China tells US and allies to stop talking about ‘status quo’ around Taiwan
Joel Gehrke
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Secretary of State Antony Blinken and U.S. allies must stop protesting China’s military pressure on Taiwan, according to a top Chinese envoy.
“Recently, there have been some absurd rhetoric accusing China of challenging the so-called rules-based international order, of unilaterally changing the status quo across the Taiwan Strait through force or coercion, and of disrupting peace and stability across the Strait,” Chinese Foreign Minister Qin Gang said Friday. “The logic is absurd, and the consequences dangerous.”
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Blinken has faulted Chinese officials for deciding that the “status quo was no longer acceptable” in recent months, based on the expansion of Chinese military operations around Taiwan following then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taipei in August. Chinese forces no longer honor the “median line” that unofficially divided the Taiwan Strait for decades, and their frequent sorties put pressure on Taiwanese forces while stoking anxiety about a conflict.
“It is not the Chinese mainland, but the ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist forces and a handful of countries attempting to take advantage of ‘Taiwan independence,’ that are disrupting international rules, unilaterally changing the status quo, and undermining stability across the Strait,” Qin insisted at the Lanting Forum, a Chinese diplomatic conference in Shanghai.
China’s bellicose posture has prompted an overhaul of Japan’s national security strategy. Japanese officials see an analogy between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s potential to attack Taiwan, according to the commanding general of U.S. Army Japan, and they suspect that a Chinese campaign against the island democracy would involve an assault on the southwestern Japanese islands closest to Taiwan.
“The Japanese who I work with each day consider Japan is like Poland; the Philippines is like Romania; China is like Russia; Taiwan is Ukraine,” Maj. Gen. Joel Vowell told reporters Thursday. “Japan is worried … that the People’s Liberation Army would have to at least block if not outright seize some of those islands to isolate Taiwan from an intervention by Western forces, if that’s the U.S., Japan, or whomever.”
The frequency of Chinese military operations around Taiwan allows Beijing to create uncertainty in Tokyo about whether a given military maneuver is just a drill or the start of a major military operation.
“For our side, it is ultimately more difficult to distinguish [if] this is an exercise for signaling or this is preparation for actual operation, and so on,” Sugio Takahashi, a lead defense researcher for the Japanese Defense Ministry, said during a Thursday event with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If they have the everyday higher readiness which can launch [an] amphibious operation at any moment, just as in the Russia exercises [between fall 2021 to spring 2022], then our preparations will be a little bit complicated.”
In that context, U.S. and allied governments have grown more outspoken about urging China “to abstain from threats, coercion, intimidation, or the use of force” against Taiwan or in other territorial disputes. South Korea, which historically has been preoccupied with the immediate threats from the North Korean dictatorship, has joined that chorus.
“After all, these tensions occurred because of the attempts to change the status quo by force, and we together with the international community absolutely oppose such a change,” South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol told Reuters in an interview published Tuesday. “The Taiwan issue is not simply an issue between China and Taiwan but, like the issue of North Korea, it is a global issue.”
Yoon’s remarks sparked a diplomatic flap with Qin’s team, which made “made serious demarches” to South Korea in protest only to find that South Korean officials regarded their complaint as a “serious diplomatic discourtesy.” Qin insisted Friday that such warnings amount to an attempt to “subvert” the international agreements implemented after the Second World War.
“Their definition of rules, status quo and stability is in fact aimed to hollow out the one-China principle, achieve ‘peaceful division’ of China, and ultimately tamper with the history of WWII, subvert the post-war order, and trample on China’s sovereignty,” Qin said. “China will not lose any part of its territory that has been restored. And the established post-war international order will not be upended.”
Qin anchored that argument in the agreements that yielded Taiwan to the Republic of China following the defeat of imperial Japan. That nationalist government took refuge on the island after being driven from Beijing by the Chinese communist revolution, and the communist regime has never exerted authority in Taipei. Yet Chinese President Xi Jinping warned Biden in November that “cross-Strait peace and stability and ‘Taiwan independence’ are as irreconcilable as water and fire,” and the U.S. and its allies are changing their military posture in light of the potential for conflict.
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“The focus has shifted to the real problem today and tomorrow, which is protecting the sovereignty of Japan, main effort in the southwest islands,” Vowell said.
“The foundation in the region has changed really to the PRC’s unwarranted aggression,” Vowell said, noting that whereas Japan feared attacks from North Korea as recently as five years ago, now, Japanese officials believe that “the greater threat to Japan’s sovereignty is the People’s Republic of China, particularly the People’s Liberation Army and the People’s Liberation Army Navy.”