My Take | Taiwan’s Lai shows cleverness can be an embarrassing thing
Claim by island leader that Beijing should challenge Moscow, by force if necessary, to take back lost territories is borderline infantile distraction
Judging by his Western cheerleaders, you might think an op-ed in Newsweek earlier this month by Taiwan’s leader William Lai Ching-te displayed sheer political genius.
“This was a brilliant political move …,” enthused two experts of some sort from the United States. “Lai’s challenge … marks a new stage for Taiwanese diplomacy, one in which it acts more assertively, decisively and is more aware of the power of good media and the influence of insightful ‘sound bites’.”
What was Lai’s powerfully insightful sound bite? Basically, he claimed that Beijing should demand the return of Chinese territories lost to the Russian empire in the 19th century to close a chapter in the country’s “century of humiliation”, by force if necessary.
No doubt Lai and his legion of foreign cheerleaders, especially in the Anglo-American sphere, were all thinking, “What a clever man!”
In one fell swoop, at least in their minds, Lai has managed to embarrass Beijing and Moscow and drive a wedge between them. Who knows, those crazy mainland Chinese nationalists might start to really demand back territories in the Russian Far East, thus distracting Russia from its war in Ukraine and the mainland from its military activities in the Taiwan Strait. Moreover, it exposes China’s hypocrisy about needing to gain back territories taken from foreign imperial powers in the past.
The point he made is hardly worth mentioning or debating but for Lai’s transparent attempt at distraction.
First, Chinese nationalism has always equated nationality with Han Chinese ethnicity. Second, Taiwan is key to the ongoing global rivalry between the US and mainland China, not just in terms of geopolitics but technology and trade as well. Territories in the Russian Far East do not remotely compare.
