On the G7 Foreign Ministers’ "Statement on Preserving Peace and Stability Across the Taiwan Strait"

 

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Mrs. Pelosi's visit to Taiwan produced the expected theatrics. It comes in two forms. The first is military: war games and maneuvers inching closer and closer to Taiwanese territory (here). The second was to impose US style targeted sanctions and diplomatic ghosting on misbehaving states (see here ("China cancelled a meeting between Wang and his Japanese counterpart Yoshimasa Hayashi on the sidelines of ASEAN events in Cambodia,")).

Liberal Democracy, though, has learned a lesson or two of united front politics. And so in the wake of Mrs. Pelosi's Taiwan visit, the G7 issued the following ministerial statement--to China: 

The text of the following statement was released by the G7 foreign ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America, and the High Representative of the European Union.

Begin Text:

We, the G7 Foreign Ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom, the United States of America, and the High Representative of the European Union, reaffirm our shared commitment to maintaining the rules-based international order, peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and beyond.

We are concerned by recent and announced threatening actions by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), particularly live-fire exercises and economic coercion, which risk unnecessary escalation. There is no justification to use a visit as pretext for aggressive military activity in the Taiwan Strait. It is normal and routine for legislators from our countries to travel internationally. The PRC’s escalatory response risks increasing tensions and destabilizing the region.

We call on the PRC not to unilaterally change the status quo by force in the region, and to resolve cross-Strait differences by peaceful means. There is no change in the respective one China policies, where applicable, and basic positions on Taiwan of the G7 members.

We reiterate our shared and steadfast commitment to maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and encourage all parties to remain calm, exercise restraint, act with transparency, and maintain open lines of communication to prevent misunderstanding.

End Text (G7 Statement).

 The Ministerial Statement was interesting for a number of reasons.  First it provides a clever exercise in using Chinese rhetorical tropes now turned against China.  The references  to avoidance of changing the status quo, of resolution by peaceful means echo some of the Chinese discursive tropes in defining their position in the Russo-Ukrainian war. Second, it is another vehicle for elaborating and projecting the discursive trope of the "rules-based international order" as the signature ideological anthem of the liberal democratic order, one which has become the "go to" slogan of the Americans since the spectacular meeting between the Americans and Chinese in Anchorage in 2021 (see here). Third, it appears that the continued commitment to a one China policy does not necessarily mean what the Chinese think it means.  Here the roles of China and the international community are reversed compared to Hong Kong. 

That change in polarity also changes the dynamics in which a conversation about a "rules based international order" can become one about  a set of functionally differentiated divisions of sovereign rights. While Chinese control was decisive in  the extension of classical unitary sovereignty in Hong Kong; this was a control conceded by all parties.  In Taiwan, that concession is much more ambiguous; and tentative; and if it was less so in 1972, it has now morphed  into a significant movement away from classical to functionally differentiated (ie "rules based international ordering") sovereignty. That, more than anything else is likely extremely infuriating to the Chinese, because it deviates from the Hong Kong approach and because it remains unfinished business from the as yet complete victory of the Communist revolutionary vanguard in 1949.It is also bound up in the narrative of national resurrection (rejuvenation)--to pick up from that moment before the decline of the late Qing reduced China to  a weak power. To that end the only possible road leads straight back to the 1840s and the rise of the vision of unitary sovereignty that climaxed for the rest of the world in 1945.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi rejected their statement, and chided them for ignoring the provocation that had come from the U.S. side. "It groundlessly criticises China for taking such measures, which are reasonable and legitimate steps to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity," Wang said in a statement issued by his ministry.  "From where have they received such a prerogative? Who has given them such qualification to? To shield the infringer of rights and to accuse their defenders - how inexplicable!" The G7 statement had aroused "great indignation" among the Chinese people, he said. "Today's China is no longer the China of the 19th century. History should not repeat itself, and it will never repeat itself!" (China scolds G7 foreign ministers over Taiwan statement)

And yet the move toward functionally differentiated sovereignty remains both a work in progress and carries with it some dangers if turned back on its authors and their own sovereign arrangements.  It suggests limits to national aspirations that may bite as hard on the liberal democratic side (eg indigenous peoples) as it does on the Marxist Leninist side (national reunification narratives). On the other hand, production based global empire  can more easiy absorb variation in sovereignty better than its predecessors.  There may be nothing particularly odd within the ideology of internationalism inherent from the construction of the post 1945 international system, of shared sovereignty, of a separation between territorial and governance sovereignty, and of the creation of territories  whose governance autonomy is vested in a notion of the superior sovereign rights of a "rules-based international order." It is to the fleshing to of that ordering that will be the great task of the emerging supra-national orders--Marxist Leninist and liberal democratic, in the new era. Both sides have now taken their discursive positions; both are committed to their semiotic stance; both are becoming increasingly inflexible as the space for maneuver is deliberately reduced. At the end of what is coming is great change--the pathways there, however, are not yet clear.