There are, properly speaking, two Chinas: the People’s Republic of China, which we generally just call “China,” and the Republic of China, which we generally call “Taiwan.” That’s why Beijing’s “One China” policy represents the largest act of language policing in the world. The policy, in essence, means that the government of the People’s Republic of China in Beijing will completely flip its Sichuan at any other country that doesn’t go along with its insistence that the other China does not exist. America has acquiesced since the Nixon administration, when the 1972 Shanghai Communique made it America’s official position to respect the One China policy as one of the preconditions for establishing relations.
The thing is, Taiwan does exist. China thinks Taiwanese sovereignty is illegitimate, and it refuses to have relations with countries that formally maintain relations with Taiwan. But it doesn’t refuse to have relations with countries that, say, sell weapons to Taiwan, have nominally “unofficial” but otherwise substantial diplomatic relations with Taiwan, and clearly behave in every way except for in its formal statements as though Taiwan is and ought to be an independent country. Sure, Beijing doesn’t particularly like this stuff. But it’s really when a country wishes to formalize its acceptance of an independent Taiwan, or to say out loud the reality that Taiwan is a real country acting and governing itself independently, that Beijing says there’s a breach of the One China policy.
This is where it’s such a strangely verbal thing China is hung up on. In some sense, the working theory is that so long as nobody says it, it isn’t happening. It’s like reality isn’t real until you acknowledge it, a geopolitical version of putting your fingers in your ears and saying “lalalala” or Wile E. Coyote not falling until he looks down.
And that’s where the resemblance to woke language policing comes in.
Language policing, as a growing phenomenon in Western cultural life, is the tactic of trying to frustrate and intimidate certain positions out of the discourse by subjecting anyone who utters them to outraged abuse, telling them what they’ve said isn’t so much wrong as the words they’ve uttered are unsayable. It’s a way to rout an argument instead of winning it. I’ve called this tendency “lexical activism” in this space before, usually in talking about the way wokeness works. But as China shows, woke culture critics are hardly its most ardent practitioners. It’s very much at work in international relations, too. Call it “lexical diplomacy.”
President Trump disgracefully tweeted recently: “Congratulations to President Xi and the Chinese people on the 70th Anniversary of the People’s Republic of China!”
Perhaps Trump’s deference to dictatorship was diplomatically smart, though. Words are cheap, after all. It’s thoughts and behaviors that are hard to change. (That, in the end, is why the fixation on language policing is so wrongheaded.)
But I’m not a diplomat. So, as Beijing cracks down on Hong Kong and expands aggressively into its surrounding waters, I might offer my congratulations, too — to Taiwan on the occasion of its Oct. 10 National Day. Officials worried about China’s weirdly woke diplomatic concerns may have to say it’s not a nation. But it is one. Thankfully, words only have so much power to change reality.
—By Nicholas Clairmont
