In response to Japan’s release of wastewater from the Fukishima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, China announced in late August that it would suspend all imports of Japanese aquatic products. According to the statistics of the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), exports of Japanese aquatic products to China plummeted by 90 percent in September — with only the “fish escaping the net,” koi, continuing to be traded.
However, after the license of the commissioned Japanese inspection organization expired at the end of last month, China has not renewed the license. So the export of Japanese koi to China has been effectively suspended starting this month.
China’s boycott of Japanese aquatic products, not based on scientific evidence, has now gone even further, with a ban on everything that swims in the water. Even the farmed koi that have nothing to do with seawater have been affected, despite koi being inedible ?— their economic value being derived from their ornamental quality. China’s excuse of “food safety supervision” is groundless.
Following the Chinese General Administration of Customs’ ban on Taiwanese agricultural and fishery products such as grouper and pineapples in August last year, it banned imports of Taiwanese cakes and pastries on the grounds of incomplete registration information. Later in December, the ban was further extended to include processed aquatic products, beverages, oils, grains and cereals.
Although the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cited “food safety supervision” as the reason, the first ban was actually announced on the eve of the visit of then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan.
China’s unilateral changes to the rules to make things difficult for Taiwanese food products are not free from the motive of political retaliation. Today, Beijing is simply repeating the same old trick.
Japanese officials said they have already submitted the updated application documents in accordance with the normal procedure and have also made enquiries through official diplomatic channels, but the Chinese side has delayed the matter by “having read it, but making no reply” (已讀不回).
A spokesperson of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said: “China has not issued any announcement or document related to the temporary suspension of the importation of Japanese koi,” without any proper reason or explanation. This fully exposed Beijing’s hoodlum behavior.
Looking back at last year’s Legislative Yuan, legislators from the blue and white camps did not criticize Beijing at all. Instead, they took turns to bombard then-minister of agriculture Chen Chi-chung (陳吉仲) for his inaction, while taking the Japanese MAFF as an example, emphasizing that Japan had done a better job of assisting its fishermen and farmers. Some lawmakers even echoed China’s “cognitive warfare” by spreading fake news, claiming that the agency in charge had never submitted any application documents for export registration to its Chinese counterpart.
The ban on Japanese koi is just the latest example of China’s economic bullying, boycotting and blocking, which Beijing sees as political tools to express its discontent. Once the CCP targets you, the application documents or registration process are not the issue. No matter how hard Taiwanese and Japanese officials try, such efforts would be in vain.
The late Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe once said: “A Taiwanese emergency is a Japanese emergency,” and he was absolutely right. The case of Japanese koi serves as proof.
Chen Yung-chang is a company manager.
Translated by Eddy Chang
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS