Xi Has Turned His Eyes Toward Taiwan... Or Has He?

"China must unify and is bound to unify. This is the final conclusion from 70 years of cross-strait development and is a necessary requirement for the rejuvenation of the Zhonghua Minzu in the new era."
-Xi Jinping, 2019 New Year's Address

A few days ago I wrote about how Japan (who, much like Godzilla, seems ready to awaken from a slumber that has been long enough for the world to forget their power, and wreak havoc on the fool who roused them) shows all the signs that they plan to make 2019 a year of huge changes. As I wrapped up that article I was on my way to a New Year's Eve Party where the hostess, the wife of a dear friend of mine, happened to be an applicant for membership in the Communist Party of China (not something I was thrilled to learn of, but I digress). As such, she received a notification on her phone at around 10:30 PM that "her Chairman" had delivered a New Year's Eve address which all applicants were ahem "encouraged" to watch. She rolled her eyes, showed the notification to us and asked if we could believe he was so arrogant that he thought he was on everyone's mind on New Year's Eve, and put the phone away while muttering something in Mandarin, much to the amusement of all the guests. Little did I realize that the speech she had just gotten word of contained hints that Japan is not the only country in East Asia seeking to shake things up in 2019.
The year 2019 will mark the 70 year anniversary of the establishment of the so-called "People's Republic" of China, the world's longest-lasting Communist dictatorship ("Communist" in name only, actually, for its forms and functions more closely resemble the Imperial monarchy that preceded it for centuries), with the bloodiest record of any regime in modern history (the death toll from Mao's rule alone exceeds seven Holocausts (Akbar), and that doesn't even include the Cultural Revolution). Anniversaries are colossal occasions in Chinese culture and by all indications that regime's controversy-ridden current emperor, Xi Jinping, is feeling the walls close in. It now shows that he is desperate to fend off the circling vultures by finding something, anything to show as his signature achievement to mark the anniversary. As it will also be the 40th anniversary of the NPC Standing Committee's "Message to Compatriots In Taiwan,", this gave Xi his target. He rang in the year with a speech wherein he, for the most part, said roughly the same thing he spends 471 pages saying in Governance of China Vol. I: nothing. Despite State-Owned China Daily's insistence that the speech "drew praise (An et al.)," there are very few outside of China who were impressed. What was interesting was the part of his speech that actually focussed on something, and that something was the object of the CPC's wet dreams for the past 70 years: Taiwan.
I needn't go in-depth on the historical background here, but I'll give a crash course for those who are somehow not aware. Taiwan (formally, the Republic of China) is the last holdout of the government that preceded the Communist Party's enslavement of the Chinese mainland. The Republic of China's last mainland leader was Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, a name the Japanese learned to fear long before any of them knew about a petty guerrilla leader named Mao Zedong, or his ragtag militia calling itself the "People's Liberation Army." Chiang's government, a military government built upon Zhongshan's theory that in order for China to transition from an Imperial Monarchy to a modern democracy there would be need for a transitional government, was driven to the island of Formosa (Taiwan) in 1949 after the PLA, spared from destruction at Chiang's hands by the disastrous naivete of US General George Marshall (who persuaded Chiang there had been enough killing and he should negotiate with Mao rather than wiping out his starving and ill-equipped rabble as they huddled in Yan'an (Cowley, 377)), stalled for 4 years of fake negotiations while they plotted the destruction of Zhongshan's Party.
Contrary to the Communist Party's propaganda about having liberated China, it was THIS government, the ROC, established by an American-educated and American-inspired visionary named Sun Yat-Sen (Sun Zhongshan if you prefer the Mandarin pronunciation), who toppled China's last emperor and set about the historic task of establishing a freely elected republic in China. This task, interrupted by the Japanese invasion, was not fully realized even in the ROC until 1996, (Mosher, 127), but it has yet to even be hinted at in the PRC, which is one of the reasons the PRC feels threatened by Taiwan: their very existence proves that the founding rhetoric of the Communist Party (that is, that Zhongshan's Party had failed and Western-style Liberal Democracy was impossible in China) is false.
Predictably enough, a threatened and paranoid Chinese government has spent seven decades painting Taiwan in the very same light that they use to paint anything that doesn't go their way, which is basically to abandon any attempt at logic or coherency, and replace them with a determination to cram in as many iterations of buzzwords like "US hegemony," "US interference" or "Western colonization" as possible.
Xi's New Year Address had the usual hallmarks of a Chinese leader's remarks on Taiwan: innumerable assertions of a commitment to "Peaceful Reunification," lathered heavily with assertions that the PLA will "peacefully" bring this unification about in the same manner as the "Peaceful Liberation of Tibet (Sun et al., 28, 41, 44, 50, 52 and others)," pulpit-thumping insistence that China's annexation of Taiwan is "unavoidable," coupled with repeated and emphatic declarations that the people of Taiwan want it as badly as the mainland does.
The last point, which Xi desperately clings to throughout every speech that was cobbled together in his book (Xi, Governance, 252-259), is an absolutely laughable example of China's ongoing war against reality, as President Tsai Ing-Wen of Taiwan pointed out in a tweet that was far more polite than mine would have been, were I in her position (Tsai). For one thing, according to Taiwan Braintrust, 90 percent of Taiwanese identify themselves as "Taiwanese" rather than Chinese (Nylander). Even Taipei Times, a source generally sympathetic to the mainland, found that for every one Taiwanese who favored reunification, there were three opposed and 1 undecided (Chiu & Chin), and Asia Times found that 70 percent of Taiwan's population were willing to pick up a gun and fight if the PLA came lumbering ashore (Asia Times Staff). While support for a formal declaration of independence (something that Beijing has repeatedly emphasized would be a red-line for the PLA) waned somewhat in 2018 amid the twin illusions of the US withdrawal from Asia and China's "ascendancy," an overwhelming majority still supported having this issue kept on their ballots to be decided later (Salmonsen).
But the Chinese Communist Party, especially its current leader, has never let minor details like reality get in the way of a nice, rousing, jingoistic rant, and as soon as "Daddy Xi" barked, every pup in China's media started to yip as well. China Global Television pounced on the story, with an article assuring anyone stupid enough to believe a Chinese-government-owned media outlet that Taiwan's people were in favor of it (CGTN, "Taiwan Compatriots"), an article fawning over another of Xi's speeches insisting that the Taiwanese share his "Chinese Dream (CGTN, "Xi"), and even one of their trademark editorials (wherein someone showing all the signature English errors of a Chinese student, touts an opinion not usually held anywhere outside of China, in the vitriol-is-more-important-than-accuracy trademark style of the Chinese, with a name attached to the editorial that is very obviously not Chinese but claims a lot of lofty credentials despite no mention of their name anywhere else on the web) berating Tsai Ing-Wen for having the unmitigated gall to dare deliver a rebuttal ("Chakraborty"(1)), and scores of other articles equally long on fanaticism and short on sense.

