Beijing favors the language of kinship to describe cross-strait relations. We are told that people on both sides are “one family,” bound by history and blood. It is a carefully chosen lexicon: warm, intimate and reassuring. Families reconcile. Families support one another. Families do not seek humiliation.
Yet, whenever Taiwan attempts to travel, speak or simply exist with dignity on the global stage, Beijing discards the language of family and reaches instead for the instruments of coercion. The sentimentality evaporates the moment Taiwan exercises agency.
The reported pressure on Seychelles, Mauritius and Madagascar to revoke overflight permissions for President William Lai’s (賴清德) trip to Eswatini was not sophisticated diplomacy, but a profound strategic embarrassment. This was not the conduct of a confident major power. It was a cheap shot executed across a map.
There is something revealingly trivial about a government using economic leverage to interfere with the flight path of a democratically elected leader. Great powers usually reserve heavy-handed tactics for existential threats or matters of genuine national security. Beijing, by contrast, increasingly deploys them against visibility, symbolism and dignity. That is not strength, it is insecurity, irresponsibility and malice all rolled into one.
What, exactly, was gained? Did China become safer by rerouting a plane? Did regional stability improve by strong-arming third countries to execute last-minute reversals? Did cross-strait trust deepen because Taiwan’s president was obstructed on his way to visit an ally?
What was demonstrated instead was a familiar and increasingly tiresome pattern: Whenever Taiwan behaves like the self-governing political community it is, Beijing responds as though reality itself must be censored, managed and administratively denied.
The episode offers a sobering lesson for Taiwanese. Beijing often speaks of “shared development,” “cross-strait exchange” and “integration.” Yet such incidents reveal that the exchange Beijing welcomes is strictly on Beijing’s terms. Taiwan is encouraged to trade, study and invest in China, deepening one-way dependence. However, when Taiwan seeks to engage Africa, Europe or the wider democratic world on its own terms, Beijing treats that autonomy as an offense to be punished. This exposes the true meaning of Beijing’s preferred “exchange.” It is monopoly, not openness.
The desired outcome is a diminished Taiwan whose international space is narrowed so thoroughly that Beijing becomes the unavoidable gatekeeper and center of gravity. That is why every beautiful phrase now demands scrutiny. “Family” too often means hierarchy. “Opportunity” can mean dependence. “Peace” is too often presented as a euphemism for submission.
Beijing often appears puzzled that Taiwanese identity continues to strengthen and that younger generations feel more distant, rather than more attached. Coercion is an excellent teacher: It teaches people exactly who respects their choices and who seeks to erase them.
There is also a cost beyond the Taiwan Strait. The international community notices when civil aviation permissions become diplomatic leverage and when commerce is converted into political pressure. Such tactics could secure temporary compliance, but they steadily corrode the trust on which lasting influence depends.
Power can close doors. It cannot make others admire the hand that slammed them shut.
If Beijing genuinely desires a peaceful future with Taiwan, it must confront an inconvenient truth: One cannot bully a society into affection, pressure it into identification or isolate it into loyalty.
This latest episode — interfering with a flight route to a national celebration — would not be remembered as a display of great-power confidence. It would be remembered as the action of a government so unsettled by Taiwan’s freedom of movement that it resorted to petty midair obstruction.
For a regime so invested in the rhetoric of inevitable unification, there is no more revealing spectacle than domination disguised as kinship.
By seeking to humiliate Taiwan’s president, Beijing has only insulted the millions of citizens whose democratic choice he represents.
John Cheng is a retired businessman from Hong Kong now living in Taiwan.
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