The Taiwanese people have selected a China-defiant candidate, Lai Ching-te, as the new president for the next four years.  Now it is time for the free world to reflect on the interactions between China and Taiwan, examine China’s track record of peace disruption, and prepare for future China strategy.

The Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Xi Jinping, projected an inevitable reunification with Taiwan in his New Year’s address to the nation on December 31.  His address sends a fresh chilling threat to Taiwan, and particularly to those Taiwanese who have been hoping for a friendlier, or at least less hostile, relationship with China.

To be clear, Xi’s “reunification” in this context is a euphemism for a “take over by force.” This is because China under the CCP will not abandon its hostile stance on democracy and freedom in the foreseeable future; Taiwan, on the other hand, would not surrender its freedom to China without fierce resistance either.  Both Taiwan and China understand the true meaning of the word “reunification” in the context of the current cross-strait relationship.

In a bid to reduce the risk of military conflict with China or to postpone the approaching moment of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, the outgoing president, Tsai Ing-wen, called on China to help maintain regional peace in her 2024 New Year’s speech.

Tsai’s appeal is reasonable to all listening ears, which doesn’t include China.  In fact, history has proven that maintaining peace, be it either domestic or global, has seldom been on China’s list of considerations.  What China has been doing is quite the opposite, and the list goes way beyond China’s current aggressions regarding the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea.

First, on the international stage:

In 1950, less than one year after its establishment and together with the Soviet Union, China backed North Korea to invade South Korea, which was an independent nation already recognized by the United Nations back then.  This led to the three-year Korean War, the bloodiest military conflict since World War II, causing 2–3 million civilian deaths.

In the 1960s, after being on the receiving end of ideological, financial, and technological aid from the Soviet Union for decades, a stronger China decided that it was time to challenge the authoritative status of its generous patronage and place itself in the seat of the big boss in the international communist movement.  It attacked the Soviet Union ideologically and provoked border conflict militarily.  China’s actions led the two communist giants to the brink of nuclear conflict, a dire situation averted through diplomatic efforts by the United States.

A decade later, in 1979, after Vietnam toppled the Chinese-backed extreme terror regime Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, China launched a large-scale invasion of northern Vietnam in the name of “self-defense,” a term used in a similar context during the Korean War.  The impact of the invasion has tainted China’s relationship with Vietnam to this day. 

The above list covers only large and significant military conflicts. Several low-profile conflicts are left out for readers to examine for themselves.  These small (but not uneventful) conflicts include the 1950s annexation of Tibet; the 1962 Indo-China War, and the three major Taiwan Strait crises (1954-55; 1958; 1995-96).

Domestically, the CCP does not seem to have much appetite for peace, either.

Shortly after its establishment in 1949, China rolled out its series of nationwide brutal campaigns, with each one targeting a specific portion of the population.

The campaigns in the 1950s include those against the entrepreneur class, bureaucrats, the counter-revolutionary, and rich peasants.  In the 1960s, old intellectuals and anyone with a connection to traditional Chinese culture found themselves in the crosshairs.  In the 1970s, it was local officials and anyone who questioned Mao’s personal cult.  In the 1980s and up through today, the enemy is anyone with a curiosity about liberty.  These campaigns have caused tens of millions of deaths in China.

The campaign starting in the 1980s is the most ironic one because, to an outside observer, this is China’s most opened-up period. However in reality, liberty has been hated during this period as much as it has ever been since 1949.

One must have wondered: What has China gained from numerous international conflicts and constant domestic turbulence?  The answer is simple and mostly unsatisfactory: Not much.

The Korean War left China with three decades of international isolation until the U.S. re-established its diplomatic ties with China.  The conflict with the Soviet Union left China with self-deprived access to the only source of advanced technology for decades.  The invasion of Vietnam left an estimated 26,000 Chinese families with the loss of their husbands/sons/fathers, and 37,000 more with war-disabled family members.  Similarly, decades of self-inflicted domestic turbulence left China on the brink of economic collapse, before it decided to open up to the international community 40 years ago.

But if one assumes that the above fallouts meant that China is in trouble, then he is wrong.  That's because each of the above turmoils is bragged about by the Chinese government as a great success, and the Chinese population actually buys into these official narratives.  The pragmatic China uses its economic success as the proof—and half of the world, which values economic power more than principles, has agreed.

With the assistance of this brief review of China’s peace-disrupting track record, it becomes clear that “maintaining peace” not only doesn’t make China’s priority list, but it actually often goes against China’s domestic and international agenda.

Taiwan has repeatedly extended olive branches to China in the past, only to have received missile-firing in return.  Tsai’s “peace-call” to China, this time before Taiwan’s latest presidential election, makes no exception.

China’s track record of peace disruption, be it domestic or international, should serve as a wake-up call to countries that still bank on communist China to initiate and sustain world peace.  China, under the CCP’s iron-fisted rule, should always be regarded as a potential threat to world peace.

Image: Free image, Pixabay license, no attribution required.