The Chinese embassy has reportedly demanded an Israel-based news outlet remove its interview with Taiwan’s foreign minister, and failure to do so may result in Beijing downgrading its ties with Israel.
Wu said that the Chinese Communist Party would sometimes “use trade as a weapon,” citing Lithuania, the Czech Republic, and Australia as some of the countries with which China has weaponized trade relations.
“We shouldn’t allow these kinds of business relations to jeopardize our national security. And I understand pretty well that Israel also places national security very high on the government agenda,” he said in a video interview.
Yaakov Katz, the editor-in-chief of The Jerusalem Post, said that he received a phone call from the Chinese embassy shortly after the publication of the interview, asking him to “take down the story.”
Taiwan’s diplomat in Israel is also referred to as a “representative” rather than an ambassador.
“A very prominent American diplomat told me that you must be doing something right when China gets upset. So don’t worry about China getting upset at you. When they get upset at you, that means you are doing something right,” Wu said.
Wu also conveyed Taiwan’s interest in cooperating with Israel during the interview, saying that Taiwan has always admired Israel’s self-defense capabilities.
“That is something that we want to emulate. So even though there’s not a whole lot of security relations with each other, our security experts have been looking at Israel,” he told the publication.
Persecuted Uyghurs, rights groups, and elected lawmakers around the world have accused Chinese authorities in Xinjiang of facilitating forced labor by arbitrarily detaining millions of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities in a network of camps in the northwestern region.