Global Times, a Chinese state-owned Chinese "news"paper famous for hawkish prattle and a Neitcszhian level of egotistical nationalistic narcissism that borders on delusions of nationwide godhood, doubled down on this rhetoric by dropping what thin veils Xi used for his empty threats of military force. The Times's edition for Friday, January 4, rn a front page story under the headline "Scholars See 3 Ways to Realize Reunification with Taiwan (Yang)." The 3 ways were best summed up as follows.

1. Taiwan bows to Beijing's wishes and accepts what Beijing habitually calls "the inevitable," and surrenders their sovereignty to Beijing under the same "One Country, Two Systems" framework as Hong Kong and Macau. You know, never mind that Beijing has so frequently abused in Hong Kong (Wang, Bland) and even gone so far as to openly repudiate it (Ng).
2. The PLA "liberates" Taiwan (and yes, they actually have the cheek to refer to it as "liberation," just as they did in Tibet and Korea, though I'm not sure what they'd be "liberating" it from, or what "liberty" the mainland Chinese have that Taiwan does not). Li Fei, a professor at Xiamen University's Taiwan Research Institute, said this would take place when "the People's Liberation Army has the overwhelming military advantage in the region that can ensure victory against any kind of intervention from any country, especially the US." Yes, you can be stupid enough to believe such a day is coming in the foreseeable future and still get a high post at a Chinese "education" institution, as long as you are a devoted enough member of the Party and write your "research papers" with enough fanatical dogma.
3. Taiwan urgently takes option 1 under duress of option 2, and Beijing, realizing Taiwan's compliance is cheaper than an invasion, "benevolently" agrees. They refer to this as "brinkmanship," a term which actually has quite a different historical meaning altogether. Jin Canrong, the Dean of Renmin University's School of International Studies (and by the way, the fact that "international studies" includes Taiwan is a rather embarrassing admission on the part of RMU, don't you think?), cited the PLA's "liberation" of Peking (modern day Beijing, which this so-called "scholar" inaccurately refers to by mixing Cantonese and Mandarin to come up with "Beiking") as a "successful example" of this "brinkmanship." If you are familiar with my blog and the name Jin Canrong sounds familiar, it's because he's the chest-beating Xi-anderthal who wrote China's Wisdom.

The final paragraph of that article is interesting, not because it reveals anything new but because it's the first time anyone representing the Party has made so many subtle admissions. Observe.

The parties on the island need to be aware that if reunification is realized by war, there will be no "one country, two systems," because then reunification will be no different from other Chinese provinces the PLA had liberated in the mainland in the past, Li noted.

Now then, let's analyze this. The "other Chinese provinces" Li is referring to here are the nations of Tibet and East Turkestan (the latter presently known as Xinjiang, a Chinese word meaning "New Frontier" which was given to it by the Manchu conquerors who, having conquered China with ease, wanted to celebrate their far more challenging victory in subduing the Uighurs). Numbering Taiwan among these is, whether Li admits it or not, an admission that Taiwan, like those two, has a unique cultural and political identity that is most assuredly NOT Chinese. Also, it's a rather thinly-veiled threat that Taiwan will lose the democratic system they value if the PLA takes over. I'm curious how that can be reconciled with the insistence on referring to the takeover as "liberation," but then again, logical sense has never been the forte of the Chinese, who seem to have adopted Orwellian doublethink as early as the Han Dynasty. And again, not only did this come from a ranking official at a major Chinese university (which means he is a Party Member, and works for a Party-owned institution, at the behest of the Party leadership), but the interview wherein he stated this, conducted by a Party member, was quoted in a Party-owned newspaper. There's never been a free press in China. If it's in print, the government said it. Period. This is not "some guy's opinion," this is what the Chinese Government wants their people (and the rest of the world, as is evident by it being reprinted in the English version) to know that they said.
Of course, the rest of the issue was rife with much of the same. The issue contained all the usual exhortations of the self-anointed "Central Nation's" magnificence, this time seeming to take delight in boasting of the country's "strength," such as their declaration that the Chang-e 4 moon lander puts China on the brink of having a permanent moon base built by robots (Leng), a story claiming China has successfully detonated its own MOAB with no citations other than a promotional video from the company claiming to have developed it (Liu), and just for a little color, an anonymous article with no quotations or evidence boasting that a group of mild-mannered Chinese tourists in St. Petersburg used their mastery of Kung-fu to fight off a nefarious pack of Russian thieves (Global Times, 4). And yet, through it all, the common thread was Taiwan. Three major articles in this issue alone directly focus on China's obsession with annexing Taiwan (Editorial, p. 16; Zhang, p. 16; Yang, p. 1), while another anonymous article touts a newly released Chinese patriotic song and goes to great lengths to point out one of its writers was born in Taiwan (p. 3, "'The Chinese Dream'"), and an additional editorial warns readers to expect more "provocations (read: 'refusal to roll over and let a weaker nation bully our allies')" from the US (p. 14), and calling for China to "hold onto its principles." This last was the most hawkish in the entire paper, claiming "[China] has sufficient power to make Washington pay an unbearable price if the US infringes on China." Of course, in typical Chinese fashion, this bluster is not followed by any evidence of what price that is or how China has the power to inflict it, but I digress. As I've said, what matters in Chinese media is not whether or not it makes sense, but whether or not it tickles the fancies of Beijing's echo-chamber of State-worshipers, and the archbishop of that motley cult has made Taiwan the focus of his latest sermon. So the choir (CGTN), the Altar Guild (China Daily) and the Amen Pew (Global Times) have all thrown their hands toward the ceiling in contest to give the loudest "Hallelujah."
So this is it. China is getting ready to make their move on Taiwan, right?

Not so fast.

It's obvious that Xi Jinping wants the Chinese population focussed on Taiwan, but there are three possibilities here.
The first possibility is exactly what I implied at the beginning of this article. Xi realizes that he has failed to deliver on his hypernationalistic promises to make China the leading power of the world, and he realizes that being the one to finally bring Taiwan to heel (and during a year that marks two wonderfully symbolic anniversaries in regards to Cross Strait Relations) would do a lot to bolster the faltering Messianic facade he has attempted to construct among the Zhonghua Minzu. If that's the case, then it's going to be a tense year but China will be in a wheelchair by the time the year is over, and the only question is "at what cost to Taiwan and the two major powers that are legally bound to come to her aid, namely, the US and Japan?"
The second possibility is the one Charlotte Gao put forth in a recent article for The Diplomat; namely, that Xi Jinping needs something to take the Chinese people's eyes (and perhaps, the world's eyes) off of China's ongoing (and likely worsening) economic crisis and he has decided that a flurry of “China's about to invade Taiwan" rumors are just the thing. If that's the case, then Tsai shot herself in the foot by letting a blustering fool like Xi get a rise out of her and taking Taiwan's rejection of Beijing's so-called "1992 Consensus" from unspoken to spoken, because if Xi's goal was to give the Chinese mainland someone to hate other than himself, she just delivered herself as the the "someone," on a silver platter. Granted, having the balls to do that (I say with tongue-in cheek, given the battles she has had to fight for simply being a woman president in Asia's patriarchal societies (Li)) may win her a great deal of support among the Taiwanese, given that anti-China sentiments (and possibly even openly pro-independence sentiment) will be running high in the wake of Xi's latest collection of senile prattle. The Taiwanese, recall, have typically responded to threats from the mainland by doing exactly the opposite of what the mainland was demanding (Mosher), 127).
But there's a third possibility, and it's the one that I find the most likely.
Everyone who has seen the movie Lucky Number Slevin is familiar with the term "Kansas City Shuffle (everyone looks left, you go right)." China's entire doctrine of war (and I remind the reader of Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui's treatise Unrestricted Warfare, wherein two PLA senior officers show how China's definition of "war" includes all international relations) is built on deception, from Sun Tzu onward. Their literature is replete with examples of minor powers winning wars against foes who should have been able to crush them with ease, by lies ranging from simple verbal deceptions to elaborate nationwide ruses. Think about it. All eyes in Taipei, Tokyo and Washington are now focussed squarely on the Taiwan Strait. The Nationalist Revolutionary Army (that's the Taiwanese Army) will now be beating down the Pentagon's door. Trump will be absolutely hell-bent on pointing as much US Naval firepower as possible at China with a clear message that if they take a step toward Taiwan, there'll be Hell to pay. Now, if you were Xi Jinping, is this the situation you would orchestrate immediately before making your Hail Mary play to try and be the man who finally brought Taiwan back into the Chinese fold?
Does the wolf call ahead to tell the sheepdog "tonight will be the night when I come for the lambs?"
I've already examined the subtle verbal tricks Xi Jinping has used to try and soft-prep the Philippines and Brunei for absorption into China by paternalistically claiming that both of those nations were of Chinese descent in a previous article. No one in the world seems to have taken note of the seemingly innocuous phrasing he used. And yet, the world seems not to have noticed.
Of course, in another article I've shown how Xi Jinping has also given hints that he has an appetite for the Korean Peninsula, an appetite which I can only surmise is getting more insatiable as Kim prepares for yet another meeting with Xi's arch-rival, Trump.
I think Xi is about to make a move, and since it's pretty clear he wants everyone's eyes focussed on Taiwan, it's safe to say there is only one country in the region that is safe from China in 2019: Taiwan.

(1) I sincerely, sincerely doubt this article was written by "Manisha Chakraborty," and I would not bet much on the surety of such a person even existing. I have commented before on CGTN's "editorials," and on my belief that their writers are in fact CGTN employees who are quite, quite Chinese, as well as the reasons I suspect this.

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