China’s stunning new campaign to turn the world against Taiwan
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. For those anxious about Chinese aggression towards the self-ruled island of Taiwan, there was a welcome signal at the end of Donald Trump’s third week back in the White House. After talks with Ishiba Shigeru, the Japanese prime minister, on February 7th the two leaders said America and Japan “opposed any attempts to unilaterally change the status quo by force or coercion" in relation to Taiwan, which China claims as its own.
This steely new language was a win in America’s long quest to get its allies to show more solidarity with Taiwan. Yet in the battle for global backing over the island’s fate, China is rapidly gaining ground. By The Economist’s count, 70 countries have now officially endorsed both China’s sovereignty over Taiwan and, just as crucially, that China is entitled to pursue “all" efforts to achieve unification, without specifying that those efforts should be peaceful.
Moreover, the vast majority of those countries have adopted that new wording in the past 18 months, after a Chinese diplomatic offensive across the global south. Our findings are consistent with those in a study published on January 15th by the Lowy Institute, an Australian think-tank. It found that by the end of last year 119 countries—62% of the UN’s member states—had endorsed China’s claim to sovereignty over Taiwan.
Of them, 89 also backed China’s unification efforts, with many supporting “all" such measures. (The Lowy study did not quantify the latter group or specify when they adopted this expansive language.) China’s latest diplomatic push appears to be designed to secure global support for its broadening campaign of coercion against Taiwan. That campaign includes the threat of imposing a quarantine
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