On Taiwan and Japan, Chinese Belligerence Backfires
When conservative Sanae Takaichi became the new leader of Japan’s governing Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and the country’s prime minister in October 2025, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) clearly was unhappy about that development. Chinese officials became even more annoyed when Takaichi voiced strong support for preserving the de facto independence of Taiwan, which Beijing considers a renegade province. During a parliamentary debate in November, she was asked repeatedly about how Japan should respond to a hypothetical Taiwan “security contingency.” Much to the surprise of most observers, Takaichi abandoned Tokyo’s longstanding evasion of the question and stated that a military crisis over Taiwan would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, potentially triggering collective self-defense and Japanese military involvement.
President Xi Jinping’s government responded with vitriol and threats. Beijing imposed a variety of economic penalties on Japanese companies. Chinese coast guard ships were sent to patrol the waters around the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, which Tokyo and Beijing both claim. One ugly incident there took place between Japanese and PRC vessels early last December.
However, if Chinese leaders thought that Japanese voters would repudiate their new prime minister and her uncompromising stance toward Beijing, they miscalculated badly. Takaichi gambled by calling a snap election for early February, and the results were a spectacular political success for her and her party. The LDP and its small coalition partner won more than two-thirds of the seats in the lower house of parliament—an indisputable mandate for her policies.
It is hardly the first time that Xi and his associates engaged in clumsy, tone-deaf policies that produced disastrous results for Beijing. In 2020, Chinese authorities imposed a harsh new national security measure on Hong Kong, which was supposedly guaranteed the right to autonomy and self-governance for 50 years under the terms of the treaty Beijing signed with Great Britain, Hong Kong’s departing colonial ruler, in 1997. The PRC’s contemptuous violation generated hostile reverberations far beyond Hong Kong. Beijing made the perception even worse when it tightened the original security measure in 2024. The sentencing this month of media tycoon Jimmy Lai to 20 years in prison (which is effectively a death sentence given his age and health) is just the latest abuse to infuriate PRC opponents around the world.
As I noted as far back as 2014, PRC leaders could undoubtedly win a policy victory and successfully impose their ideological will in Hong Kong, but the long-term geopolitical cost, especially with respect to Taiwan, would be considerable. I renewed that warning in 2021 following Beijing’s imposition of the new national security law on Hong Kong the previous year. The PRC’s bullying tactics especially alienated public opinion in Taiwan, killing off any chance of an agreement for the island’s political reunification with the mainland.
Expectations that there might be a gradual rapprochement between Taipei and Beijing once seemed reasonably promising. From 2008 until 2016, Ma Ying-jeou of the moderate Kuomintang Party served as Taiwan’s president. Ma embraced a policy of conciliatory engagement with Beijing, an approach that stood in marked contrast to the extremely assertive policies of his predecessor, Chen Shui-bian, the first member of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to win the island’s presidency. During Ma’s two terms, economic ties between Taiwan and the mainland soared, as did tourism and other interactions between the two political entities.
PRC officials began to press Ma for more concessions, however, generating significant political pushback from the Taiwanese people, especially younger Taiwanese who joined the new Sunflower movement in 2014 advocating greater political transparency and other reforms to reduce corruption. Sunflower activists also contended that the KMT government was becoming too compliant with Beijing’s goals instead of standing up for important Taiwanese interests and values against the PRC’s pressure.
The combination of those volatile political factors produced a decisive victory for DPP candidate Tsai Ing-wen in Taiwan’s 2016 presidential election. Instead of reacting calmly to the return of the DPP to power in a democratic system, however, PRC leaders denounced Tsai in the most harsh and inflammatory terms. Beijing also returned to the policy it pursued during Chen’s tenure of trying to isolate the island diplomatically and intimidate it militarily. The PRC intensified its efforts to induce the handful of small countries heavily dependent on Taiwan’s flow of economic aid that still maintained diplomatic relations with Taipei to switch their ties to Beijing, and 10 of them did so during her presidency. Militarily, the PRC boosted both the frequency and size of its military exercises in the Taiwan Strait.
Just as Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong’s democratic activists failed to sway Taiwan’s population to support appeasement and reunification, the PRC’s coercive measures against Tsai’s administration backfired. She won a landslide re-election victory in 2020 and, for the first time, the DPP also secured control of parliament. The PRC’s inexorable crackdown on Hong Kong enhanced the appeal of Taiwanese political leaders who insisted that they would never allow Taiwan to suffer a similar fate.
Indeed, the current government of Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te (William Lai) is even more hardline than that of Tsai Ing-wen. Lyle Goldstein, a scholar on East Asia issues and director of the Asia Program at the Defense Priorities think tank, notes that instead of trying to adopt a low profile and play down any claims to an explicitly independent status for Taiwan, as did Tsai, “Lai has lurched toward formal independence with a succession of speeches making the case for Taiwanese nationhood.” Indeed, Lai devoted nearly all of his initial national address to making the case for Taiwan’s right to sovereignty. As one prominent Taiwanese columnist noted: “Never before has a Taiwanese president devoted an entire speech to laying out clearly, point-by-point, and unequivocally how Taiwan is unquestionably a sovereign nation.”
Once again, PRC policymakers have reacted with a marked lack of subtlety. Just a few months after Lai’s election in 2024, PRC forces conducted extensive military drills directed against Taiwan. That pattern occurred again later in the year. Throughout 2025, the pace and scope of PRC military activity increased yet again. In late 2025, even more menacing exercises took place.
PRC hardliners seem incapable of learning the basic lesson that a bullying strategy is counterproductive. Currently, Lai’s level of domestic support has dropped amid mounting evidence of DPP corruption and authoritarian tendencies at home. The emergence of a KMT administration in the next election is a distinct possibility. Indeed, the DPP could suffer a fate similar to the precipitous decline of the KMT leading up to the 2016 elections—and for similar domestic reasons. But Beijing’s boorish conduct may help keep the DPP in power for an extended period, despite such factors.
Moreover, even most members of the KMT, while they advocate a less confrontational relationship with Beijing, emphasize that they have no interest whatsoever in reunifying with the mainland while it is controlled by the Communist Party. Indeed, there are significant limits to the mundane policy concessions the KMT is willing to make to placate Beijing. PRC leaders need to be far more realistic about the nature and extent of policy options within Taiwan’s democratic political system. There is no popular mandate on the island for feckless appeasement.
Unfortunately, PRC policymakers seem clueless about such realities with respect to both Taiwan and Japan. Indeed, the biggest political beneficiaries of Beijing’s militant approach are the anti-China hawks in Taipei and Tokyo. Members of the PRC’s policy elite need to conduct some serious introspection about their current tactics toward Beijing’s neighbors.
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