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Danish foreign minister defends China trip amid criticism from opposition

Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen is scheduled to travel to Shanghai and Beijing on Tuesday, where he will sign a new programme of cooperation between Denmark and the Asian superpower.

Published: 15 August 2023 09:10 CEST
Danish foreign minister defends China trip amid criticism from opposition
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen speaking to media in July. Rasmussen visits Shanghai and Beijing on Tuesday to sign a new international partnership agreement with China. Photo: Mads Claus Rasmussen/Ritzau Scanpix

Opposition parties on both the right and left wings have spoken critically about the visit, citing issues including China’s stance towards Taiwan, support of violent regimes and record on international treaties.

Rasmussen has stated that Denmark has had a “too naïve” approach to China in the past, but that it remains in the Nordic country’s interest to have a good relationship with Beijing.

The trip has meanwhile been backed by the Confederation of Danish Industry, which says that Denmark’s trade with China is crucial.

The libertarian right-wing party Liberal Alliance has criticised Rasmussen’s visit and said that China regularly fails to comply with international treaties, threatens Taiwan and the South China Sea passage for ships and is trying to exert itself in the Arctic region.

“We should be careful about becoming too dependent on states and regimes that don’t wish us well,” the party’s foreign spokesperson Henrik Dahl said.

The spokesperson said that the trade argument did not weigh heavily enough against the other concerns.

“You can also find examples in history that you shouldn’t be too busy trying to make money,” he said.

Three other parties – the national conservative Danish People’s Party and Denmark Democrats, and the centre-left SF – have also been critical of the visit by Rasmussen.

The former party’s leader Morten Messerschmidt told broadcaster TV2 that China “is flagrantly stealing our know-how and supports some of the worst regimes in the world”.

Rasmussen told news wire Ritzau that he was taking an open approach to the new partnership with China.

Although Denmark may have been too close to China previously according to Rasmussen, he also warned against now taking excessive distance.

“It’s not in Danish interests to shift from one position to the other. If we tended to be a bit too open 15 years ago, the lesson should not be that we are now too closed,” he said.

“If you had that approach to the rest of the world, that we would only work with those who are like us, you’d be left in a very small club,” he said.

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POLITICS

EXPLAINED: How AI deep fakes are bringing new tensions to Danish politics

Denmark's culture minister said on Monday he hoped to use copyright law to bring an end to the controversial new trend of using deep fake videos in politics. Here's the background.

Published: 13 May 2024 15:13 CEST
EXPLAINED: How AI deep fakes are bringing new tensions to Danish politics

Jakob Engel-Schmidt, who represents the Moderate Party, warned that the technique, used in recent videos by the far-right Danish People’s Party and libertarian Liberal Alliance were the “top level of  a slippery slope that could end up undermining our trust in one another and making every political message, newspaper article and artistic publication a potential battleground for whether it is true or false”. 

Which parties have used deepfake video in campaigning? 

The Danish People’s Party at the end of last month issued an AI-generated deepfake video showing a spoof speech in which Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen appeared to announce that Ascension Day, Easter and Christmas would no longer be public holidays, and that they would all be replaced by the Muslim festival of Eid as the country’s only holiday. 

This was a satirical reference to the government’s unpopular decision to abolish Store bededag, or “Great Prayer Day” as a public holiday. 

The video was clearly labelled as AI-generated, and ends with the Danish People’s Party’s leader, Morten Messeschmidt, awakening from a nightmare. 

The Liberal Alliance also released a video for Great Prayer Day, in which it used AI to turn Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen (S), Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen (V) and Foreign Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen (M) into eccentric-looking characters similar to those in the film’s of the US director Wes Anderson.

What kind of a stir have the videos caused in Denmark? 

Denmark’s Minister for Digitization, Marie Bjerre, who represents the centre-right Liberal Party, was sharply critical of the Danish People’s Party’s move. 

“I think it is way over the line for the Danish People’s Party to make a deepfake of a political opponent. I don’t think it’s proper either, and they shouldn’t do it,” she said. “It is also a problem for our democracy and society. Because with deepfakes, you can create material that looks extremely credible, which means that you can really spread misinformation. That is why it is also very serious that the Danish People’s Party is using deepfake for this kind of thing.” 

She said that such videos should only be allowed if the organisation making or distributing them have received consent from the person depicted. 

“If you want to make deepfakes of people, you must ask for permission. That will be the proper way to do it,” she said. 

Messerschmidt defended the video as light-hearted satire that at the same time educated Danish people about the new technology. 

“What we can do is show Danes how to use the new technologies and how to use them in a good way, like here in an entertaining and satirical way,” he said. 

Although Engel-Schmidt said he was concerned about the use of deepfake videos in politics, he acknowledged that the light-hearted videos released by the two parties were in themselves unlikely to deceive anyone.  

How does Engel-Schmidt hope to regulate such deepfake videos? 

He said he aimed to see whether copyright law could be used to regulate such videos.

Presumably this would mean seeing whether, under law, people have a right to the use of the own image, personality or voice, and can therefore forbid them from being used without permission. 

What do the experts say? 

Christiane Vejlø, one of Denmark’s leading experts on the relationship between people and technology, welcomed the government’s moves towards regulating deepfake videos, pointing to the impact they were already having on politics in other countries such as India and the US.

“There is no doubt that we will have to deal with this phenomenon. It has an impact on something that is most important to us in a democracy – namely trust and faith in other people,” she told Denmark’s public broadcaster DR.

In the current Indian election campaign, she said that deepfakes of popular Bollywood actors had been used to criticise the current government and encourage voters to vote for the opposition.

“In India and the USA we see politicians saying things they could never think of saying. We are getting an erosion of the truth,” she said. 

She said that even if the videos were clearly labelled as AI-generated, it did not necessarily make them unproblematic. 

“Even if you can see that it is a deepfake, it can still influence voters to think that there is something wrong with them [the politician] or that they look stupid,” she said. “We have a situation where another person is used as a digital hand puppet.” 

 
 

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