{"id":75977,"date":"2022-10-21T06:00:51","date_gmt":"2022-10-20T19:00:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=75977"},"modified":"2022-10-20T19:08:19","modified_gmt":"2022-10-20T08:08:19","slug":"any-conflict-over-taiwan-will-be-one-that-xi-and-the-ccp-have-chosen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/any-conflict-over-taiwan-will-be-one-that-xi-and-the-ccp-have-chosen\/","title":{"rendered":"Any conflict over Taiwan will be one that Xi and the CCP have chosen"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/figure>\n

Last Sunday, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, addressed<\/a> the party\u2019s 20th national congress in Beijing. In dense jargon, Xi spoke<\/a> for two hours on the party\u2019s achievements and its challenges in building the \u2018new China\u2019. He said, \u2018We have fully and faithfully applied the new development philosophy on all fronts, focused on promoting high-quality development, and worked to create a new pattern of development.\u2019<\/p>\n

He described a China in crisis at the start of his term as chairman in 2012, with \u2018misguided patterns of thinking such as money worship, hedonism, egocentricity and historical nihilism\u2019 and in which \u2018systems for safeguarding national security were inadequate\u2019. And he talked about how the party has addressed these issues: \u2018We have adopted the Five-Sphere Integrated Plan and the Four-Pronged Comprehensive Strategy as well as the general principle of pursuing progress while ensuring stability, and we have worked to both pursue development and safeguard security.\u2019<\/p>\n

Xi\u2019s speech at the congress functioned as the most fundamental assertion of power in China\u2019s party-state system. Its stupefying and arcane phraseology, or tifa <\/em>(\u63d0\u6cd5), all referencing earlier phraseology going back through the history of the party, constructs a closed, deterministic cosmology, informed by a version of Marxist theory, in which history moves ineluctably forward through the resolution of contradictions guided in theory and in practice by the party. Xi\u2019s speech was a representation of the party-state\u2019s system for the realisation of socialism and China\u2019s \u2018great rejuvenation\u2019, and, in the party\u2019s terms, advancing human civilisation to eclipse the liberal capitalist democratic world era represented by the United States.<\/p>\n

On Taiwan, Xi accordingly built on established formulations that appeared in his 2019 speech<\/a>, in the new Taiwan white paper<\/a>, and earlier. He said, \u2018Resolving the Taiwan question and realising China\u2019s complete reunification is, for the party, a historic mission and an unshakable commitment.\u2019 He said unification is a historical inevitability: \u2018The wheels of history are rolling on toward China\u2019s reunification and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.\u2019 He claimed the party is committed to peaceful unification under the \u2018one country, two systems\u2019 model, which provides an intermediate stage before Taiwan is fully absorbed into the party\u2019s vision of China, but the party needs to struggle, potentially with military force, against the separatists and foreign forces that hold back those wheels of history.<\/p>\n

The ideological construction of Taiwan by the party justifies and requires escalating threats against Taiwan, but for a military invasion and occupation the party will need to claim that Taiwan\u2019s de facto sovereignty is an existential threat to its revolutionary project. This is flagged by Xi\u2019s use of the phrase \u2018all necessary measures\u2019 to achieve unification.<\/p>\n

The truth is that Taiwan really is an existential threat to the party\u2019s project. Taiwan has been on its own path of post-imperial development for more than a century, since the end of the Qing dynasty, through Japanese colonial rule, authoritarianism and to democracy. Taiwan\u2019s sovereignty and modernisation have come to represent the party\u2019s failure, both in theory and in practice. Taiwan has been very successful, too\u2014this year its per capita GDP passed Japan\u2019s for the first time<\/a> and is far higher than that of any province in China.<\/p>\n

Like other ideological constructs, such as GDP growth targets<\/a>, the CCP\u2019s version of Taiwan is not a policy response to Taiwan\u2019s objective reality. As Xi showed in his speech, Beijing brooks no history other than the party\u2019s history, and it has no practical roadmap<\/a> to achieve unification that addresses objective questions like the future of the Taiwanese military or the security of Taiwan\u2019s place at the centre of global technology supply chains. Instead, Xi offers a set of declarations about Taiwan\u2019s place in the party\u2019s future.<\/p>\n

Xi\u2019s speech has been subject to forensic analysis, down to counting phrases and terms<\/a>. A particular focus is looking for a sign in Xi\u2019s word usage or tone of a timeline or deadline<\/a> for annexing Taiwan. But the practice of parsing the language of Xi\u2019s speeches for such signs can concede to the party the power to control the geopolitical discourse about Taiwan. Rather than directly confronting the reality of annexation under whatever circumstances or timeline\u2014that is, China launching a war against Taiwan and a military occupation that will permanently destabilise the international system\u2014the practice of divining Xi\u2019s intent places analysis within the party\u2019s closed worldview.<\/p>\n

Unlike some economic and financial analysis<\/a>, foreign policy analysis struggles with the issue of how to develop a systematic critique of the Chinese party-state system, its policy choices and its ideology. Foreign policy analysis is by inclination wary of critiques of power, and when it does adopt a stance of critique towards power in the international system, it generally arrives at a view of China as a challenge to the dominance of the US<\/a>. This can be a fruitful, sometimes righteous line of inquiry, but it attenuates the specifics of China\u2019s system, occludes the people of Taiwan and can locate a critique of Beijing\u2019s Taiwan policy within pro-US politics.<\/p>\n

Yet, a critique of Beijing\u2019s Taiwan policy and ideology has become a necessary step. Reducing the future of Taiwan to great-power competition makes it harder to see that Beijing\u2019s Taiwan policy is an ideologically fixated assertion of party power that is disconnected from reality and points China towards potential catastrophe. China is certainly not the first great power to set itself on such a path and there are no easy options for the international community in response, but a clear focus on Beijing\u2019s agency must be the starting point.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last Sunday, the head of the Chinese Communist Party, Xi Jinping, addressed the party\u2019s 20th national congress in Beijing. 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