Editor’s note for Monday, August 31, 2020

There are only nine more days until the The China Project Virtual Women’s Conference and tickets to the cocktail reception are almost sold out! You can buy discounted cocktail reception tickets or get your complimentary conference-only tickets by using the promo code WC20ACCESS.

My thoughts today:

Drums of war watch: “U.S. intends to force China to ‘fire first shot’ over Taiwan” is the headline of a Global Times editorial published today about a U.S. military aircraft that allegedly “appeared in the skies over Taiwan on Sunday,” and is “suspected” of having taken off from Taiwan. This is the message, summarized in a tweet from the mouth-frothing state-owned tabloid:

If military cooperation between the U.S. and the island is discovered and poses concrete threats to the mainland, the PLA will be forced to take effective action to eliminate the threat and may even realize reunification by force for once and for all: experts.

A separate editorial in the Global Times warns that if Beijing “has conclusive evidence [of U.S. military planes taking off from Taiwan], it can destroy the relevant airport in the island and the U.S. military aircraft that land there — a war in the Taiwan Straits will thus begin.” The newspaper also published a similar piece in Chinese.

Of course, the Global Times is click- and profit-driven; it is not the authoritative voice of the Chinese government. But I think it does a very good job of showing us the id of the Chinese Communist Party.

Taiwan and Somaliland have been upsetting the governments of both China and Somalia. The Republic of Somaliland broke away from Somalia in 1991 but has little global recognition. But now Somaliland “will officially open a representative office in Taipei early next month,” reported the Taipei Times last week. Taiwan has already opened a representative office in Hargeisa, the capital of Somaliland.

Our word of the day is personalized information push service technology (个性化信息推送服务技术 gèxìnghuà xìnxī tuīsòng fúwù jìshù).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief