Time.news – La Lithuania closed its embassy in Beijing and evacuated all personnel at the height of the worst diplomatic crisis with China in decades.
What aroused the Dragon’s wrath was the decision of the Baltic country to allow the Taipei authorities to open a diplomatic representative office in the name of Taiwan, an unacceptable move for China, which considers the island as an integral part of its territory and does not tolerate its sovereignty and autonomy being recognized.
A large part of the world accepts the “one China” policy and allows the small Asian democracy to open de facto diplomatic offices as long as they use the name of the capital Taipei.
Following the announcement last September, Beijing asked the Lithuanian ambassador to leave the country and downgraded the mission to the level of charge d’affaires.
The next one to alarm the 19 workers left Chinese request to deliver the documents by 14 December to receive new ones reflecting the new diplomatic status.
For fear that the surviving staff of the embassy would come immunity lifted, with unpredictable consequences, the Lithuanian foreign ministry then recalled diplomats and their families “for consultations” the day after the expiry of the ultimatum, sealing the embassy.
In a scene from Cold War told by ‘The Economist’, the employees left in a hurry at dawn with a private bus, without returning the documents, to take the first Air China flight to Paris, escorted by means of friendly embassies.
After locking the (actually negligible) imports from the Baltic countryBy making it impossible to select Lithuania as a country of origin in customs databases, Beijing warned France and Germany that it could prevent them from exporting goods with Lithuanian components to China, putting hundreds of containers already in transit at risk.
The bet of the People’s Republic is that the other European countries leave Vilnius to their own fate to avoid economic retaliation. A bet that is increasingly proving to be a miscalculation.
In the EU Council, even Hungary, one of the most pro-Chinese countries in the bloc, sided with Vilnius.
On November 30, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, assured his Lithuanian counterpart, Nauseated gypsy women, that European solidarity comes before relations with the great powers. And on December 8, officials in Brussels warned that reprisals against Lithuania could amount to violations of the rules of the World Trade Organization, where China still maintains the incongruous status of a developing country.
Nauseda’s spokesperson, Asta Skaisgyrite, he asked the European Commission for resolute action. “We want the implications of the conflict to be clear to our European partners and for economic actions to be as broad as possible,” Skaisgyrite told public television.
However, it is not yet clear whether there will be a unified EU response, or how far it can go. A fundamental step will be the first, announced conversation between the new German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, among the first world leaders to congratulate him on his election.
Berlin has very close relations with the Baltic countries and Beijing fears a relationship with Germany that is less serene and predictable than that enjoyed during Merkel’s long government, especially after the declarations of the new foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, who promised a relationship based on “dialogue and harshness”.
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