This essay begins from a 2020 Nihon Keizai Shimbun front-page feature on China’s growing military and economic power and then turns that article inside out. While the Nikkei appears to warn against China’s expansion—DF-26 “Guam Killer” missiles, naval buildup, economic coercion—the author argues that the paper subtly appeases Beijing, even parroting phrases like “Senkaku Islands (Chinese name: Diaoyu Dao),” which he denounces as traitorous. Citing Xi Jinping’s own remark that the world faces a “once-in-a-century turning point,” the essay declares that the historical conditions that produced the United Nations have already ended. Japan, the US, and Europe must urgently create a new international organization of free and democratic states and decisively confront totalitarian regimes built on “bottomless evil and plausible lies.” The author condemns Asahi Shimbun, NHK, academic elites, human-rights lawyers, and “citizens’ groups” as morally bankrupt opportunists who still refuse to face this reality.

The conditions under which the United Nations was created have come to an end.
Japan, the United States, and Europe must form a new international organization as soon as possible.
June 8, 2024.

The conditions under which the United Nations was created have come to an end.
Japan, the United States, and Europe must form a new international organization as soon as possible.
October 13, 2020.

This was the top page of the October 13, 2020 edition of the Nihon Keizai Shimbun.
“Authoritarian China: World on Guard Against Coercive Diplomacy.
Military Power to Match the U.S. by Mid-2030s.
China Is the Largest Trade Partner for 130 Countries.”

China is deepening its authoritarian system.
While other nations are thrown into confusion by the novel coronavirus, it tightens control at home and refuses to halt expansionist actions in surrounding regions.
The question is how to face China’s challenge as it increases its influence in every field—politics, the economy, and science and technology.

The world has reached a time of choice.
In the glow of sunrise, the strategic bomber H-6K takes off.
When the pilot locks onto the target and fires an air-to-surface missile, it hits a runway along the coast and a mushroom cloud rises—
The People’s Liberation Army Air Force released this video in September.
The bombing objective resembled the U.S. Andersen Air Force Base on Guam, and the footage sent ripples through the world.
On the 26th, the PLA launched the DF-26, a medium-range ballistic missile nicknamed the “Guam Killer,” into the South China Sea.
In April, the U.S. Air Force reviewed for the first time in sixteen years its practice of rotating B-52, B-1, and B-2 strategic bombers through Guam and shifted to a strategy of deploying directly from the U.S. mainland in an emergency.
This move is seen as a response to the DF-26.
Professor Yasuhiro Matsuda of the University of Tokyo says, “There is a risk of local clashes breaking out in places like the South China Sea.”

In its annual report on the PLA released in September, the U.S. Department of Defense warned that “in some areas, China has already overtaken the U.S. military.”
The PLA has about 350 surface vessels and submarines, surpassing the U.S. Navy’s 293.
The U.S.–China Economic and Security Review Commission, a bipartisan advisory body of the U.S. Congress, also points out that “by 2035, China will be able to rival U.S. forces across the entire Indian and Pacific Oceans.”
A PLA source says, “We can attack a U.S. nuclear-powered aircraft carrier from 500 kilometers away.”
Supporting this military power is the economy.
China’s nominal GDP in 2019 reached 67% of that of the United States.
The former Soviet Union never went beyond about 40% even in the 1970s.
While China has “contained” the coronavirus through authoritarian measures, the United States has stumbled.
In their latest post-COVID forecasts, both countries project that by around 2030 their GDPs will be roughly equal.

Zhang Yansheng, chief researcher at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, predicts that “after intense friction in the early 2020s, the U.S. and China will build a new cooperative relationship by 2035.”
There are signs that China expects the U.S. to give up trying to counter it once their GDP positions reverse.

“Taiwan: the next Hong Kong.”
China wields its economic power as a weapon and takes an assertive diplomatic stance.
The number of countries and regions for which China is the largest trading partner has risen from about 70 in 2006 to more than 130 in 2019.
Unable to go against China’s wishes, many of them support China on the South China Sea issue and on human rights.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo criticized China in August, saying it “uses economic power as leverage to force its claims on other countries.”
In June, China enforced the Hong Kong National Security Law.
The “one country, two systems” framework, under which Hong Kong was to enjoy a high degree of autonomy for fifty years after its return from Britain, has effectively ended.
The protest movements of young people have been crushed by force, and the world has witnessed direct pressure on freedom and democracy.

