Editor’s note for Tuesday, October 20, 2020

My thoughts today:

The first time I met a Chinese diplomat was in the summer of 1995. I was working as an English teacher at a factory in Beijing that made industrial electrical equipment. It was a joint venture between a Swedish company and a Chinese state-owned enterprise.

Since then, I have had many occasions to meet and socialize with Chinese diplomats, in Beijing and all over the world. Some of them are nice, some of them are smart, some of them are fun to hang out with. But they all have one job they need to get done, which is to make sure that YOU and anyone within hearing distance, knows that they are not just giving you the Party line, but bashing you over the head with it.

By contrast, the first time I met a diplomat from Taiwan in 2012, we spent an hour talking about Oliver Sacks, Congolese sapeur culture, and Jimi Hendrix.

So, it is with a sense of nauseous recognition that I read this Twitter thread from Bloomberg journalist Peter Martin, author of the forthcoming book China’s Civilian Army, describing Chinese diplomats in Fiji trying to physically beat up their Taiwanese counterparts:

How could such a bizarre series of events occur?

The first thing to understand is that there’s no such thing as a low-stakes event when it comes to Chinese diplomacy.

Especially if it involves Taiwan. The 100+ memoirs of Chinese diplomats I read for my book are littered with lengthy anecdotes about expelling Taiwanese representatives from trade fairs and receptions.

These stories are often portrayed as the pinnacle of the person’s career: Protecting China from a rogue flag E.g. A diplomat in PNG wrote about his role in removing the ROC flag from an event in the ’90s:

“The Chinese delegation had successfully carried out the important task the motherland had entrusted to us,” he wrote. “We succeeded because our great motherland stood behind us.”

This all comes off as quite petty, but I think we should take his pride seriously.

When China established its diplomatic corps in 1949, Beijing saw competition with the ROC on Taiwan as a matter of life and death. No victory was too small. No defeat could be accepted lightly.

Taiwan remains uniquely important to Chinese diplomats.

The reasons for this have shifted. The vast majority of the world’s governments now recognize Beijing, but the CCP has continued to make its promise to “reunify” with Taiwan a central plank of its domestic legitimacy.

Read Peter Martin’s whole Twitter thread if this subject interests you.

Our word of the day is Ninebot, the company that bought Segway in 2015 (九号机器人 jiǔ hào jīqìrén).

—Jeremy Goldkorn, Editor-in-Chief