Al Jazeera reported last month on an interesting fact: satellite imagery shows that China has not dismantled the quarantine camps it constructed during the heyday of its zero-COVID policies in 2020 (“China’s huge quarantine camps standing months after ‘zero COVID,’” Erin Hale, Mar. 23, 2023).
These are not small facilities. According to the article, just one facility at Guangzhou’s Nansha District (南沙) can hold 80,000 people. In November, The Associated Press reported that Guangzhou city authorities announced plans for another 250,000 beds.
The continued existence of these facilities across China may be due in part to the lack of budgets and plans for repurposing or demolishing them, but many privately watching their construction see one obvious use: housing pro-democracy Taiwanese after the People’s Republic of China (PRC) occupies Taiwan and begins arresting them.
Photo: Bloomberg
That “re-education” is an inevitable occupation policy of the PRC has been made abundantly clear in comments by its officials, in its policies toward its nationals abroad, and in its treatment of the lands it occupies.
RE-EDUCATING TAIWANESE
Last August, the Chinese ambassador to France, Lu Shaye (盧沙野), who has been in the news recently for his remarks that the post-Soviet states are illegitimate, told BFM TV, “We will re-educate. I’m sure that the Taiwanese population will again become favorable of the reunification and will become patriots again.”
Photo: Reuters
Later that month, China’s ambassador to Australia, when asked about these remarks by Lu, said that he was not aware of them, but was quoted in the Australian Financial Review (“China plans re-education ‘once Taiwan is united,’” Andrew Tillet, Aug. 10, 2022) as saying: “I haven’t read such about such an official policy. I think my personal understanding is that once Taiwan is united … there might be process for the people in Taiwan to have a correct understanding of China.”
His personal understanding, coupled with Lu’s comments on re-education, apparently indicates a belief that is widespread in PRC officialdom. We’ve already seen such camps in action in Xinjiang, and the surveillance apparatus that China has deployed across its empire is in part beta testing for what will be happening in Taiwan.
Many other things signal the future of Taiwan under Chinese rule. China last year detained Taiwanese National Party (臺灣民族黨) vice-chairman and political activist Yang Chih-yuan (楊智淵). Last week it formally charged him with “secession.”
Photo: AP
Others have been detained, most obviously Lee Ming-che (李明哲), who was released in April last year after being detained for democracy activism in 2017.
Multiply that by the 8 million people who voted for the current president in the last election, the implementation of national security laws similar to Hong Kong’s, and systems of colonial surveillance and domination that are commonplace in the PRC’s occupied territories.
Even as we speak, China is systematically retaliating against western firms operating in China, especially when they have access to a rich array of local information. Detentions of foreign businessmen are rising.
Photo courtesy of Chou Chung-te
POWER CONFERS LEGITIMACY
What will happen to foreigners here in Taiwan who do not or cannot leave? The PRC threatens everyone here. Even businessmen here who think of themselves as outside of the China-Taiwan political issues will find that they are not.
Why is this so seldom laid out in the international media? It’s not like we haven’t been through this before. Lu’s infamous remarks on the illegitimacy of the post-Soviet states echo old language long used by imperial states to describe the smaller states in the world. Power alone confers legitimacy. That is how their officials think.
The German demand to annex the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia was famously described by former British prime minister Neville Chamberlain as a “quarrel in a far away country, between people of whom we know nothing” as he negotiated a “peace” deal that would deliver that nation to Hitler.
The real lesson of the subsequent Munich Agreement isn’t its infamous and inevitable failure to buy peace, but the contemptuous attitudes towards the central European state and all small states that created the conditions for that failure. Chamberlain’s dismissal of Czechoslovakia had deep roots in British imperialism.
For example, Sir Joseph Addison, the British minister in Prague and later to the Baltics during the interwar period, had nothing but contempt for Czechoslovakia, which he termed an “artificial country” populated by “inferior Slavs.” For him the Baltic States were “a part of Europe that has no claim to civilization.” British policy in the interwar area was informed by the idea that the postwar states were lesser entities, artificial and unstable.
This belief that Czechoslovakia need not be taken seriously as a nation underlies the discussion of the “Sudetenland issue” in British papers in the 1930s: territorial “issues” are only “issues” for would-be conquerors. There is no “Taiwan issue” for the Taiwanese.
ARGUMENT FOR APPEASEMENT
The arguments for appeasement — recognizable today in the Taiwan debate by a simple swap of names — that Hitler is rational and the Germans people want peace, the German demands for Sudetenland have a certain legitimacy, that it should be conceded because Germany will sooner or later dominate central Europe, that Germany merely sought economic dominance and not territorial gains, only make sense if the speakers regard one state as much less legitimate than the other and assume their listeners share the same assumption.
For anyone who speaks knowledgeably on Taiwan, it is always shocking to hear people advocate that Taiwan be annexed to China. It is because, like all imperialists, they do not think of Taiwan as a real country and Taiwanese as real people. It is only ghostly abstractions who will be packed off to concentration camps to purchase peace with their suffering.
It should now be clear why the international media never ask officials of any country about the consequences of the PRC occupation for Taiwanese, and why discussions about the post-invasion world always contain phrases like “first island chain” and never phrases like “concentration camp.” It is because media workers too often share the same underlying assumptions about power and spheres of influence and the shaky legitimacy of smaller states.
Poor Taiwan lacks even that evanescent legitimacy.
After all, the obverse of the Taiwanese yearning for international recognition is the understanding that the lack of international legitimacy Taiwan suffers from makes it a target.
Notes from Central Taiwan is a column written by long-term resident Michael Turton, who provides incisive commentary informed by three decades of living in and writing about his adoptive country. The views expressed here are his own.
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