The situation in Taiwan continues to deteriorate: the Chinese leadership is underlining its alleged claim to the Taiwan Strait with military rehearsals. Taiwan is not the only victim of Chinese colonial policy.

Beijing continues to escalate the situation around Taiwan. Meanwhile, ruler Xi Jinping has sent 13 warships into the Strait of Taiwan and launched 30 fighter jets into the sky. With this, the communist leadership underscores its claim to the Taiwan Straits. Important for world trade, this waterway is an international body of water. However, Beijing claims that it is an inland sea that belongs entirely to China and must therefore also be controlled by China.

The world community contradicted this view even before the current escalation of the situation. Even otherwise reticent Germany sent the frigate Bayern through the Taiwan Straits in September 2021. As a punishment, the ship was later not allowed to dock in China. France, Japan and the United States of America took the same position as Germany: international law applies in the Taiwan Strait, not Chinese law. This look at the recent past shows that the People’s Republic only used Nancy Pelosi’s visit as an excuse to continue its aggressive policy in the western Pacific.

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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.

Taiwan is not the only victim of this colonial policy: Chinese military exercises take place regularly off the Philippines. US Secretary of State Blinken has therefore reiterated that the United States will come to Manila’s aid should China attack the country. Chinese mercenaries have been occupying parts of the Spratly Islands, which belong to the Philippines, since March last year. In addition, Beijing has had artificial islands built up in the South China Sea and militarized them. The goal is to make this part of the western Pacific a national waters as well. That is why Beijing must take land away from the states on and in this ocean.

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In the wake of the naval blockade of Taiwan, the Chinese army fired missiles that hit the water off Taiwan’s coast. Five missiles were also sunk in Japanese territorial waters. In doing so, Beijing is also provoking Tokyo. Japan is an ally of Taiwan. The former colonial empire, which brought unspeakable suffering to the people of Korea and to China (the supporters of the Republic of China and Mao’s rebels even paused their civil war in order to fight together against the cruel Japanese invaders) are comparatively familiar in Taiwan good memories. Japan used the island for a modernization project that they wanted to show the rest of the world as an example of their good colonial style.

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Whenever an earthquake hits Taiwan today, Japan offers to help. Beijing protests and demands that no foreign aid workers enter Taiwan on grounds of “territorial integrity”. Beijing’s claim to ownership of Taiwan is just as unfounded as that of the Spratly Islands. In total, China has 17 territorial and border conflicts. Good neighbors are different. The missiles on Japanese waters are now further exacerbating the situation.

Because of its terrible warlike past, Japan does not have its own army, but in an emergency, like South Korea, is defended by the United States. So, whether Beijing takes on Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea or Japan, there is always a risk of outright war with the United States and its allies.

Military strategists inside and outside Taiwan see the Chinese army’s actions as a dress rehearsal for the invasion of the country. Weeks before the invasion, the Kremlin ruler also massed his soldiers on the border with Ukraine and called this a “maneuver”. Xi Jinping, a self-declared friend of Putin, seems to want to copy the Russian army’s actions.