A recent article published by CGTN, China’s English-language news outlet, made a striking claim. It reported that Sweden’s centre-right foreign minister, Maria Malmer Stenergard, had told her Chinese counterpart, Wang Li, that “Sweden’s adherence to the one-China principle will remain unchanged.”
If true, it would have marked a reversal of decades of Swedish policy on the China–Taiwan question, and a jarring rebuke of her own party’s long-standing criticism of the Social Democrats’ Cold War rhetoric of non-alignment.
The one-China principle is the People’s Republic of China’s position that there is only one China, represented by the PRC, and that Taiwan is a province of that state. Sweden, however, has never endorsed that principle — and, I am told by a member of Stenergard’s staff, that has not changed. Indeed, her political advisor writes that “Sweden’s one-China policy remains firm”, and that the CGTN’s article blurs the distin…
