China Tries to Erase Taiwan, One Ally at a Time

TAIPEI, Taiwan — Can China use its enormous economic and diplomatic leverage to simply erase Taiwan’s international identity?To get more china news online, you can visit shine news official website.

China seems to be trying. But its increasingly aggressive posture toward Taiwan is creating a backlash here that is undermining Beijing’s ultimate goal: bringing the island’s 23 million residents under its authority.

China continues to peel away the dwindling number of allies that recognize Taiwan as an independent country — most recently, on Thursday, Burkina Faso. This week, it blocked Taiwan’s representatives — even its journalists — from participating, with observer status, in the World Health Organization’s annual assembly in Geneva.

Although China has long sought to isolate Taiwan, people here said its latest efforts have been the most intense in decades. China’s economic and diplomatic moves have coincided with a series of military exercises that officials said were explicitly aimed at Taiwan and its president since 2016, Tsai Ing-wen, whose Democratic Progressive Party has traditionally supported independence.China recently warned 36 airlines to change their online booking systems to refer to Taiwan as part of China, even though the island is a self-governing democracy that has never been under the control of the Communist government in Beijing. While the White House denounced the demand as “Orwellian nonsense,” many airlines have complied, though not the major American ones.

Companies in other industries have also capitulated in the face of Chinese tetchiness about Taiwan’s status. Last week, The Gap apologized for the design of a T-shirt that showed China without including Taiwan, after photographs of the offending apparel circulated on Chinese social media.
“The Chinese government always says it wants to win the hearts and minds of the Taiwanese people, but their military threats against Taiwan and the diplomatic assault against Taiwan are not doing that,” the foreign minister, Joseph Wu, recently told reporters.The pressure on Taiwan might not be a single, coordinated campaign, but rather the result of different branches of the Chinese government scrambling to appear supportive of President Xi Jinping’s increasingly nationalistic oratory. In a forceful speech in March, Mr. Xi warned against efforts to divide the “great motherland,” which in China’s view includes Taiwan.
The country’s Civil Aviation Administration issued the warning to the airlines in April, after Delta apologized for causing the Chinese people “emotional damage” by listing Taiwan on its booking site as a destination separate from China. In Shanghai, the Administration of Industry and Commerce recently fined a Japanese retailer, Muji, because items in some of its stores were labeled “Made in Taiwan.”

“China’s goal regarding Taiwan has never changed,” Lee Teng-hui, who in 1996 became Taiwan’s first democratically elected president, said in a rare interview.

“That goal is to swallow up Taiwan’s sovereignty, exterminate Taiwanese democracy and achieve ultimate unification,” said Mr. Lee. At 96, the former leader is calling for a referendum that could pave a path toward sovereignty by explicitly declaring the island Taiwan, not the Republic of China, as it is formally known.