China warns Japan of the ‘perils’ ahead in Taiwan row

Deep wounds from Japan’s brutal occupation of China still fester. From the late 1930s until the end of World War II in 1945, up to 20 million Chinese people were killed. Historically, it is known as the “Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression.”

For the ruling Communist Party of China, the scars of Tokyo’s imperialist past shape today’s geopolitical tensions between the two East Asian powerhouses. But it is not a rivalry between equals. Beijing is now the nerve center of a manufacturing and military superpower. 

It allows China to throw its weight around in the East and South China Seas, forcing Japan to tweak its pacifist policies. Last year, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi even warned that an attack on Taiwan would be an “existential threat” to her nation. 

She also hinted that Tokyo could intervene if Beijing launched a blockade or an invasion of the island democracy. Since then, the diplomatic mood has darkened. 

“By posing as a ‘peacekeeper’ while convening allies and distorting the facts, Takaichi’s government is pushing Japan further down a path of error and peril,” state-run China Daily cautioned in an editorial this week.

The People’s Republic of China has repeatedly twisted the facts.

Chiu Chui-cheng, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council

Anxiety attack:

• Yet Chinese President Xi Jinping has created this situation after building the world’s largest surface fleet. The question, is will he use it?  
• So far, anxiety among China’s neighbors has only increased amid his posturing around Taiwan and in waters close to the Japanese mainland.

Delve deeper: But this is based on a false premise. The Communist Party-state, which is now China, has repeatedly “distorted history” to suit its narrative as the savior of the country from Japan’s militarism. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Between the lines: “During World War II, the People’s Republic of China did not exist, but the Chinese communist regime has in recent years repeatedly twisted the facts,” Chiu Chui-cheng, the head of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, told the Reuters news agency.

Big picture: The Communist Party “did not fight imperial Japan.” Chiang Kai-shek and his nationalist army “did.” While his “military defended China, the CCP built up strength for the civil war,” defeating Chiang’s exhausted troops before they escaped to Taiwan in 1949.

Bottom line: “[More importantly,] Beijing has no legal claim to Taiwan even today,” Peter C Hansen, an international law specialist, and Michael Rubin, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, stressed in a 2022 analysis. 

China Factor comment: Yet it is this myth of “reunification” with the island that Xi appears willing to use to plunge the Asia-Pacific into a major conflict of conquest.