China’s latest aggressive military activities near Taiwan have many observers speculating if, or when, Beijing will invade the island democracy.
If China does end up moving against the island, the process started last weekend, when Beijing made yet another assertive messaging effort and Washington did the exact opposite.
When did the Russian invasion of Ukraine start? With hindsight, one can point back to Vladimir Putin’s now-infamous 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he launched the propaganda groundwork for Russian aggression in the years that followed. NATO broke its promise of not expanding eastward, so Putin’s narrative goes, and the grievances Putin expressed would be used to justify his fighting back. NATO never made that promise, but the facts are now irrelevant. Propaganda is not about facts but about serving the power that propagates it. That’s why recent pronouncements from Beijing about Taiwan should concern everyone.
Since Washington switched its diplomatic relations from Taipei to Beijing in 1979, it has maintained a “One China” policy that acknowledges, but falls short of accepting, China’s position that Taiwan is a part of China. The American position on the island has remained indeterminate to this day.
In recent months, however, Beijing has ratcheted up its propaganda offensive, arguing that Washington in 1979 subscribed to the “One China” principle. Last Friday, Beijing’s Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying, a poster child for the “wolf warriors” in Beijing’s foreign policy circle, claimed that the United States had signed on to the Chinese position as early as 1972, when the two sides signed the normalization communique.
That this is a falsehood is, again, beside the point. Rather, this narrative can serve as a pretext for China’s next move. Beijing is laying the groundwork to say that the U.S. broke the normalization deal.
The world saw this movie not long ago — and not just in Moscow. In 2017, China claimed that its joint declaration with the United Kingdom over Hong Kong, which specified how the city would be ruled after the handover in 1997, was a historical document that ceased to be effective upon the handover. The subsequent Chinese crackdown on Hong Kong’s freedoms made clear exactly how the propaganda groundwork should have been interpreted. Never mind that the Sino-British joint declaration is a binding treaty.
The Biden administration’s recent mixed messaging on Taiwan is particularly concerning in this context. On Sunday, national security adviser Jake Sullivan confirmed that the island would not be included in the launch of the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework, the U.S. plan to get back in the game in Asia, in order to avoid irking China. But the next day, President Joe Biden again insisted the U.S. would defend Taiwan in the case of a Chinese invasion. Once again, the White House staff walked back his words almost immediately.
Generous critics might say that despite the backtracking, the president’s words are a sign that Washington is deviating from its long-held “strategic ambiguity” and might even deter Beijing. That’s optimistic and just one side of the coin. There’s no guarantee that China won’t be emboldened by the backpedaling and become more belligerent toward the island.
There’s a clear difference between disciplined ambiguity and contradicting oneself. And while strategic ambiguity may have worked well when China was less assertive in its authoritarian influence, the strategy has clearly run its course. If Washington doesn’t take a clear and unequivocal stance on the future of Taiwan, China’s propaganda will be better able to fill the information void, and last weekend may well have been the beginning of a Chinese invasion of the island.
Weifeng Zhong is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a core developer of the open-sourced Policy Change Index project, which uses machine-learning algorithms to predict authoritarian regimes’ major policy moves by “reading” their propaganda. He’s also the curator of the Wei To Think Again newsletter on U.S.-China competition.
