The Invisible Armada

2025/04/09

(This speech addressed to doctoral students in history and literature at Xiamen University  - Fujian Province, a city of over 4.5 million inhabitants -   during a short stay on campus, followed by a lively Q&A session  - January 6–9, 2025).

Since the beginning of this century, we have witnessed an increasing homogenization of discourses on China in the West. By “the West,” I mean North America on one hand, Europe extending to the edges of Russia on the other, and the predominantly white parts of the world located elsewhere, notably Australia and New Zealand. And by “homogenization,” I mean that political, ideological, and cultural differences and oppositions tend to become uncertain—if not altogether vanish—when it comes to discussions about China.

Furthermore, this homogenization of discourse is underpinned by hostility. The prevailing idea is that China now poses a threat—a threat to us Westerners in general, and increasingly, a vital danger. There is a great deal of emotion in this perception of China—anxiety is mingled with a kind of resentment toward what is now seen as the primary “bad object” of our present world. This is because the rise of China in all domains appears as the main driving force of change in both the present and foreseeable future—change that affects the systemic foundations of what is supposed to be the world order.

Western ruling elites, and to varying degrees, the populations and publics of these regions, are concerned not only by China’s growing power as a state or economic force, but as a “world” in itself. They perceive it—consciously or unconsciously—as the factor most likely to challenge what they view as the immutable, legitimate, and sole possible rules of the game: that is, Western hegemony as it was established globally after World War II.

I suspect I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know with this broad introduction. But here, I’d like to insist on two key points. First, this homogenization of the perception of China—and consequently, the discourse about it—in the West doesn’t appear out of nowhere; it awakens something. The China bashing that dominates public discourse and the media today in the West is fundamentally a reprise, a remake, of age-old discourses. And the defining characteristic of the West’s age-old discourse on China as the “Great Other”—that is, in its radical otherness, the most “other” among all great civilizations—is that it is a racialized discourse.

This is what makes its resurgence today particularly problematic, even if a certain discursive cosmetics now alters its surface appearance—it’s more about “totalitarianism,” “economic warfare,” “expansionism,” etc., rather than overt claims about the inherently dangerous or inferior nature of the “yellow race.” But if you listen carefully, you can still hear echoes of race war—a discourse whose formation dates back to the origins of European modernity and has long been a living matrix in the Western imagination and representations of this part of Asia known as the Far East, especially the Chinese world.

Remember the traumatic and recent episode of the COVID-19 pandemic and how, in the West—especially in the United States—it reawakened the worst racialized discourse under the guise of rejection and collective panic: “the Chinese virus,” or worse still, as uttered by none other than Donald Trump, then President of the world's most powerful nation. This resurgence of the repressed reveals how racial discourse remains the unshakable bedrock of today’s systemic hostility toward China in the West.

Before I turn to the question that interests you most—the relationship between Taiwan and China today, from the perspective of a European familiar with Taiwan—let me add one more thought. The perception of China as a “bad object,” so dominant in the West today, is not part of some long-standing, uniform rule. What generally prevails is fascination—an ambivalent fascination—for China and the Chinese world as the “great Other” of Western civilization. In other historical moments, this fascination may be driven by a mix of curiosity and empathy, even blissful admiration—as in the 1970s, when a wave of sinomania swept through the intellectual radical left in the West in the form of Mao-worship.

More broadly, even a staunch conservative like Alain Peyrefitte, a minister under General de Gaulle, could write a bestselling book titled When China Will Awaken—a prophetic title that, in itself, was an entire program.

In France, we’ve seen the rise of an interesting little commons in recent years, called book boxes: small public boxes placed in parks or along walkways, in cities or even villages, where people can leave books they no longer want and others can take them freely. As a book lover, I’m a frequent user. And what do I consistently find in abundance? Novels and memoirs by two bestselling authors from the latter half of the 20th century: Pearl Buck and Han Suyin. Both drew their popularity from presenting themselves as cultural ambassadors of modern China—China in the process of awakening, breaking from its traditions, or rather, serving as a fascinating stage for the ceaseless struggle between tradition and modernity or Westernization.

Their success came from portraying China to the average Western reader (this is popular literature, after all) in a positive and engaging light. This shows that Western perceptions of the Chinese world as radical otherness oscillate and fluctuate. Generally speaking, when—like now, or during the Opium Wars and the predatory interventions by European expeditionary forces in China—hostility based on negative stereotypes prevails, it’s because the West has interests to defend against China. For the looting of the Summer Palace by frenzied French and British troops to be palatable to a Western public, the Chinese civilization must be depicted as decadent and corrupt, and the Chinese people as a race without merit.

All things considered, we are currently in a similar configuration. The West today has a serious problem with China—not because it has merely “awakened,” but because its current stature and power objectively challenge the forms of Western supremacy established after the defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945.

As for myself, I am by no means a Taiwan specialist in the academic sense. My field is European philosophy, especially political philosophy—not international relations, not the Chinese world, not East Asia, and I don’t speak Chinese. My only qualification to speak on the topic you’ve asked me to address is that I’ve lived regularly in Taiwan for more than ten years. I’ve taught and lectured at several universities there, and in doing so, I’ve established a kind of personal observatory of social and political life. For about a decade now, I’ve lived “between” France and Taiwan, and it is from this position that I can speak to you about the relationship between Taiwan and the mainland, as seen from Europe.

