Frisbee and fire — Editor’s note for Friday, July 29, 2022

Dear reader,

Our phrase of the week is: Frisbee warrior (接盘侠 jiē pán xiá). But if we had read earlier the Chinese Foreign Ministry’s readout (Chinese, English) from yesterday’s phone call between Joe Biden and Xí Jìnpíng 习近平, it might have been: Those who play with fire will perish by it (玩火必自焚 wán huǒ bì zìfén).

Those words were Xi’s warning to Biden about “China’s principled position on the Taiwan question,” apparently in response to the reported upcoming visit of U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to Taiwan.

That’s some strong language. Not quite as strong as some of the threats from Party-backed voices like former Global Times editor Hú Xījìn 胡锡进, who has, for the last week, been tweeting things like: “If Pelosi eventually makes the trip, to China, it will be a joint show between the White House and the Capitol Hill. I believe the PLA air force will definitely take action then.” For more from Hu — who also features in our phrase of the week, Frisbee warrior — see his opinion piece in his former newspaper, the Global Times: Taiwan Straits will be a place where the U.S. will finally show its true ‘paper tiger’ face.

Reuters says that despite Xi’s “warning to U.S. President Joe Biden against ‘playing with fire’ over Taiwan, the two leaders managed largely to steer clear of escalatory rhetoric during their call, suggesting that neither side wants a fresh crisis.”

After living in China for 20 years, I moved to the United States in 2015.

China and the U.S. are like Bizarro cousins.

In China, the government interferes with any and all acts of public speech, social media, journalism, etc. The United States has no federal censor of any kind, but many and various anklebiters try to police the way people speak. These annoying but highly effective swarms of anti-free-speech mosquitoes are everywhere in America: They are puritanical academics at elite liberal universities, and they are also governors of conservative states like Tennessee, where I live.

In the U.S., the China-watching community has one spot where China bashers and panda huggers tend to converge: a reluctance to talk about a PLA military takeover of Taiwan (As Fawlty Towers put it: “Don’t talk about the war!”) Funnily enough, there seems to be a similar reluctance in Taiwan itself, even among people who want the island to declare itself an independent nation.

But if there’s one thing everybody should mentally prepare for right now in terms of geopolitical events, it’s war in the Taiwan Strait. The Communist Party of China keeps talking about it. So should we, no matter what our views of the wrongs and rights of it.