Foreign media have reported that during a meeting in April last year Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) told European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that the US is attempting to provoke China to invade Taiwan.
He said that China would not rise to the bait, according to the reports.
These ideas of US provocation or using Taiwan as a means to destroy China have been broached in the past by Chinese academics and retired generals.
In Taiwan, pro-China elements have also been pushing the idea that Washington is exploiting Taipei and extending this to a series of “US skeptic” theories to undermine relations between the US and Taiwan, and inculcate among the public a sense of antipathy toward the government’s purchase of US weapons. Some avidly deep-blue supporters even believe that the US is fleecing Taiwan by selling overpriced, outdated and useless weapons, or that Taiwan can only secure peace by giving up its weapons altogether.
Whatever form this US skepticism takes, it is all rooted in China’s insistence that all problems are the responsibility of other countries and reflect an inability for instropection. China always passes the buck to others, blaming external forces, “Taiwan separatists” and the Democratic Progressive Party. It believes that if it says something loud enough, it can continuously reverse right and wrong, call a deer a horse and sow division, setting members of the public at each other’s throats and benefiting from it.
Xi said China would not act as the US wishes. This does not mean China would not attack Taiwan by force; he is instead casting around for an excuse to initiate an invasion of Taiwan and make China look like the aggrieved party.
Beijing did the same thing a few years ago when it said that COVID-19 originated in the US. It is also possible that Xi is trying to drive a wedge between the EU and the US by saying this.
Nonetheless, Xi’s artifice would not succeed, because most Western countries have already seen through the nature of China, and would not treat it as just any other country. Beijing has repeatedly shown it never practices what it preaches, just as it signed the Peace Treaty with Tibet and the Sino-British Joint Declaration with Hong Kong, but refuses to comply with either.
China had promised not to militarize disputed islands in the South China Sea, but it has not only brought military forces into those islands, but also refused to accept the Permanent Court of Arbitration’s South China Sea ruling in 2016, bullying neighbors such as the Philippines and infringing upon other countries’ rights.
Beijing rationalized its action by blaming the US military’s high-intensity activities and saying that its military deployment is purely for national defense.
From territorial disputes in the South China Sea, it is clear that China always says one thing and does another, not to mention that it refuses to say it would not use force against Taiwan, with military drills around the nation every day increasing the risk of war.
China has intensified its invasion of Taiwan through cognitive warfare, trade tensions, diplomatic isolation, forced declarations and “united front” work in the realm of culture, because it refuses to accept the objective fact that Taiwan is not part of China and sticks to its “reunification” agenda just as it did to exert total control over Hong Kong regardless of the consequences.
Xi’s statements mean nothing until China stops oppressing Taiwan.
Hong Tsun-ming is a specialist in the Taiwan Statebuilding Party’s international section.
Translated by Chien Yan-ru
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
For Taiwan, the ongoing US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets are a warning signal: When a major power stretches the boundaries of self-defense, smaller states feel the tremors first. Taiwan’s security rests on two pillars: US deterrence and the credibility of international law. The first deters coercion from China. The second legitimizes Taiwan’s place in the international community. One is material. The other is moral. Both are indispensable. Under the UN Charter, force is lawful only in response to an armed attack or with UN Security Council authorization. Even pre-emptive self-defense — long debated — requires a demonstrably imminent
Since being re-elected, US President Donald Trump has consistently taken concrete action to counter China and to safeguard the interests of the US and other democratic nations. The attacks on Iran, the earlier capture of deposed of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and efforts to remove Chinese influence from the Panama Canal all demonstrate that, as tensions with Beijing intensify, Washington has adopted a hardline stance aimed at weakening its power. Iran and Venezuela are important allies and major oil suppliers of China, and the US has effectively decapitated both. The US has continuously strengthened its military presence in the Philippines. Japanese Prime
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS