It was their first personal encounter: Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe and his American counterpart Lloyd Austin met in Singapore. It became clear how nervous China is with regard to the current geopolitical developments.
It was their first personal encounter: Chinese Defense Minister Wei Fenghe and his American counterpart Lloyd Austin met in Singapore. And rags flew.
The name of the venue of their battle of words, the Shangri-La Dialog Forum, was the purest contrast: Shangri-La is the name of a paradise on earth in the 1933 novel “Lost Horizon” by the British author James Hilton. The name may have become better known thanks to the hotel chain of the same name. In any case, there was no sign of paradisiacal harmony and unity in Singapore.
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Wei Fenghe, not free from solemn gestures, declared that the People’s Republic would never tolerate Taiwan declaring itself independent. According to the military, the island is an immovable part of China. In doing so, he repeats what Xi Jinping and all the presidents of the Communist People’s Republic before him said.
Alexander Görlach is a Senior Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs in New York. The PhD linguist and theologian teaches democratic theory in Germany, Austria and Spain as an honorary professor at Leuphana University. In the 2017-18 academic year, he was at National Taiwan University and City University Hong Kong to conduct research on China’s rise. He is currently researching new technologies at the University of Oxford’s Internet Institute and how they are used in democracies and abused in dictatorships.
But just because you say something often doesn’t make it any more true, because neither Mao nor any of his successors have ever ruled Taiwan. Today the island is a democratically run state, with free elections, freedom of the press, freedom of opinion and religion. It is a country where, unlike the People’s Republic next door, homosexuals are not denigrated and there is a lively civil society.
At a recent event in Berlin, the Taiwanese ambassador said accordingly: “Beijing always claims that we are a province of China”. “I answer that. No, we are not. Rather, we are das Versprechen für China” (“a promise to China”). With the play on words, he expressed his hope that democracy and freedom, as they exist in Taiwan, will spread to the mainland in the hopefully not distant future and communist dictatorship the CP would end, which is exactly what Xi Jinping and his nomenklatura fear.
During the lockdowns of the past few months, when millions upon millions of people were confined at home by the communist leadership, their doors and houses barricaded so that they could not go outside, and at the same time they lacked adequate food and essential medicines, such a moment could have happened in which people in China could see that life is better in Taiwan: the model democracy has mastered the pandemic without resorting to such excesses as Xi Jinping.
Perhaps that also explains Wei Fenghe’s nervousness in Singapore: they would fight to the end against a secession from Taiwan. This was addressed to the USA, whose President Joe Biden recently reiterated during his trip to Asia that Washington would not stand idly by should China attack a smaller, weaker partner of the USA.
Biden is fulfilling what he called the “commitment” Washington made to Taipei. The United States has never accepted the claim that Beijing is articulating about Taiwan, only saying it “takes note” of that claim.
If China and Taiwan wanted to team up in any way, as per the American One China policy, then of course they would be free to do so. However, only if both met on an equal footing like partners and Taiwan wanted a merger voluntarily and without coercion. Beijing has long distanced itself from this: Xi Jinping has repeatedly threatened the island with war and occupation.
Wei Fenghe falsely claimed in his statement that the ruling party in Taiwan is striving for “independence.” That is factually wrong. For Taiwan and President Tsai Ing-wen, there is no reason to challenge the status quo, which has always allowed the country to breathe.
Defense Secretary Austin also expressed this in mind: The USA would only continue to support Taiwan in organizing its own defence, nothing more. This military cooperation between the two states has been regulated since 1979 in the “Taiwan Relations Act”. Beijing has always criticized the US-Taiwan alliance.
Observers at the forum in Singapore said the confrontation between foreign ministers there illustrated that the relationship between the two countries is at its lowest point since diplomatic rapprochement in 1972.
It is still positive that the two representatives met at all and spoke to each other behind closed doors beyond the publicly presented positions. Precisely because the tensions between China and the USA are greater than ever before, a direct line between the two ministers could prevent an escalation.
