The lack of gratitude is astounding. Having organized one’s own welcoming committees, postponed one’s purges for a brief few days, traipsed across 16 time zones to attend the APEC conference in San Francisco, teased the possibility of tender heart-to-hearts between the U.S. and China militaries and graciously emceed a feelgood corporate dinner for the great and good of the American business community, one might expect that President Joe Biden of the United States would not surreptitiously slap a “dictator” sign on one’s back while shaking one’s hand and send one wearing it all the way back to Beijing without so much as a low-grade NVIDIA chip to get excited about.
Why, oh why, does the American business community clap to one’s face yet pull $31 billion dollars from the Chinese economy as soon as one’s head is turned? Does Moody’s Investors Services have to lower the credit ratings outlook for China, Hong Kong and Macau all to negative at once? Must Apple switch 25% of iPhone production to India? Under the circumstances, is it any wonder that one feels compelled to fix stock exchanges, fib about growth and amass a rabble of white devil influencers to smash up Apple products in front of Huawei stores?
So must ring the thoughts in Xi Jinping’s discontented brain as he tries to come to terms with the wreckage of his reign to date, an increasingly troubled tenure encapsulated by his return from a mid-November visit to the United States with little more than promises of ping pong and panda bear diplomacy to show for his troubles. Certainly, he has nothing of sufficient substance to bring economic auspiciousness to the Chinese Communist Party’s much-anticipated Third Plenum and has thus unofficially canceled it, presumably by scrunching the draft agenda into an angry little ball and hurling it a now-disappeared underling.
Far from helping a Chinese Communist Party chairman in need, Washington has instead doubled down on chip sanctions, embarked on new military patrols with the Philippines near Taiwan, advised Manila of how to maintain its presence on a disputed South China Sea atoll and found new ways to punish audit companies malpracticing in China, all while sliding forward a bill that would close Hong Kong’s representative offices on U.S. soil due to the loss of the city’s ability to govern itself without intense interference from Beijing.
The bill’s progression on November 29 from the House Foreign Affairs Committee, where it was unanimously passed, to the House Rules Committee followed two weeks on from the 2023 Report to Congress of the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review, which excoriates that “Hong Kong’s political, educational, and legal institutions have been stripped of their previous autonomy.”
One can imagine the vein pulsing on Xi’s temple to receive this news, especially when the Taiwan stock exchange, TAIEX, outperformed Hong Kong’s Hang Seng Index for the first time in 30 years, also on November 29. Xi was then dismissively dissed — on the same day — by Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, who described his country as too “overwhelmed by its internal challenges” to consider invading hers.
Shortly afterwards, he was also trolled on X by Taiwan Foreign Minister Joseph Wu (吳釗燮), whose office posted a photograph of the latter eating “freedom fried rice,” a reference to a meal that is censored at this time of year in the Middle Kingdom, because it can signify the unofficial celebration of Chinese Thanksgiving, when dissidents ironically mark the death of Mao Zedong’s son and thereby China’s deliverance from a hereditary communist dictatorship along the lines of North Korea.
All of this would be endurable if China could bank on Tsai and Wu’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) being dumped from power in Taiwan’s forthcoming election on January 13, 2024, a prospect that would have been very much easier to achieve if the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) had been able to form a China-leaning coalition. Unfortunately, the parties’ respective leaders Hou Yu-ih (侯友宜) and Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) not only acrimoniously failed to decide who should head the presidential ticket but also broadcast the debacle live to the nation. China was described by Politico as “fuming” in response.
In lieu of the Hong Kong model, whereby all the candidates for Sunday’s district council election were on the same side, having sometimes essentially nominated themselves for candidacy and blocked everybody else out in a rigged procedure that was upheld by the courts, the frustrated Chinese Communist Party is now having to find other ways to bend the Taiwan election to its will.
These involve venting wrath upon the incumbent DPP, which most analysts consider to be the frontrunner, by characterizing it as tying “residents to the war-chariot of ‘Taiwan Independence,’” floating suspicious balloons across the Taiwan Strait to pump up the threat of military intervention if China’s preferred candidate is not elected and energizing a disinformation network to boost the more dependably pro-Beijing Chinese Nationalist Party to power, if not for the presidency, then in the legislature, where a DPP minority would frustrate policy-making and thereby discredit the whole project of democracy.
Comforting as that prospect may be to Xi, it does not stop Taiwan acting like a country and being taken seriously as one by other sovereign states, as highlighted by the forthcoming Memorandum of Understanding that is set to be signed between New Delhi and Taipei.
