Brahma Chellaney, Taipei Times

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been expansionist and contemptuous of international law. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the CCP regime has become more despotic, coercive and punitive.

As part of its strategy to annex Taiwan, Beijing has sought to erase the island democracy’s international identity by bribing countries to sever diplomatic ties with Taipei. One by one, China has peeled away Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners, leaving just 12 countries (mostly small developing states) and the Vatican recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. Taiwan’s formal international space has shrunk dramatically.

Yet even as Beijing has scored diplomatic successes, its overreach is turning it into its own worst enemy. Nowhere is this clearer than in its relationship with Japan, which it has pushed from wary partner to strategic counterweight over the past two decades.

More recently, China’s full-spectrum pressure campaign against Japan — intended to weaken Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi — has instead helped deliver her a landslide victory in the Feb. 8 election. Japanese voters appear to have grown weary of Beijing’s coercion. The resulting supermajority in the Diet gives Takaichi not only political authority, but also strategic latitude to harden Japan’s statecraft against China.

Japan’s election has thus delivered something Taiwan has not heard in a long time: genuinely good news.

For Taipei, Takaichi’s victory is not just another electoral outcome in a neighboring democracy. It marks a strategic inflection point for Taiwan’s security environment. For the first time in decades, Japan is moving decisively from strategic ambiguity toward strategic clarity — and that shift matters enormously for Taiwan’s future.

The first and most consequential change is political. Takaichi has been more explicit than any previous Japanese leader in stating that a Chinese attack on Taiwan would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan itself. Under Japan’s 2015 security legislation, that language is not rhetorical; it provides the legal basis for the Self-Defense Forces to exercise collective self-defense if an ally is attacked in circumstances that endanger Japan’s survival.

In practical terms, this signals that Japan is politically and legally prepared to stand alongside the US if Taiwan is attacked.

For Taiwan, this reduces the most dangerous form of uncertainty — not whether China might act, but whether others would respond.

It may also explain Beijing’s sharp reaction. At the recent Munich Security Conference, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi (王毅) denounced Takaichi’s Taiwan position as a “challenge to China’s sovereignty.”

The second shift is military. Japan’s southwestern island chain, stretching from Kyushu to Yonaguni just 110 kilometers from Taiwan, is rapidly becoming a fortified defensive arc. Japanese missile batteries, air defense systems, electronic warfare units and surveillance networks are being deployed along this chain, transforming it from a symbolic “tripwire” into a credible counterstrike barrier. This significantly complicates any Chinese attempt to blockade Taiwan or project force across the Taiwan Strait.

Geography has always made Japan central to Taiwan’s security. Taiwan, in turn, underpins Japan’s own security as a geographic extension of the Japanese archipelago. Under Takaichi, that geographic reality is finally being translated into operational strategy.

Third, Takaichi’s supermajority opens the door to constitutional reform. For decades, Article 9 has constrained Japan’s ability to act as a normal security provider.

With a two-thirds majority in the Lower House, Takaichi now has the leverage to formalize the status of the Self-Defense Forces and expand their operational latitude, even as she accelerates defense spending toward 2 percent of GDP.

A stronger Japan means a more secure Taiwan. Indeed, a Japan that is legally unshackled becomes a far more credible deterrent against Chinese expansionism — one that Beijing must factor into any calculus over Taiwan.

Japan now appears poised to move from reacting to Chinese military pressure to imposing tangible costs. Nowhere is this clearer than along the southwestern island chain, where Tokyo is building the capacity to deny access, complicate Chinese planning, and ensure that no coercive maritime gambit or fait accompli seizure of territory goes unanswered.

Fourth, and just as important, Tokyo has demonstrated that it will not be intimidated by China’s economic coercion, despite the costs.

Beijing attempted to influence Japan’s election by restricting seafood imports and Chinese tourism, tightening export controls on critical materials, and intensifying military pressure around Japan’s southwestern islands. The effort backfired. Japanese voters interpreted the pressure as bullying and responded by strengthening Takaichi’s mandate.

That outcome carries a powerful message for Taiwan: China’s economic leverage is not irresistible, and democratic societies can push back when they choose to do so.

Taken together, these developments amount to something Taiwan has long needed but rarely enjoyed: strategic clarity from its most important neighbor.

