China bristles at France s Macron linking Ukraine defence to Taiwan threats

SINGAPORE - China on May 31 criticised as “double standard” attempts to link the defence of Ukraine with the need to protect Taiwan from a Chinese invasion – a thinly veiled reference to a speech by French President Emmanuel Macron in Singapore on the night of May 30.

As part of a broader address on the risks of division between China and the United States, Mr Macron told the Shangri-La Dialogue defence meeting that if Russia was allowed to take any part of Ukraine without constraint, then “what could happen in Taiwan?”

In a Facebook post, China’s embassy in Singapore said that comparing the Taiwan issue to the Ukraine issue was “unacceptable”.

“The two are different in nature and not comparable at all,” the post said, adding that Taiwan was entirely an internal affair for China.

“If one tries to denounce a ‘double standard’ with a double standard, the only result we can get is still a double standard,” it said.

The embassy post did not mention Mr Macron directly, but it was accompanied by a photo of him talking at the event.

Beijing previously dispatched defence ministers and other senior military officials to the annual meeting, which ends on June 1. This year, it sent a relatively low-level delegation of military academics.

China views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory and has stepped up military and political pressure to assert those claims, including increasing the intensity of war games, saying the island is one of its provinces with no right to be called a state.

Taiwan’s government rejects Beijing’s sovereignty claims, saying that only the island’s people can decide their future.

US Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth told the gathering on May 31 that China posed an “imminent” threat and any attempt to conquer Taiwan “would result in devastating