China bristles at Macron linking Ukraine defence to Taiwan threats

By Greg Torode

SINGAPORE (Reuters) -China on Saturday criticised as a "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 Emmanuel Macron in Singapore on Friday night.

As part of a broader address on the risks of division between China and the United States, 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 with the Ukraine issue is "unacceptable".

"The two are different in nature and not comparable at all," the post said, saying 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," the post said.

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

Beijing has previously dispatched defence ministers and other senior military officials to the annual meeting, which ends Sunday, but this year 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 only the island's people can decide their future.

U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told the gathering on Saturday that China posed an "imminent" threat and any attempt to conquer Taiwan "would result in devastating consequences for the Indo-Pacific and the world".

Regional diplomats said that Macron's comments were far from isolated during the freewheeling, informal meeting and risks of a Russian victory emboldening a Chinese invasion of Taiwan had at times surfaced in sideline discussions.

"The message from many backing Ukraine is that the line must be held if a message is to be sent to China," said one East Asian envoy.

(Reporting By Greg Torode; additional reporting by Fanny Potkin and Jun Yuan Yong)