The benefits for Taipei are concrete. A Taiwan contingency is now explicitly linked to Japan’s own security. Intelligence-sharing is likely to deepen as Tokyo centralizes its intelligence apparatus. Economic ties may expand through a potential Taiwan-Japan Economic Partnership Agreement, embedding Taiwan more firmly in trusted supply chains. And Japan’s easing of defense-export restrictions opens the door to quiet but meaningful industrial cooperation.

None of this means Taiwan’s challenges are over. Beijing will continue to apply pressure — diplomatic, economic and military. Japan’s constitutional reforms will likely face hurdles in the Upper House and in a national referendum. Ultimately, Taiwan’s own resilience remains the decisive factor in its future.

But geopolitics is rarely about perfect security; it is about relative advantage. Compared with a year ago, Taiwan’s strategic position is stronger. It now has a Japan that is more willing, more capable and more politically authorized to contribute to its defense. And the US has approved a record US$11.1 billion arms package to strengthen Taiwan’s deterrence against Chinese coercion.

In a region where bad news has become routine, that alone marks a meaningful shift.

For Taiwan, Japan’s election result is a reminder that the balance of power in Asia is not static and that democratic solidarity, when backed by political will, can still reshape the strategic landscape.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).

Brahma Chellaney, Taipei Times

China badly misread Japan. It sought to intimidate Tokyo into silence on Taiwan. Instead, it has achieved the opposite by hardening Japanese resolve.

By trying to bludgeon a major power like Japan into accepting its “red lines” — above all on Taiwan — China laid bare the raw coercive logic of compellence now driving its foreign policy toward Asian states. From the Taiwan Strait and the East and South China Seas to the Himalayan frontier, Beijing has increasingly relied on economic warfare, diplomatic intimidation and military pressure to bend neighbors to its will.

Confident in its growing power, China appeared to believe that even Japan — the world’s third-largest economy and a US treaty ally — could be cowed into compliance.

In unleashing an unusually ferocious campaign of diplomatic, economic and military pressure against Tokyo, Beijing pointedly targeted Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi. Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) telephoned US President Donald Trump to vent his fury at Takaichi. And, by seeking to inflict pain on Japan through undeclared economic warfare, Xi’s regime sought to marshal Japanese business lobbies against the country’s first female prime minister, who heads a narrow conservative coalition.

The catalyst was Takaichi’s warning in parliament that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, triggering Tokyo’s right to collective self-defense under its 2015 security legislation. That language was not rhetorical; it carried real legal and strategic consequences. That legislation allows Tokyo to exercise the right of collective self-defense if an ally is attacked in circumstances that endanger Japan’s own survival.

In clarifying what geography has long dictated, Takaichi made explicit what Beijing hoped to keep ambiguous: Japan cannot remain a bystander in a Taiwan contingency.

Taiwan, once ruled by Imperial Japan, is not a distant flashpoint for Tokyo. It lies along the same island chain as Japan — a geographic extension of the Japanese archipelago that underpins Japan’s own security.

This reality has been highlighted by China’s live-fire drills around Taiwan that effectively rehearsed an air and sea blockade. During the drills, Chinese missiles sent over Taiwan landed inside Japan’s exclusive economic zone, a stark reminder that a Taiwan crisis would not remain confined to the Taiwan Strait.

It is against this background that China’s fierce, full-spectrum campaign against Japan must be seen. Chinese officials issued furious denunciations. Military pressure intensified around Japan’s southwestern islands. Economic coercion followed, including restrictions on Japanese exports and Chinese tourism to Japan, as well as threats against supply chains. The message was unmistakable: cross China’s Taiwan red lines and pay a hefty price.

It is now apparent that China made a fundamental miscalculation. Rather than intimidating Takaichi into retracting her statement, China’s bullying is pushing Japan toward greater strategic clarity — and closer operational alignment with the US, as well as more explicit contingency planning involving Taiwan.

The Japanese statement on Taiwan matters because it raises the potential costs of aggression for Beijing.

In recent years, China has used ambiguity — about US resolve, allied involvement and escalation thresholds — to preserve freedom of action in the Taiwan Strait and step up coercive pressure on Taiwan. Now, Tokyo’s linkage between Japan’s survival and Taiwan’s security narrows that ambiguity.

