China sets stage for violent crackdown: ‘Taiwan is a rebel regime’

Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping ’s regime is setting the legal and diplomatic table for a crackdown on Taiwan while blaming the United States for the growing possibility of war over the island democracy.

“In a certain sense, China’s civil war has not yet ended, and the current regime in Taiwan is a rebel regime within China’s territory,” Chinese Ambassador Lu Shaye told a Paris audience last week. “The Chinese government has the right to expel this regime and reclaim governance over Taiwan at any time.”

Chinese Communist authorities have never ruled the island, the last refuge of the nationalist government defeated in the Chinese Communist Revolution and a crucial link in the chain of islands linking U.S. forces and allies across the Pacific. Lu, China’s truculent envoy to France, offered his assertive commentary as Chinese officials promulgated new laws that threaten “Taiwan independence diehards” with the death penalty.

“The sharp sword of legal action will always hang high,” said Sun Ping, the Chinese Ministry of Public Security, last week.

The ominous rhetoric seems to express in part Xi’s displeasure with the newly elected Taiwanese President Lai Ching Te, whom he regards as a proponent of “Taiwan independence.” Taiwan’s government is known as the Republic of China — the name of the state that ruled in Beijing prior to 1949. Lu insisted the prospects for peace have been “compromised” by U.S. support for Taiwan.

“The U.S., driven by the purpose of maintaining its global hegemony and its strategy to contain China through the ‘first island chain,’ has been conniving and supporting the Democratic Progressive Party authorities in Taiwan to pursue ‘independence,’” he said.

Chinese Communist authorities have pledged to assert authority over the island for decades, but the question of whether they feel the need to launch an invasion at any given point is entangled in a complex series of diplomatic signals about what kinds of political activity are consistent with the status quo and what activity seems to affirm the fact that the island rules itself like an independent state too blatantly.

"Democracy is not a crime, but autocracy is a crime,” Lai said last week in response to Beijing’s new legal threats. “China has absolutely no right to sanction the Taiwanese people simply because of their beliefs, and China certainly does not have the right to pursue cross-border prosecution of the Taiwanese people."

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Lu said that if Taiwan refused to submit to Beijing’s rule, it would be forced into more painful restrictions.

“If it cannot be done by peaceful means, then by non-peaceful means; if some people do not want ‘one country, two systems,’ then by ‘one country, one system,’” he said, referring to the governing arrangement that existed between Beijing and Hong Kong prior to the recent crackdown on the former British colony’s judicial system. “All in all, we will never allow Taiwan to be separated from the motherland.”