Hong Kong protests, Taiwan problem, Wuhan virus: Xi Jinping’s woes just keep mounting
- After six months of protests in Hong Kong, the new year has brought more chaos, with Tsai Ing-wen winning an election in Taiwan and disease spreading in Wuhan. Perhaps President Xi Jinping should recognise that China needs new leadership
More damaging, however, has been Beijing’s disastrous response to the ongoing protests in Hong Kong. Tsai acknowledged as much herself, telling the BBC that Taiwan’s voters were watching as the much-heralded “one country, two systems” framework collapsed in Hong Kong, and voted with this in mind.
Tsai’s victory, just months after pro-democracy candidates’ overwhelming victory in Hong Kong’s district council elections, is a stark sign of how Beijing’s – and President Xi Jinping’s – policies have failed.
Tsai said that Beijing’s policies of the past few years had changed the nature of the relationship between the island and the mainland, and nullified the ambiguity between them.
Xi may well believe that the initiative is a way to buy friends, which China sorely lacks. Its only true ally, North Korea, offers nothing beyond its geostrategic position as a buffer against the US-allied South Korea.
China’s other historic partner, Pakistan, likewise has little to offer. Xi has been strengthening ties with Russia but, as I have written previously, it is folly to expect any loyalty from President Vladimir Putin considering the historical animosity between the two countries.
Xi’s aggressive foreign policy in the South China Sea is sending countries in the region back to the embrace of the United States. He is seeking to buy friends in Central Asia and Africa without considering the extent to which he is overleveraging the Chinese economy.
I grew up during the warlord era in China. I witnessed the Sino-Japanese war, Japanese occupation and civil war. Now, the People’s Republic of China is 70. Through all this time, the Chinese people have been excluded from the process of selecting their own leaders. It does not appear that this will change for the foreseeable future.
But I hope the Chinese people will get to decide for themselves one day, just as those in Taiwan have.
Chi Wang, a former head of the Chinese section of the US Library of Congress, is president of the US-China Policy Foundation