Any Chinese use of force would clearly risk drawing in not just Washington but also a militarily advanced Japan positioned astride China’s maritime access routes.

Japan hosts more American troops than any other US ally in the world. American forces based in Okinawa would be indispensable in any Taiwan contingency, making Japan an unavoidable participant regardless of political preferences.

In this light, China’s coercive pressure only reinforces the logic of deeper contingency planning and interoperability among the US, Japan and Taiwan. Beijing’s campaign is accelerating the very security integration it seeks to prevent.

The irony is stark. China claims its pressure is meant to deter “external interference” in what it claims is an “internal matter.” In practice, Beijing is internationalizing the Taiwan issue further — and transforming Japan from a cautious stakeholder into a more determined deterrent actor in the Taiwan Strait.

Far from reinforcing Beijing’s red lines, the Chinese campaign against Tokyo has narrowed strategic ambiguity, deepened regional alignment and raised the potential costs of any use of force against Taiwan.

Beijing has also exposed a broader pattern in its Asian strategy. By targeting Japan — a historic great power — China is signaling how it intends to deal with others in Asia: through intimidation, economic punishment and calibrated nationalist wrath. This is likely to stiffen resistance among those with the capacity to push back.

Indeed, China’s coercion is already accelerating Japan’s military modernization. Tokyo has pledged to double defense spending, acquire long-range strike capabilities, and harden supply chains against economic blackmail. Collectively, these steps enhance deterrence around Taiwan, even if Taiwan is not named explicitly.

At the same time, tensions are rising in adjacent theaters. Increased Chinese military activity near the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands — known to Taiwan and China as the Diaoyutais (釣魚台) — heightens the risk of accidents and miscalculation. By widening the geographic scope of confrontation, China is multiplying escalation pathways. This is a dangerous strategy for a power that claims to value stability.

For Taiwan, the implications, paradoxically, appear reassuring. China’s effort to isolate the self-governing democracy diplomatically is instead clarifying the stakes for regional actors. Japan’s shift from studied ambiguity toward conditional clarity strengthens deterrence by signaling that a Taiwan conflict would not remain confined. That signal, more than any single weapons system, raises the threshold for war.

Simply put, China’s coercion of Japan is strategically counterproductive for Beijing and, ironically, stabilizing for Taiwan.

To be sure, all this does not guarantee stability. A more crowded and militarized environment carries its own risks. But if China’s objective is to keep Japan neutral and Taiwan isolated, its bullying campaign is a strategic own goal.

By trying to tame Japan, Beijing is compelling Tokyo to prepare more seriously. And far from weakening the emerging deterrent architecture around Taiwan, China is helping to build it.

Brahma Chellaney, professor of strategic studies at the independent Center for Policy Research in New Delhi, is the author of nine books, including the award-winning Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press).

If China can punish Japan — economically powerful, diplomatically influential and protected by a U.S. defense treaty — then no other country should imagine itself beyond Beijing’s reach. 

By Brahma Chellaney
Contributing Writer, The Japan Times

China’s latest confrontation with Japan is more than a bilateral spat. It is a warning shot to all of Asia — and to the U.S., Japan’s treaty ally.

By trying to bludgeon a major democracy into accepting its “red lines,” above all on Taiwan, China is exposing the raw coercive logic now powering its foreign policy. Its willingness to target Japan — a historic great power and today the world’s third-largest economy — telegraphs how Beijing intends to deal with the rest of Asia: through intimidation, economic punishment and calibrated use of nationalist fury.

Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s warning that a Chinese assault on Taiwan could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan — enabling the country to exercise its right to collective self-defense — provoked not a routine diplomatic protest but a ferocious, full-spectrum backlash. Beijing answered with a sweeping coercive campaign that showcases its new playbook — and its growing willingness, as it earlier demonstrated against India, to impose costs even on countries far too large and powerful to be cowed easily.

Beijing’s reprisals against Japan have been broad, theatrical and unmistakably punitive. Officials have issued warnings to Chinese tourists and students to avoid Japan, dispatched naval vessels to the waters of the Japanese-administered Senkaku Islands, suspended diplomatic engagements and threatened further freezes in economic and cultural exchanges.

