After President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) took office on May 20 last year, Beijing settled in for “a period of observation” before it initiated military intimidation and a series of propaganda attacks aimed at Taiwan.
These actions include a drastic reduction in the number of Chinese tourists who are allowed to travel to Taiwan; repeated flights around Taiwan by Chinese military aircraft; the establishment of diplomatic relations with Sao Tome and Principe, which caused that nation to sever diplomatic ties with Taiwan; and China’s only aircraft carrier, the Liaoning, sailing through the Taiwan Strait.
These were followed on Thursday by Nigeria’s announcement that Taiwan’s representative office in the capital, Abuja, would be moved to the coastal city of Lagos, Nigeria’s and Africa’s largest city. These actions are designed to increase the pressure on Tsai and they are also raising tensions in the cross-strait relationship.
Tsai has refused to accept the so-called “1992 consensus,” although she follows a policy of maintaining the cross-strait “status quo,” a position that Beijing does not find acceptable. After having observed Tsai’s actions and statements for half a year, China is using military, economic and diplomatic means to try to force her administration to fall in line with its demands.
The reason that China selected Nigeria — and Taiwan’s representative office in that nation — for its next statement was because Nigeria is a major African nation and it does not have diplomatic relations with Taiwan. By doing so, Beijing is letting Taipei know that it will encounter problems even in its relations with non-diplomatic allies with which Taiwan merely maintains a substantive relationship.
At the Mainland Affairs Council’s (MAC) year-end news conference, MAC Minister Katharine Chang (張小月) said that the cross-strait relationship has been fraught, with more changes than usual.
She said that any issue is up for discussion when trying to find a new model for relations between Taiwan and China as long as it sets no political preconditions and is aimed at seeking common ground, while reserving differences.
Chang did not elaborate on what she meant by a new model for cross-strait relations, but a functioning cross-strait policy requires that the two sides are in agreement with each other and thus requires informal discussions between the two sides before anything can be made official.
However, looking at the anger inherent in China’s recent actions, it is clear that the two sides are still quite far apart.
China has never been able to understand what Taiwan wants or hopes for. When Taiwan was ruled by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), Beijing was under the impression that it would be able to win over Taiwanese by offering concessions and following a conciliatory policy, but all the benefits of this approach went to a small number of intermediaries within the KMT.
The imbalance in how China distributed these benefits and the negative effects of these policies resulted in the Sunflower movement, a social uprising that highlighted the wrongheadedness of the KMT’s and Beijing’s approach.
China’s decision to return to its old approach of propaganda attacks and military intimidation is a matter of wishful thinking that has nothing to do with reality. Not only will it do nothing to improve the cross-strait relationship, it will also push Taiwanese further away from China.
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