Heightened tensions with Taiwan have focused attention on China, with many wondering where President Xi Jinping sees his country on the world stage, reports BBC.
China’s global rhetoric
China is now a global power, something scarcely imaginable just a few decades ago.
Yet there is also a highly confrontational tone to much of China’s global rhetoric. Beijing condemns the US for seeking to “contain” China through the new AUKUS (Australia-UK-US) submarine pact, warns the UK that there would be “consequences” for granting residence in Britain to Hong Kongers leaving their city because of the harsh National Security Law, and told the island of Taiwan that it should prepare to be unified with the mainland.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has asserted China’s place on the global stage much more strongly than any of his predecessors since Mao Zedong, China’s paramount leader during the Cold War.
About the Taiwan conflict
Beijing stresses the unshakable destiny of the island of Taiwan, which it defines as unification with mainland China.
Yet the past century of Taiwan’s history shows that the issue of its status waxes and wanes in Chinese politics. In 1895, after a disastrous war with Japan, China was forced to hand over Taiwan, which then became a Japanese colony for the next half century.
It was then briefly unified with the mainland by the Nationalists from 1945 to 1949. Under Mao, China missed its chance to unify the island; the American Truman administration would have probably let Mao take it, until the People’s Republic of China joined the North Koreans in invading South Korea in 1950, prompting the Korean War and suddenly turning Taiwan into a key Cold War ally.
Mao launched attacks on the Taiwan coast in 1958, but then ignored the territory for the 20 years after that. After the US and China re-established relations in 1979, there was an uneasy agreement that all sides would agree that there was One China, but not agree over whether the Beijing or Taiwan regime was actually a legitimate republic.
Forty years on, Xi Jinping is insistent that unification must come soon, while the aggressive rhetoric and fate of Hong Kong has led Taiwan’s public, now citizens of a liberal democracy, to become increasingly hostile to a closer relationship with the mainland.
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Source: BBC