The now-deleted threat by the Chinese consul general in Osaka to “chop off” Takaichi’s “filthy head” was extraordinary not only for its crudity. It showed how emboldened China’s “wolf warrior” apparatus has become, with state media amplifying the incitement rather than disavowing it.

The escalation is deliberate. Beijing is not merely signaling displeasure; it is trying to shock Japanese society, especially business and political elites, into pressuring Takaichi to back off her Taiwan stance. Intimidation is the strategy by seeking to weaponize Japan’s economic dependence on China and making an example of a country others consider too powerful to be pushed around.

China is waging an economic war on Japan in all but name — slapping de facto bans on seafood imports, freezing group tours, stalling Japanese film releases and even scrapping trilateral summits. Airline cancellations have gutted winter travel bookings. For the Japanese economy, these are not pinpricks but calculated moves to hurt and to coerce.

This is not new behavior. Beijing has repeatedly used trade as a weapon against countries that defy its wishes — from Australia and South Korea to Norway, Lithuania, Mongolia, the Philippines and India. But until now it has typically calibrated such punishment to avoid meaningful blowback to its own business interests. Going after Japan marks a bolder escalation: an effort to show that crossing Beijing carries a price even for a major power, and that no state — however large — is beyond China’s coercive reach.

By inflicting economic pain, China is seeking to marshal political challengers and business lobbies in Japan against Takaichi, who heads a narrow conservative coalition. Beijing’s objective is to try and reshape Japan’s political landscape from the outside. This is a tactic it has used to strong-arm smaller neighbors, but now it is brazenly attempting it against a Group of Seven power.

China has intensified the pressure by also reviving its familiar historical narrative of Japan as an aggressive, unrepentant militarist state. By invoking World War II “victory,” questioning Okinawa’s sovereignty and accusing Japan of “remilitarization,” Beijing is recasting Takaichi’s remarks as dangerous provocations rather than straightforward defensive clarifications. The messaging is aimed at two audiences: to stir renewed nationalism at home by portraying Xi Jinping’s regime as standing firm against Japanese “aggression,” and to make it harder for other nations to align openly with Japan’s concerns over Taiwan.

Weaponizing history in this way is classic wolf-warrior diplomacy — a tactic meant to force the target onto the defensive and to reframe Chinese coercion as justified self-protection.

The most ominous element of Beijing’s campaign is its geopolitical message. If China can punish Japan — economically powerful, diplomatically influential and protected by a U.S. defense treaty — then no other country should imagine itself beyond reach. The lesson Beijing wants others to absorb is clear: Stay silent on Taiwan, on Chinese expansionism from the South and East China Seas to the Himalayas and on human rights abuses in China — or pay a steep price. This is coercive diplomacy elevated into a foreign-policy doctrine.

Tokyo, however, has not buckled. Takaichi has held her ground, clarifying but not retracting her statement, and polls show broad public unease over China’s behavior.

If Japan withstands the pressure until Beijing is forced to scale back, it will send an unmistakable signal that China’s coercion can be resisted. Indeed, Beijing may be accelerating the very alignments it fears — including tighter U.S.-Japan strategic coordination, deeper informal links among Tokyo, Taipei, Canberra and New Delhi, and a greater appetite in Asia for pushback against Chinese coercion.

What was meant as a warning to Asia may instead become a rallying cry. Japan is teaching the region that standing up to coercion is not only necessary — it is possible. And reinforcing the perception that China’s aggressive rise poses an expanding threat to Asian and global security.

Brahma Chellaney, a longtime contributor to The Japan Times, is the author of nine books, including “Water: Asia’s New Battleground.”

From surveilling and repressing Chinese citizens to firing and prosecuting potential rivals, Chinese President Xi Jinping seems able to rule only through fear. But fear is not a foundation for long-term stability, and the more Xi seeks to consolidate power, the more vulnerable his position becomes.

Brahma Chellaney, Project Syndicate

During his 13 years in power, Xi Jinping has steadily tightened his grip on all levers of authority in China – the Communist Party of China (CPC), the state apparatus, and the military – while expanding surveillance into virtually every aspect of society. Yet his recent purge of nine top-ranking generals, like those before it, shows that he still sees enemies everywhere.

After taking power in 2012, Xi launched a crackdown on corruption within the CPC and the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The campaign was initially popular, because China’s one-party system is rife with graft and abuse of power. But it soon became clear that enforcement was highly selective – a tool not for building a more transparent or effective system, but for consolidating power in Xi’s hands. In Xi’s China, advancement depends less on competence or integrity than on earning the leader’s personal trust.

But even after more than a decade of promoting only loyalists, Xi continues to dismiss officials regularly, including top military commanders. According to the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence, nearly five million officials at all levels of government have been indicted for corruption under Xi. And this is to say nothing of those who simply disappear without explanation.

True to form, Xi’s regime claims that the military leaders swept up by his latest purge – including General He Weidong, a member of the Politburo, Vice Chair of the Central Military Commission, and the third-highest-ranking figure in China’s military hierarchy – committed “disciplinary violations” and “duty-related crimes.” But a more plausible explanation is that Xi is playing an interminable game of Whac-a-Rival, desperately trying to preserve his grip on power.

Xi’s fears are not entirely misplaced: each new purge deepens mistrust among China’s elite and risks turning former loyalists into enemies. From Mao Zedong to Joseph Stalin, there is ample evidence that one-man rule breeds paranoia. By now, Xi may well have lost the ability to distinguish allies from foes. At 72, Xi remains so insecure in his position that, unlike even Mao, he has refused to designate a successor, fearing that a visible heir could hasten his own downfall.

None of this bodes well for China. By refusing to lay the groundwork for an eventual leadership transition, Xi sharply increases the risk that the end of his rule – however that comes – will usher in political instability. In the meantime, Xi’s emphasis on personal fealty over ideological conformity is weakening institutional cohesion in a system once grounded in collective leadership. Coupled with his arbitrary firings and prosecutions, Chinese governance is now increasingly defined by sycophancy and anxiety, rather than competence and consistency.

China’s military is paying a particularly steep price for Xi’s insecurity. In recent years, the PLA has undergone sweeping structural reforms aimed at transforming it into a modern fighting force capable of “winning informationized wars.” But Xi’s purges risk undermining this effort by disrupting military planning and leadership. For example, his abrupt removal in 2023 of the leaders of the PLA’s Rocket Force, which oversees China’s arsenal of nuclear and conventional missiles, may have jeopardized China’s strategic deterrent.

Replacing experienced commanders with untested loyalists might ensure Xi’s political survival – and Chinese leaders have often used the military to safeguard their own power – but it does nothing for national security. And when generals are preoccupied primarily with political survival, both morale and operational readiness suffer. Can the PLA fight and win a war against a major adversary like the United States or India while operating under the political constraints Xi has imposed on it?

So far, Xi has advanced his expansionist agenda through stealth and coercion rather than open warfare. But a paranoid leader surrounded by sycophants unwilling or unable to challenge him is always at risk of strategic miscalculation. Recall that Stalin decimated the Red Army’s leadership on the eve of the Nazi invasion – with disastrous results. In Xi’s case, it might be China that does the invading, if he orders an amphibious assault on Taiwan.

For all the pomp surrounding China’s rise, the country is beset by structural problems, including a slowing economy, rising youth unemployment, and an aging and declining population. Popular discontent may well be growing, but it is masked by repression, just as any potential challenge to Xi’s leadership is preempted by purges and prosecutions. Ultimately, Xi seems able to rule only through fear.

But fear is not a foundation for long-term stability. A leader consumed by fear of disloyalty may command obedience but not genuine fidelity. Obedience is not merely a poor substitute for strength; it can become a source of fragility, as it leaves little room for creativity, competency, or collaboration. The great irony of Xi’s approach is that the more he seeks to consolidate power in his own hands, the more vulnerable his rule becomes.

Mao’s purges culminated in chaos and national trauma. Xi’s methods are more sophisticated, but the underlying logic is the same – as could be the results.

Brahma Chellaney, Professor of Strategic Studies at the New Delhi-based Center for Policy Research and Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin, is the author of nine books, including Water: Asia’s New Battleground (Georgetown University Press, 2011), for which he won the 2012 Asia Society Bernard Schwartz Book Award.

© Project Syndicate, 2025.