Under the memorandum, Indian workers will fill gaps in Taiwan’s labor market, enabling the latter to demonstrate a fleet-footedness of policy in response to its demographic crisis that will likely be difficult for China, whose stability obsession and minority paranoia preclude similar solutions. At the same time, Taiwanese companies are flocking to India to expand the ecosystem for Apple’s aforementioned supply chain, which will gradually prize the Chinese Communist Party’s grip from the world’s most valuable company.
Long an irritant of Beijing on account of its refusal to hand over Himalayan territory, its population of Tibetan exiles and its membership of the China-containing Quad alliance with Australia, Japan and the U.S., India’s growing closeness to Taiwan cannot be easily tolerated. Therefore, a disinformation campaign has sprung up that looks to foment Taiwanese nationalism and racism towards Indians. Almost certainly, an angry China is in the background somewhere.
Nonetheless, while friendly Taipei-New Delhi relations are undoubtedly enraging for Beijing, rising heat will be accompanied by the flicker of a smile: For one, New Delhi’s own aspirations to superpower status do not necessarily accord with the world vision of other democracies or, even, perhaps, democracy at all. For another, it is sowing discord in Quad with its suspected extraterritorial assassination of Sikhs, which, together with the ongoing mass repression in Kashmir, undermines the human rights rationale for decoupling supply chains towards India from Middle Kingdom.
Other events in Xi Jinping’s neighborhood are rankling diversely. The presence of Australia’s HMAS Toowoomba warship in the international waters of Japan’s exclusive economic zone was so irksome that the People’s Liberation Army resorted to launching what seems to have been a mildly injurious sonar attack on Aussie divers as they removed entangled nets from the ship’s propellor on November 14. Canberra barreled the Toowoomba through the Taiwan Strait just a few days later.
As this was playing out, approval for Japan’s purchase of 400 advanced U.S. Tomahawk missiles worth $2.35 billion was announced by the Pentagon in mid-November. Perhaps in connection, China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has felt challenged enough to tickle the tensions that exist between Okinawa, Tokyo and Washington over crimes by U.S. forces personnel and the divisive recent crash of an American Osprey helicopter. Okinawans, some of whom would prefer independence from Japan, live in close proximity to a U.S. military base and are therefore quite reasonably spooked by such incidents, gifting China leverage.
Meanwhile, the Philippines reacted to the Middle Kingdom deploying its maritime militia to swarm reefs in the Filipino exclusive economic zone of the South China/West Philippines Sea, a de facto act of annexation, by conducting joint marine patrols with the U.S. and Australia, organizing its own abortive counter-flotilla and adopting a new resolution on December 6, through its House of Representatives, “to assert and fight for its rights,” which will involve boosting its armed troops and civilian maritime patrol forces to counteract China. Naturally, Beijing threw a hissy fit in response to the resolution, feeling “groundlessly criticized, misrepresented and smeared.” It has subsequently rammed Filipino boats, fired water cannons at them and blasted long-range acoustic devices towards their crews.
Yet perceived malicious slandering and other desecrations of the motherland or its interests over the past month have come from all across Europe, too: On November 16, the president of the Belgian Chamber of Representative’s External Relations Committee, Els Van Hoof, released a statement condemning the “forced assimilation of nearly one million Tibetan children in Chinese state-run boarding schools.” On November 22, Norwegian parliamentarian Guri Melby floated the possibility of a representative office for her country in Taipei, after becoming the first high-level political figure to visit Taiwan from the Nordic state in 14 years. On November 29, Ukraine spectacularly sabotaged rail links between China and Russia. On November 30, Finland’s Minister of European Affairs Anders Adlercreutz expressed skepticism that damage to an undersea pipeline connecting it with Estonia could have occurred accidentally or without Beijing’s knowledge. In early December, news emerged that Italy has formalized its high-profile withdrawal from China’s Belt and Road Initiative. And the European Union warmed up for its summit with Beijing on December 7-8 by warning China that it will not tolerate unfair electric vehicle competition, wants to see disintegration of Beijing’s “brotherhood” with Moscow and expects Xi Jinping to chip in for climate disaster funds.
Quoted by Reuters, one E.U. official stated, “There’s not a single outstanding deliverable that will be crowning the summit.” In other words, China is extremely miffed. It is not the only one.
BEIJING ANGER-OMETER: 83/100 Fire rising ten yards high (火冒三丈)
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