2024-01-10
The following is from Masayuki Takayama’s column concluding today’s issue of Weekly Shincho.
This article also proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
It is a must-read not only for the Japanese people but for people throughout the world.
A Coward’s Failure to Learn
Why is Xi Jinping so obsessed with Taiwan?
Asahi Shimbun reporter Nozomu Hayashi wrote that it comes from Xi’s desire “to overcome the negative history of semi-colonization.”
Xi, he wrote, “became the first General Secretary of the Communist Party to visit Weihaiwei, where he sank into profound contemplation.”
It was the site of the final naval battle of the First Sino-Japanese War.
Inside the harbor, protected by coastal batteries, the battleships Dingyuan and Zhenyuan, which had survived the Battle of the Yellow Sea, had taken refuge together with three cruisers.
Just when they thought they no longer had to fear being sunk, Japanese torpedo boats charged into the harbor, finished off the Dingyuan with a torpedo, and then sank the three cruisers as well.
The Beiyang Fleet ceased to exist.
Confronted with this unimaginable outcome, Admiral Ding Ruchang swallowed raw opium and killed himself.
Opium is, after all, also a deadly poison.
I can understand why Ding wanted to die.
In the preceding Battle of the Yellow Sea, although the Chinese possessed heavy warships that overwhelmingly outclassed the Japanese fleet, two crucial cruisers lost their nerve and fled before the enemy, causing China to suffer a crushing defeat.
Shina’s disgraceful defeat exposed the fact that it was no “sleeping lion,” after which Russia simply seized Port Arthur and Dalian, Britain took Weihaiwei, France took Guangzhouwan, and Germany took Jiaozhou Bay.
Unlike those countries, Japan received Taiwan—which the Qing dynasty had despised as “a land beyond civilization”—as legitimate wartime reparations.
I thought that, while standing at the site of this humiliating history, Xi Jinping might have sighed over the inadequacy of the Chinese people, the Han race.
But that was not the case.
“Now that our national power has grown, the time has come to overcome the history of suffering inflicted upon us by the great powers and restore the country to the form it ought to have,” Xi declared.
Hayashi wrote with considerable emotional investment that Taiwan’s unification embodied Xi’s determination to accomplish this.
Incidentally, 林望 is not the Chinese name Lin Wang, but the name of some Japanese man called Hayashi.
It may sound plausible, but it remains unclear upon what grounds the Chinese Communist government claims latent sovereignty over Taiwan.
There was nothing deceptive whatsoever about Japan’s acquisition of Taiwan.
It was far more moral than the American annexation of Hawaii during the same period.
Even if, for the sake of argument, Taiwan “belonged to the Qing dynasty and must therefore be recovered because the Chinese Communist regime is its successor,” is there not somewhere else that should be recovered first?
Yes.
Vietnam.
As the Qing dynasty itself said, Taiwan was “a land beyond civilization” that people scarcely approached, whereas Vietnam had once been territory under direct Chinese rule, administered through the Protectorate General to Pacify the South.
Abe no Nakamaro, who was unable to return to Japan, served for six years as Military Governor of Annam during the final years of his life.
But France seized Vietnam during the Sino-French War, shortly before the First Sino-Japanese War.
Franklin D. Roosevelt remembered this.
At the Cairo Conference, he therefore told Chiang Kai-shek, “If you want French Indochina, I will give it back to you” (Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War Against Japan).
But the account continues: “Chiang refused.”
It is said that he was probably afraid of de Gaulle.
FDR also intended to return Hong Kong to Chiang, and sounded out British Colonial Secretary Oliver Stanley by asking, “Was Hong Kong not taken unlawfully?”
The British Colonial Secretary replied, “Yes, I believe it was around the time of the Mexican-American War.”
What he meant was that the United States had used even more underhanded methods to seize California from Mexico.
If Xi Jinping genuinely wishes “to overcome the history of semi-colonization,” logic dictates that he should recover Vietnam before Taiwan and restore China to “the form it ought to have.”
Indeed, China attempted to do precisely that once, in 1979.
For all its pretensions, the Chinese Communist regime is deeply attached to the Sinocentric order.
Angered that Vietnam had bullied the Khmer Rouge regime it cherished, China set out to punish Vietnam.
This became the Sino-Vietnamese War, in which 200,000 troops of the People’s Liberation Army invaded, only to be beaten back, with nearly 30,000 killed in just two weeks.
In other words, China never wants to touch Vietnam again.
Nor does it tell Russia to return the Primorsky region, which Russia extorted through the Convention of Peking.
If Xi said that to Putin, Putin being Putin, he might casually drop a nuclear weapon on Beijing to make an example of China before the world.
Xi is too frightened to say it.
Could the reason he targets Taiwan be that Taiwan seems like an opponent he might be able to defeat?
Come to think of it, China launched the Sino-Vietnamese War for precisely the same reason.
Cowards, above all others, should study history.

2024/1/9 in Kyoto