An article titled “Xi’s New Language on Taiwan Alters the Diplomatic Starting Point” by Ai Ke, a doctoral researcher specializing in cross-strait relations, was published on Monday on news site The Diplomat.
The “new language” refers to the phrase, as it appeared in the official English-language transcription of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) Nov. 24 phone call with US President Donald Trump: “Taiwan’s return [to China] is an integral part of the post-[World] war [II] international order.”
Ai Ke detected a subtle change in the language in referring to Taiwan, not just the use of the phrase “return to China,” but also in contextualizing this as a necessary completion of the post-war international order, which Xi said was important to “jointly safeguard the victory of WWII.”
The author was right to highlight these shifts. She did not mention the preceding phrase, which was equally as telling: Xi reminded Trump that “China and the US fought shoulder-to-shoulder against fascism and militarism.”
The militarism reference was pointed at Japan; Xi wanted to lock the US into the group that defeated Germany and Japan, consolidating the idea that the US, the UK and China — he glossed over the fact that it was Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) forces, not those of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — had fought together and led to Japan’s surrender.
The phone call was not the first time these ideas arose. Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) has been laying the groundwork for Xi for months. It started in August, in the run-up to the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II — and victory over Japan in the Asian theater — and China’s Sept. 3 military parade to mark the occasion.
On Aug. 15, addressing the Lancang-Mekong Cooperation Foreign Ministers’ Meeting in Yunnan, China, Wang said that documents such as the Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Proclamation “clarified” Japan’s culpability for the war and required that the territories it had “stolen, including Taiwan” be “returned” to China.
He said that was “an integral part of the post-war international order.”
In Chinese, as in English, the phrase was word-for-word identical to Xi’s presentation to Trump.
On Wednesday, on the eve of the meeting between French President Emmanuel Macron and Xi in Beijing, Wang told his French counterpart, Jean-Noel Barrot, that as World War II victors, France and China must not allow Japan to “stir up troubles” over Taiwan.
This is all part of a coordinated effort to vilify Japanese, consolidate a shared historical bond and drive a wedge between the US and Japan. The overblown reaction to Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s Nov. 7 comments that Chinese military action in the Taiwan Strait would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan was just an opportunistic leveraging of rhetoric planned months ago.
A pattern is clear. First, the slow introduction of a concept, together with the cajoling of pro-Beijing governments and of governments along for the ride out of economic necessity, to endorse the CCP’s position. If that does not work, or if the government is resistant to its advances, Beijing proceeds with the distortion of the other party’s position, as it did with the US and India over their respective “one China” policies. The objective is to normalize the concept in international discourse. It is basically incremental revisionism through the back door.
Singapore arguably has legitimate historical reasons to echo the CCP’s rhetoric, but chooses not to.
Speaking at the Bloomberg New Economy Forum on Nov. 19, Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財) said he hoped that China would move on, as Southeast Asia has done with Japan.
“With the passage of time ... we have put the history aside and we are moving forward... Singapore and all the Southeast Asian countries support Japan playing a bigger role in our region, including on the security front, because we think that that provides for some stability in the region,” Wong said.
The reality is that Japan is consolidating its ability to defend itself. In this region, South Korea is doing the same, as are Australia, New Zealand and the Philippines.
President William Lai (賴清德) is working to increase the national defense budget. The opposition in the legislature is doing its level best to hobble those efforts. The US and other allies are wondering why Taiwan is dragging its feet. They have a point.
China badly misread Japan. It sought to intimidate Tokyo into silence on Taiwan. Instead, it has achieved the opposite by hardening Japanese resolve. By trying to bludgeon a major power like Japan into accepting its “red lines” — above all on Taiwan — China laid bare the raw coercive logic of compellence now driving its foreign policy toward Asian states. From the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China Seas to the Himalayan frontier, Beijing has increasingly relied on economic warfare, diplomatic intimidation and military pressure to bend neighbors to its will. Confident in its growing power, China appeared to believe
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