To get straight to the point: the one thing that is absolutely certain today is this—should a local conflict erupt in the Strait (almost inevitably bound to globalize), whether over Taiwan’s status or some incidental event, you, citizens of the People’s Republic of China, cannot expect any moderating intervention or positive mediation from European countries or the European Union. On this issue, as on many others in international politics (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for instance), Europeans are, with few exceptions, increasingly aligned with the United States. They have abandoned any semblance of an independent foreign policy—such as that once pursued by General de Gaulle in the 1960s—and this is especially true regarding Taiwan, which, for them, is nothing more than a byproduct of their “China policy.”

The telltale sign is the presence of European warships in the Strait separating Taiwan from mainland China, always under the eternal pretext of “freedom of navigation”—a rationale that has been used since the 17th century by Western maritime powers to justify their claims against rivals (then Britain against the Netherlands, or both against Spain and Portugal, and now against China in the Pacific and South China Sea). By regularly sailing their ships through the Strait, Western powers show solidarity with the United States and affirm their commitment to the hegemonic version of the so-called international order. Even Italy that has not been a major maritime power for a long time has recently sent ships through the strait. Even Germany—supposed to be historically cautious in asserting military power, like Japan—has done the same.

“Freedom of navigation” is a useful Western fiction—as long as Chinese coast guards aren’t patrolling international waters between Cuba and Florida. What this narrative really reveals is something far more worrying: the increasingly assertive projection of NATO into the East Asian theater, especially in the wake of the Ukraine conflict—far from the “North Atlantic” that gives the alliance its name. NATO’s growing involvement in East Asia, seen as a space of multiple potential conflicts, clearly reflects the tightening alignment of European powers with the United States in anticipation of open conflict with China.

From this perspective, Taiwan is a litmus test.  It is in the case of Taiwan that the double discourse, the duplicity of most European leaders in their dealings with China, becomes most evident. Officially, they adhere to the doctrine established during normalization with China: “One China.” But in practice, they spare no effort to undermine the foundations of that doctrine—especially through symbolic gestures of encouragement and friendship toward the pro-independence forces currently in power in Taiwan.

What must be understood is this: what’s at stake is not Taiwan as a separate object—which in itself is relatively minor—but Taiwan as part of a greater whole, as the tip of the iceberg. The real issue is the West’s relationship with China and the Chinese government—and the radical reorientation of that relationship now that mainland China is seen as a systemic adversary and, increasingly openly (in the mouths of pro-war Taiwanese voices, U.S. hawks, and their European counterparts), as the enemy.

Today, Taiwan has become the bastion of anti-China rhetoric—completely out of control—and its headquarters is an increasingly substantial fraction of the island’s political and ideological elites. This stands in stark contrast to the majority of the population, who I would argue are among the least war-minded people in the world. Ordinary Taiwanese are islanders who like to go about their business, large and small, live their family lives—they are a people of neighbors and cousins, living in a world of local ecosystems rather than a nation in the European sense. This remains true despite the somewhat desperate efforts of the pro-independence elite to graft onto them a national sentiment grounded in two pillars: mimicry of the West and resolute opposition to the mainland.

As for Europe: in international politics, the European Union has never been able to act as a unified force with a shared goal and a single voice on any major issue. When Yugoslavia disintegrated, the leading European powers took opposing sides—Germany and France in particular—and it took determined U.S. intervention to halt the fighting. If Europeans now appear relatively united (though only relatively, if you look closely) in their support for Ukraine, it’s because this is above all a NATO war against Russia, in which Ukraine has been drawn—and which the U.S. is leading from the Western side.

NATO is a military alliance under U.S. command, and it is only through submission to this command that European countries can achieve relative unity in conflicts with third parties. This is exactly what would happen in the event of a conflict over Taiwan. European countries would behave politically and militarily as vassals and auxiliaries of the United States. They have neither a shared nor individual policy regarding Taiwan, and what would ultimately determine their stance is their perception of China as a systemic adversary—or, in the case of armed conflict, as an enemy.

It is not out of principle but due to power dynamics that today’s European governments adhere to the supposed “One China” dogma. But should China’s position be weakened by a crisis in the Strait, they would quickly seize the opportunity to openly support pro-independence forces and a declaration of Taiwanese sovereignty. If you look closely, some smaller European countries—with more flexibility than the UK, France, Italy, or Germany—such as the Czech Republic or the Baltic states, already say aloud what others only whisper. They are developing official relations with the Republic of China and engaging in competitive grandstanding over “Taiwanese independence/sovereignty.”

It’s like the issue of migration: fifteen years ago, when Viktor Orbán deployed barbed wire to stop migrants from entering the EU, he was vilified as a barbarian in France and Germany. Today, everyone is doing Orbán—and more.

It seems to me that, in recent years, the West—and especially Europe—has solidified around a superficial and misleading consensus: the idea that Taiwan is a small nation simply yearning to live in peace and freedom, threatened by relentless Chinese expansionism. This is a simplistic, decontextualized image that ignores historical, cultural, and geopolitical complexities. But it resonates. “The Chinese threat” is the perpetual mantra of Taiwanese separatists and U.S. hawks—but it also finds broad resonance in Europe: as I said earlier, few international topics enjoy more consensus across the political spectrum in France and Europe than Taiwan does today, from the far right to the supposedly anti-imperialist left.

People still argue about Russia and the war in Ukraine—but the neo-imperialist narrative of the “Chinese threat” looming over Taiwan remains entirely unchallenged in public discourse. During the Cold War, Formosa, as a U.S. proxy for dirty wars in East Asia, had a bad reputation on the Western left and beyond. But today, Taiwan has become a fetishized, kawaii object of an opinion addicted to human rights, total democracy, and defense of the weak and oppressed—except in Gaza, of course, but that’s another story...