Leaders from more than 50 African nations gathered in Beijing on Monday to attend the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation, where Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) delivered a speech pledging US$60 billion of financial support for the continent, matching his pledge from three years ago.
Despite the eye-watering levels of investment, there is mounting evidence that China’s heavy presence in Africa is nothing short of a neocolonial resource grab that uses “debt-trap” diplomacy to saddle African nations with unsustainable levels of debt.
Beijing’s increasing assertiveness around the world is sounding alarm bells in Washington, but it also affords Taiwan an opportunity to boost its diplomatic credentials as a key ally to counter China’s threat.
In the Asia-Pacific region, China’s militarization of waters in the South and East China Seas through aggressive island-building is well-documented. On Monday, Japanese Minister of Defense Itsunori Onodera said that China has been “unilaterally escalating” military activities over the past year, including conducting airborne operations around Japanese airspace and sending a nuclear submarine near disputed islands.
“This has become a significant concern for our country’s defense,” Onodera said.
The umbrella of Beijing’s nefarious influence spreads much wider than just the Asia-Pacific region. The Chinese Communist Party is steadily painting the globe red as it leverages its economic might to force indebted nations in Africa and elsewhere to cede strategic ports and hand over valuable mineral wealth and resources to pay off Chinese loans.
Sri Lanka is perhaps the most egregious example of the grave security threat posed by China’s “debt-trap” diplomacy, delivered through its Belt and Road Initiative. In December last year, the Sri Lankan government was forced to hand over the strategic port of Hambantota to China on a 99-year lease in a desperate attempt to pay off US$8 billion of debt the nation had racked up to Chinese state-controlled firms.
Perhaps the irony was lost on China’s leaders, given that Hong Kong’s New Territories were leased to Britain from China during the Qing Dynasty in 1898 for, you guessed it, 99 years — an aspect of the UK’s colonial past about which China never fails to remind Britain.
China last year opened its first overseas military base in Djibouti, whose government is reportedly close to striking a deal with a Chinese state-controlled company that would cede control of its main port, which is the main access point for US, French, Italian and Japanese military bases in the area.
Earlier this year, French magazine Le Monde reported that China had infiltrated the African Union’s computer network and had been siphoning confidential data to a server in Shanghai every evening for five years from 2012 to last year. The union’s building was funded almost entirely by China as a “gift” to Africa and constructed by Chinese firms, with everything down to the furniture and interior fittings supplied by China. It was the mother of all Trojan horses.
However, perhaps of even more concern for Washington is that China has even begun to reach into South America, which the US regards as its backyard. The latest example of this occurred last month, when Beijing poached Taiwan’s former diplomatic ally El Salvador, eliciting an uncharacteristically robust response from the US Department of State.
Washington is clearly rattled by China’s neocolonial designs, but out of every crisis comes an opportunity, and Taipei should be doing everything in its power to leverage heightened concern over Chinese expansionism to supercharge its relationships with the US, Japan and other like-minded nations.
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
A large part of the discourse about Taiwan as a sovereign, independent nation has centered on conventions of international law and international agreements between outside powers — such as between the US, UK, Russia, the Republic of China (ROC) and Japan at the end of World War II, and between the US and the People’s Republic of China (PRC) since recognition of the PRC as the sole representative of China at the UN. Internationally, the narrative on the PRC and Taiwan has changed considerably since the days of the first term of former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) of the Democratic
A report by the US-based Jamestown Foundation on Tuesday last week warned that China is operating illegal oil drilling inside Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone (EEZ) off the Taiwan-controlled Pratas Island (Dongsha, 東沙群島), marking a sharp escalation in Beijing’s “gray zone” tactics. The report said that, starting in July, state-owned China National Offshore Oil Corp installed 12 permanent or semi-permanent oil rig structures and dozens of associated ships deep inside Taiwan’s EEZ about 48km from the restricted waters of Pratas Island in the northeast of the South China Sea, islands that are home to a Taiwanese garrison. The rigs not only typify
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