An Indo-Pacific Game of Chicken
The Biden Administration recently announced the creation of the AUKUS security pact between Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The most focused on provision of this deal is the assistance that the UK and US will provide to Australia when it comes to the construction and deployment of nuclear-powered submarines. This move is almost certainly a response to China’s ongoing revamping of their naval forces, and their hostile attitude towards Taiwan. Xi’s China intends to fully reunify with Taiwan, which is a not-so-subtle euphemism and almost certainly entails an aggressive invasion. China’s froth-mouthed response to this announcement was unsurprising, but worrying all the same.
Deputy Director of the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Information Department Zhao Lijian responded by saying:
“Taiwan is part of China. China must and will be reunified. This historical trend cannot be stopped by any force. We warn the Taiwan authorities that any attempt to seek independence and reject unification is doomed to fail.”
China’s State-sponsored media is already portraying Australia as a lapdog of the United States, and claiming that this agreement constitutes an aggressive provocation on the part of the AUKUS pact. Conveniently forgetting the bullying posture the nation has been taking toward its largely autonomous regions like Hong Kong and its neighbor Taiwan. If one wishes to predict what China has planned for Taiwan one must only look toward how they managed to reabsorb Hong Kong.
This wildfire was sparked when an amendment was proposed to an existing extradition law that would allow Hong Kong to consider extraditing suspected criminals to mainland China for trial. This was widely opposed by Hong Kong residents, not only because Hong Kong and mainland China are massively different in regards to how the accused are treated, but also because this piece of legislation introduced new crimes to the autonomous region which collide with freedoms that the citizens of Hong Kong have traditionally relied upon. China is known to have incredibly expansive definitions of “secession, subversion, terrorism, and collusion with foreign organizations,” if the treatment of the Uyghur people in Xinjiang is any indication.
It is wholly understandable why the citizens of Hong Kong would view this law as an attempt by China to slide Hong Kong underneath their heel. While the protestors were initially successful in getting the extradition amendment withdrawn, they were eventually steamrolled by the National People’s Congress. The government of China used the uproar in Hong Kong over the extradition amendment as an excuse to march in the military and strip Hong Kong residents of rights they had previously enjoyed and institute a new, more authoritarian, legal system in the region.
The Orwellian nature of China’s behavior is very much a cliché at this point, but it cannot be avoided. Books have to be smuggled into and within the country because the Chinese Communist Party considers them to be contraband. A video was released on social media around the time of the mass demonstrations showing Chinese authorities demanding a clearly broken man named Zhui Feng Luhua answer and apologize for a joke he made at the expense of Chinese law enforcement on an app called WeChat. Of course, the police forcing someone to apologize into the camera while strapped to a tiger chair, nothing fishy here.
Chinese propaganda is completely ignorant of what the average citizen of a liberal democracy would consider an affront to human rights and what they would consider acceptable behavior. In an attempt to discredit the Uyghurs that testified during the tribunals held in the United Kingdom in which survivors of China’s ongoing genocide recounted their experiences, the Embassy of China in the Netherlands labeled them “actors.” An obvious, pitiful, and false cry of conspiracy. In one case they claimed that the Chinese government “decided not to prosecute [Gulibahaer Miahamutijiang] because she regretted not exposing her husband’s splitting behaviors in time.” Oh, well that’s fine then. They decided not to prosecute her because she publicly denounced her husband. Also, she’s a liar. Nothing fishy here either, obviously.
It is middle-of-the-brownie rich for the Chinese government to be accusing anyone of lying about the conditions in Xinjiang considering they have been changing their story for what is going on there for years. At first, the Chinese government insisted that the camps didn’t exist and this was a mere fabrication by war and fear-mongers. When satellite, photo evidence, video evidence, and eye-witness testimony began to pile up they pivoted to the position that these camps were used to combat terrorism in Xinjiang. When the international community began to raise eyebrows and wondered, “surely there couldn’t be hundreds of thousands of terrorists living in Xinjiang,” China began to spread propaganda about how these facilities are nothing but “vocational centers.” Oh Xi, what a novel way to fight back against terrorists; peacefully invite them to job training seminars!
I’ve only begun to dive into the first-hand accounts of how the Chinese government is currently treating the Uyghur people in these (let’s not mince words) concentration camps. Everything from torture, attempts to brainwash them out of their cultural beliefs, forced marriages between Uyghur people and Han Chinese people, strange syringe cocktails being injected into detainees, the forced sterilization of Uyghur women, and undoubtedly the list goes on. If even a fraction of what is going on in Hong Kong and Xinjiang (international isolation, the harsh restriction of freedoms, flat-out genocide, etc) may potentially crash down upon Taiwan, it is no wonder that they are looking to the international community for more overt support. This has been a slow-brewing operation, and China has been desperate to use its economic power as a bulwark against accountability for its human rights abuses and aggressive expansionism. This is something it has been unfortunately quite successful at up to this point. A strong message has been sent to China through the AUKUS agreement, and Taiwan’s increase in their military budget. Despite its rabid, incoherent, and tough-talking response one must hope that China realizes that this is a game of chicken that it cannot afford to try and win.
I was bordering on disillusion with all of the empty jaw-wagging Western nations typically trot out about human rights. The United States typically doesn’t intervene in such a drastic fashion when it doesn’t align with its other geopolitical interests, but on occasion the right thing and the advantageous thing to do converge and one must not make the latter the enemy of the former. As is expected, the Chinese propaganda factory has begun churning out the line that the AUKUS agreement is rooted in out-of-date Cold War thinking, that the nations which comprise this alliance are operating on the basis of ideological bias, and that their actions are a threat to stability and peace in the region. Only a fool would be tricked by such a shameless inverting of reality. China’s border disputes with India, the ongoing genocide in Xinjiang, its authoritarian crackdown on Hong Kong, and its constant threatening of Taiwan is what is presently preventing stability and peace in the Indo-Pacific, not the people who wish to deter them.
If China truly wishes for the world not to fall back into the ideology of the Cold War, perhaps it should stop behaving so much like the Soviet Union.