’s visit comes amid warming relations between Taiwan and a number of Central and Eastern European countries, but it also comes amid heightened cross-strait tensions.
Wu told AFP that recently, China has been creating external crises, including heightening the level of cross-strait tensions. He said this is because authorities in Beijing are faced with a number of issues, including a slowing economy and energy shortages, that they want the Chinese people to forget about.
He said this strategy of shifting public attention away from domestic issues with external ones is part of a classic playbook used by authoritarian regimes.