During a state visit to Nepal on Sunday, Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) told Nepali Prime Minister Khagda Prasad Oli that any attempt to drive a wedge between China and its “territories” would “end in crushed bodies and shattered bones,” China Central Television reported.
Xi’s comment was an explicit threat to Hong Kong’s pro-democracy protesters, who have been a thorn in Beijing’s side for months.
The message was plain: If you carry on like this, you will share the same fate as the pro-democracy protesters whose bodies were crushed and bones shattered by the tanks that rolled into Tiananmen Square in 1989.
The comment seemed particularly crass as this year marks the 30th anniversary of the massacre, but more than lacking compassion, it was a strategic blunder: Whenever Beijing interferes in the affairs of Hong Kong — or Taiwan — its leaders only end up making matters worse for themselves.
In 2002, just five years after the handover of Hong Kong from Britain, the Hong Kong Legislative Council, apparently on orders from Beijing, proposed legislation to amend the territory’s Basic Law to prohibit treason, secession, sedition and subversion against the Chinese government.
Panic spread as Hong Kongers justifiably feared the bill would sound the death knell on freedom of speech. The public mobilized and an estimated half a million or more Hong Kongers marched through the streets in protest on July 1, 2003 — a watershed moment in Hong Kong’s democracy movement.
In 2012, the authorities proposed amendments to insert patriotism classes into Hong Kong’s school curriculum. Much of society united against what was viewed as an attempt by Beijing to brainwash Hong Hong’s youth. It also led to the formation of the student campaign group, Scholarism, headed up by then-15-year-old Joshua Wong (黃之鋒). Two years later, Wong was back spearheading the “Umbrella movement,” after Beijing went back on its commitment to introduce universal suffrage.
Xi is interfering again this year, attempting through Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥) to introduce a law that would have allowed any Hong Kong resident to be extradited to China.
Beijing’s meddling is counterproductive and a strategic blunder. All the Chinese government needed to do was scrupulously adhere to Hong Kong’s “one country, two systems” model — and Taiwan’s pro-independence movement would have been effectively neutered.
Beijing has been similarly tone-deaf to Taiwan, most famously firing missiles in 1996 into waters near it to prevent then-president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) from becoming Taiwan’s first directly elected president. The strategy backfired.
Today, Chinese warships and military aircraft regularly conduct encirclement drills around Taiwan in a crude attempt at psychological warfare.
With Xi’s militarization of the South China Sea and brazen cyberespionage worldwide, he might have moved his chess pieces too early, prematurely waking the US lion from its slumber and alerting the whole world to Beijing’s nefarious intentions. In years to come, these actions might also be viewed by historians as major strategic blunders.
That is not to say that in Taiwan, and elsewhere, people should be complacent, but perhaps China’s leaders are not the formidable strategic geniuses that the outside world takes them for.
Having surrounded himself with a coterie of yes-men, the arrogant Xi and his regime might be weaker than the world thinks. Taiwan — and Hong Kong — must stay the course and play the long game.
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
The cancelation this week of President William Lai’s (賴清德) state visit to Eswatini, after the Seychelles, Madagascar and Mauritius revoked overflight permits under Chinese pressure, is one more measure of Taiwan’s shrinking executive diplomatic space. Another channel that deserves attention keeps growing while the first contracts. For several years now, Taipei has been one of Europe’s busiest legislative destinations. Where presidents and foreign ministers cannot land, parliamentarians do — and they do it in rising numbers. The Italian parliament opened the year with its largest bipartisan delegation to Taiwan to date: six Italian deputies and one senator, drawn from six
Recently, Taipei’s streets have been plagued by the bizarre sight of rats running rampant and the city government’s countermeasures have devolved into an anti-intellectual farce. The Taipei Parks and Street Lights Office has attempted to eradicate rats by filling their burrows with polyurethane foam, seeming to believe that rats could not simply dig another path out. Meanwhile, as the nation’s capital slowly deteriorates into a rat hive, the Taipei Department of Environmental Protection has proudly pointed to the increase in the number of poisoned rats reported in February and March as a sign of success. When confronted with public concerns over young
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
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