“Japan will not sit idle if its national sovereignty, ethnic dignity, or space for development is harmed.”
So says President Xi Jinping.
The South China Sea, the Sino–Indian border—

The Nikkei seems to be criticizing China, yet it is a newspaper that in fact constantly makes allowances for China.
The fact that a paper which refuses to write clearly about the Senkaku Islands still calls itself “The Japan Economic Newspaper” is itself the core of the postwar Japanese problem—a reality which every Japanese citizen should long since have recognized.

Ambitions of territorial expansion seep through.
In September, the United States sent Undersecretary of State Keith Krach to the funeral service in Taipei for former Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui.
It was the highest-ranking visit by a State Department official since the U.S. severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan in 1979.
The United States has continued to sell arms to Taiwan while keeping its stance on military intervention ambiguous, but in September Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote in a U.S. foreign affairs journal that “America must clearly state that it will always respond if China uses force against Taiwan.”
He warned that, as things stand, “no one can rule out the possibility that Taiwan will become the next Hong Kong.”
In a survey conducted this summer by the Pew Research Center, which polled 14,000 people in fourteen advanced countries, the percentage of those who view China “unfavorably” rose across the board.
In Australia in particular, the figure jumped twenty-four points from the previous year to 81%.
When Australia called for an independent investigation into China’s handling of the coronavirus, China responded by imposing higher tariffs on barley and partially suspending meat imports.
Since the inauguration of the Suga administration, China has been sending feelers to Japan, including a congratulatory telegram from Xi himself, but Japan has once before experienced a disruption of rare earth imports from China over the issue of the Senkaku Islands in Okinawa Prefecture (known in Chinese as Diaoyu Dao).

The fact that the Nikkei is, in reality, a newspaper completely under China’s influence is made obvious by its wording “the Senkaku Islands (known in Chinese as Diaoyu Dao).”
It is clear that the writer of this commentary has never purchased and read “One Hundred Questions and Answers for Refuting Claims on the Senkaku Islands,” the monumental work of Ishii Nozomu, a true scholar worthy of a Kyoto University degree.
What shamelessness.
At first glance, this appears to be an editorial criticizing China, but in its depths it is a traitorous piece that makes deferential allowances for China.
How can he not feel ashamed as a Japanese?

Taiwan and Australia, under Chinese pressure, are not someone else’s problem.
Xi repeatedly says that “the world is undergoing a major transformation unseen in a hundred years.”

Even Xi Jinping himself says so.
The conditions under which the United Nations was created have already ended.
Japan, the United States, and Europe must urgently form a new international organization comprising an alliance of nations built on freedom and democracy.
The world has not only entered an era of confrontation with totalitarian states founded on bottomless evil and plausible lies; we must utterly destroy those regimes.
Those who parade themselves as moralists are precisely the ones who must all rise up to bring about the destruction of totalitarian states.
Even an elementary-school pupil could grasp this.
Totalitarianism is the exact opposite of morality.
The Asahi Shimbun and NHK, which have continued to attack Japan—the nation with the highest moral standards in recorded history—while siding with China and South Korea, the so-called intellectuals represented by the Science Council of Japan, the so-called human-rights lawyers, and the so-called citizens’ groups are all so foolish that they do not even realize they are now in a situation where they ought to be sweating with shame pouring from their faces.

U.S. hegemony is wavering, not least because of the coronavirus.
It is difficult for a single country to contain China, which brandishes military and economic power and seeks to force its claims through.
Nor can China bear forever the enormous costs of its revisionist behavior.
It is hard for either side to choose a path of endless escalation in division and confrontation.

*China and South Korea have long exploited precisely these seemingly reasonable, pleasant-sounding words used by people who “understand both sides.”
The editorial writer who penned this piece still has not realized that.
If this kind of commentator is allowed to “lead Japan,” it is practically no different from already submitting to China.
The only thing that nations like China and South Korea understand is a firm, resolute stance backed by power.

He has absolutely no understanding of that.

This editorial is no more than kindergarten-level logic.

When struck by the Wuhan virus, this writer should have read the essays I produced in a fury.

It is editorials that foolishly resign themselves to the notion that Xi Jinping’s dictatorship will not collapse that most effectively support Xi Jinping.

It is cowardly, despicable opportunism that has always driven the world to the brink of ruin—a glaring historical fact.*

How should we face China, which turns its back on the rules the world has built up?
Trade, medicine, climate change—
Where can we find a foothold to keep cooperation alive?
Japan—and the world—must choose.