The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) suppression of Taiwan in the international community and the insult it brings to Taiwanese are pervasive and pernicious. Sometimes it is overt, while other times it is so subtle as to make you wonder if you are paranoid or reading too much into Beijing’s machinations. Therein lies the problem.
The more explicit and dramatic manifestations of this suppression are seen in the military incursions over the median line of the Taiwan Strait and the drills clearly designed to project its intention to blockade Taiwan. They are in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) refusal to say that he would not resort to using force against Taiwan.
The interference, disinformation campaigns and attempts to sow division within Taiwan during last month’s presidential and legislative elections are another, less overt example. The huge number of cyberattacks targeted at Taiwan is known, but less obvious are the covert operations to interfere in the political process and steer voters toward one candidate over another. The prevailing suspicion among many Taiwanese is that Beijing would have preferred the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in power to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). At least in this there is a sense of certainty.
The KMT would say that its candidate, New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜), did not always benefit from the CCP’s interference, and that on at least one occasion it was Taiwan People’s Party Chairman Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) who stood to gain most, as KMT assistant director of international affairs Howard Shen (沈正浩) writes on this page.
There, the lines start to blur.
It is no secret that Beijing opposes the DPP. Over the weekend at the Munich Security Conference, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) gave a speech entitled “China in the World” in which he wove such a web of contortions and evasions that it was truly a masterclass in misinformation. In an on-stage interview immediately following the speech, Wang brushed aside questions about China’s human rights record, inviting people to visit Xinjiang, while accusing Western media of concocting stories of rights violations and what amounts to internment camps for Uighurs. He also pointedly criticized the DPP government, blaming it for cross-strait talks coming to a halt in 2016. The refusal to come to the table has come from the CCP’s side, not from Taipei.
Wang’s criticism of the DPP was as artfully phrased and as utterly misrepresentative of the facts as were his attempts to persuade people that the CCP’s actions in Xinjiang or in the South China Sea were in good faith.
Another example of Beijing’s more nuanced attempts to alter the international community’s perception of its claim over Taiwan is its insistence on having Taiwan listed not as Taiwan or the Republic of China, but as “Taiwan, Province of China.” This is a longstanding issue that again came to the fore on Sunday. It was the focus of a letter of complaint by the All Japan Taiwanese Union to Japanese National Diet Library (NDL) director-general Motonobu Yoshinaga.
People using the online “NDL Search” service are required to select a country of residence, and while it is possible to choose “Taiwan” in the Japanese version of the Web site, the only option in the English version is “Taiwan, Province of China.”
Governments, agencies, private institutions and individuals are obliged to participate in this charade of adherence to the “one China” principle, even if they know it to be baseless. China’s suppression of Taiwan and insults to Taiwanese are conducted at all levels, explicit and subtle, covert and overt. There is no end to them, and Beijing cajoles others to sign on for it.
A series of strong earthquakes in Hualien County not only caused severe damage in Taiwan, but also revealed that China’s power has permeated everywhere. A Taiwanese woman posted on the Internet that she found clips of the earthquake — which were recorded by the security camera in her home — on the Chinese social media platform Xiaohongshu. It is spine-chilling that the problem might be because the security camera was manufactured in China. China has widely collected information, infringed upon public privacy and raised information security threats through various social media platforms, as well as telecommunication and security equipment. Several former TikTok employees revealed
At the same time as more than 30 military aircraft were detected near Taiwan — one of the highest daily incursions this year — with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69kms) from the northern city of Keelung, China announced a limited and selected relaxation of restrictions on Taiwanese agricultural exports and tourism, upon receiving a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) delegation led by KMT legislative caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅崑萁). This demonstrates the two-faced gimmick of China’s “united front” strategy. Despite the strongest earthquake to hit the nation in 25 years striking Hualien on April 3, which caused
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth