The ink was barely dry on western leaders’ criticism of China’s global behaviour when Beijing gave its contemptuous response — sending 28 aircraft, including fighter jets and nuclear-capable bombers, screaming towards Taiwan.
They crossed into the island’s air defence buffer zone, ignoring radio warnings and forcing Taiwan to scramble its own fighters and ready surface-to-air missiles, before veering off to the south.
Tuesday’s aerial armada was Beijing’s answer to an unprecedented rebuke from the G7 and Nato. It was the largest incursion yet in a campaign of intimidation against Taiwan, a democratic self-governing island that China claims as its own, and it sent tensions across the Taiwan Strait soaring to levels not seen in decades.
When Nato warned on Monday that China posed “systemic challenges” to the rules-based international order, Beijing called the statement “slander of China’s peaceful development” — a response that would be almost comical, if the implications of its actions were not so serious.
Beijing is especially prickly as it approaches the July 1 centenary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. The event is being marked with displays of chest-thumping patriotism under the slogan “Follow the Party Forever” — though a more fitting slogan might be “Follow Xi Forever”, as a Mao-style cult of personality is being taken to new heights, with the party leader Xi Jinping portrayed as a heroic, transformative figure, restoring China’s position as a global power, facing off against a declining West.
It would be wrong to see this as a fleeting euphoria, linked solely to the 100th birthday. Something more profound is taking place. The party has become an instrument of at times unbridled xenophobia, and the centenary marks its transformation away from any lingering notions of “communism” into a party of strident ethnic nationalism built round Xi. It is not clear western leaders appreciate the dangerous implications of this.
Xi’s much-vaunted “Chinese dream” is a dream of national rejuvenation, the restoration of the great Han Chinese nation, underpinned by a culture of historic grievance, victimhood and ethnic superiority that has become the driving ideology of the party. Within China, cultural and ethnic differences are seen as a threat to be eliminated.
This is at its most brutal in Xinjiang’s “re-education camps”, where more than one million Uighurs have been incarcerated. In the run-up to the centenary, jingoistic online mobs have hounded anybody perceived as lacking loyalty to the country. A US embassy funding programme for civil society groups was condemned by state media for “recruiting traitors”. Communist party official texts have been edited to better reflect Xi’s views. A Brief History of the Chinese Communist Party has removed advice from Deng Xiaoping, the late paramount leader, that China should “hide our strength and bide our time”.
Last week, more than 100 guests from Hong Kong’s political and economic elite attended a symposium to mark the centenary, where they listened to Liu Guangyuan, China’s top official in the city, spout the new xenophobic orthodoxy. “Here is our solemn message to the small handful of anti-China forces: the dignity and legitimate rights of the Chinese people are not to be undermined. The historical trend towards the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation under the CPC [Communist Party of China] leadership is not to be stopped,” he said.
This is now the lens through which Beijing views disputes from the South China Sea to the borderlands of India. Every criticism is seen as an affront to national dignity. It is at its most dangerous over Taiwan, one of the world’s most successful new democracies. The island celebrates diversity and has a strong sense of its own identity — both anathema to Xi’s monochromatic nationalism.
An attack on Taiwan would not just be a territorial grab, but an assault on democratic values. The irony is that Xi by his aggressive actions — and his trashing of “one country, two systems” in Hong Kong, once seen as a model for Taiwan — has made any agreed unity far less likely. He has driven Taiwan away, and only a small minority of Taiwanese now want anything to do with China.
It’s been 25 years since the last Taiwan Strait crisis, when the US sent two aircraft carrier battlegroups to deter China successfully from disrupting the island’s first fully democratic presidential election. In 1996 I was on the USS Independence to interview Rear Admiral Jim Ellis, the commander of the battlegroup.
He is now with the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, from where he told me how dramatically things have changed, with China now deploying “carrier-killer missiles” — designed to destroy aircraft carriers — to deter US intervention. “They [China] swore that it would never happen again, and they’ve now fairly successfully been able to craft a strategy that would make it much more challenging and much more difficult,” he said.
Ellis heads a Hoover national security taskforce, which has brought him full circle — back to Taiwan. “China’s gone from ‘bide our time’ to ‘this is our time’. There are fewer and fewer inhibitions,” he said.
No other subject commands as much attention among US policymakers and military strategists as Taiwan. There is a recognition that the ambiguity that has characterised policy for decades, the fudges surrounding the island’s status and America’s willingness to defend it, is no longer tenable. Many are pushing for a more explicit security guarantee.
In recent years the CPC has drawn its legitimacy from its ability to deliver stability and economic growth. Is its more stridently nationalist turn a sign of strength or weakness? Last year an audio recording circulated online in which Cai Xia, a former professor at the elite Central Party School, accused Xi of transforming the party into a “political zombie” and of turning China into an “enemy of the world”.
It is hard to say how representative that view is, but Xi is increasingly defining himself by ethnic nationalism and becoming a prisoner of his own rhetoric, which leaves Beijing blind to the impact of its own behaviour and the extent to which it is generating global concern.
Ian Williams is author of Every Breath You Take: China’s New Tyranny (Birlinn)
