During his visit to Japan over the past weekend, former White House senior adviser Steve Bannon said that the US and its East Asian allies must unify to constrain China’s “frightening, audacious and global ambitions.”
The statement implies that Bannon has seen through China’s innate rogue status. Western so-called “China experts” with their belief that propriety, justice, honesty and honor are part of Chinese culture have been manipulated into assisting China’s rogue behavior.
Here are some of the recent examples of China’s audacity.
The human rights situation in China is deplorable. Beijing’s “low-end” inhabitants have over the past few months been driven out of their homes and forced to live rough in the cold weather.
Still, on Friday last week the Chinese State Council issued a white paper saying that Chinese enjoy ample economic, social, cultural, civil and political rights, and the human rights situation is moving forward “like the spring breeze, full of vitality.”
Not long before that, the council also claimed that China is the world’s biggest democracy.
China’s protectionism in its relationship with the US has resulted in an annual US trade deficit with China of almost US$500 billion. Still China continues to steal US intellectual property and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) shamelessly continues to blame the US for being protectionist while he pursues global leadership.
When US President Donald Trump visited China, China offered a “great gift” by relaxing restrictions on foreign investment in Chinese banks, but Chinese banks are being dragged down by domestic debt and will now drag foreign capital down with them.
China is engaged in unrestricted military expansion: It issues belligerent statements, its navy passes between the Japanese islands through the Miyako Strait and the Tsushima Strait, and it has said that the Sea of Japan is not a Japanese sea.
This militarist expansion is forcing Japan to increase the strength of its self-defense forces, only to be criticized by China for reviving Japanese militarism.
When South Korean President Moon Jae-in visited China, he made a point of currying favor with Xi and accepted Xi’s talk about the two countries being part of a “shared community.”
A visiting South Korean photographer was being beaten up by Chinese police and less than 72 hours after Moon agreed to being part of a shared community, the People’s Liberation Army Air Force entered South Korea’s air defense identification zone to take advantage of “shared community airspace.”
After the Cultural Revolution, China was on the brink of default. Taiwanese and Hong Kong businesspeople brought capital, technology and management know-how to China and were followed by other foreign investors, helping China’s development.
Now China is treating Hong Kong and Taiwan as “low-end” regions.
China has also changed its attitude toward other investors: In addition to being provocative, it is now demanding that foreign businesses in China set up Chinese Communist Party (CCP) branches in their companies.
China has forgotten who helped it grow strong and is now acting like a bully.
Bannon is calling for leaders to avoid the Thucydides trap — when a rising power causes fear in an established power which escalates toward war.
I am currently reading Herman Wouk’s War and Remembrance, which uses the Thucydides trap to impart an important lesson: Democracy best meets our thirst for freedom, but a lack of discipline, as well as disorder, and the desire for ease and comfort often drive us toward autocracy.
This is a warning that no democracy, including Taiwan, must forget.
Paul Lin is a political commentator.
Translated by Perry Svensson
We are used to hearing that whenever something happens, it means Taiwan is about to fall to China. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) cannot change the color of his socks without China experts claiming it means an invasion is imminent. So, it is no surprise that what happened in Venezuela over the weekend triggered the knee-jerk reaction of saying that Taiwan is next. That is not an opinion on whether US President Donald Trump was right to remove Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro the way he did or if it is good for Venezuela and the world. There are other, more qualified
This should be the year in which the democracies, especially those in East Asia, lose their fear of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “one China principle” plus its nuclear “Cognitive Warfare” coercion strategies, all designed to achieve hegemony without fighting. For 2025, stoking regional and global fear was a major goal for the CCP and its People’s Liberation Army (PLA), following on Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) Little Red Book admonition, “We must be ruthless to our enemies; we must overpower and annihilate them.” But on Dec. 17, 2025, the Trump Administration demonstrated direct defiance of CCP terror with its record US$11.1 billion arms
China’s recent aggressive military posture around Taiwan simply reflects the truth that China is a millennium behind, as Kobe City Councilor Norihiro Uehata has commented. While democratic countries work for peace, prosperity and progress, authoritarian countries such as Russia and China only care about territorial expansion, superpower status and world dominance, while their people suffer. Two millennia ago, the ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius (孟子) would have advised Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) that “people are the most important, state is lesser, and the ruler is the least important.” In fact, the reverse order is causing the great depression in China right now,
As technological change sweeps across the world, the focus of education has undergone an inevitable shift toward artificial intelligence (AI) and digital learning. However, the HundrED Global Collection 2026 report has a message that Taiwanese society and education policymakers would do well to reflect on. In the age of AI, the scarcest resource in education is not advanced computing power, but people; and the most urgent global educational crisis is not technological backwardness, but teacher well-being and retention. Covering 52 countries, the report from HundrED, a Finnish nonprofit that reviews and compiles innovative solutions in education from around the world, highlights a
RSS