Somber Dog

I remain absolutely flabbergasted at the level of propaganda on China in France, even on state television. This is a show called @Ccesoir on @FranceTV, and the guy speaking is Romain Graziani, supposedly one of France's leading "experts" on China, a Professor of Chinese studies at the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon. The way he narrates the history of Taiwan and why it matters to China is, put politely, a complete fabrication. Listening to him, "Taiwan was only really part of the Chinese nation for only 10 years" (and saying otherwise is "pure revisionism") and it's "only in the 1990s" that China's "obsession" with reuniting Taiwan first arose. He further asserts that it's only nowadays with Xi Jinping that "the predatory voracity of China leads to rewriting all of history as if it had been a lost province in the style of Ukraine with Russia." This is so outrageously wrong that I'm not even sure where to start. For one, as a Frenchman, maybe he should read the book "Quand la Chine s'éveillera" ("When China awakens") by Alain Peyrefitte, a former senior French politician and De Gaulle's confidant. In this book written in 1972 (so long before the 1990s), Peyrefitte - drawing from his extensive discussions with Zhou Enlai in China - describes Taiwan as "China's Alsace–Lorraine", drawing the comparison with France's own historical trauma of losing these provinces to Germany in 1871, showing that China's desire for reunification with Taiwan was already a central national priority decades before the 1990s, not a recent invention as Graziani falsely claims. In the book Peyrefitte also relates how he saw in China so many "Let's free Taiwan" slogans alongside others such as "Let's crush imperialism", demonstrating again how central it was to China back then already. The truth is that China's view of Taiwan as an inseparable part of its territory that needs to be reunited has been a persistent diplomatic stance ever since the creation of the PRC (and even before when it was colonized by Japan), making Graziani's timeline not just revisionism but an outright historical fabrication. Also, in his ridiculously wrong retelling of history, Graziani conveniently omits the central fact of Taiwan's recent history: that it indeed represents an "Alsace-Lorraine" for China in the sense that it is a painful territorial wound inflicted during a period of national weakness. Just as France never accepted the legitimacy of German control over Alsace-Lorraine and spent decades determined to recover it, China has consistently viewed Taiwan as a province temporarily separated by an unfinished civil war and foreign meddling, not as a '10-year' historical footnote as Graziani absurdly suggests. And, at the risk of being a "revisionist" in Graziani's eyes, it's also laughably wrong to suggest that Taiwan was only part of China for 10 years between 1885 and 1895. This deliberately obscures how in 1683, after defeating the forces of Ming loyalist Koxinga (who himself had expelled the Dutch colonizers), the Qing dynasty incorporated Taiwan into its empire. It's at this stage that Taiwan was formally incorporated into the empire and administered as part of Fujian province for over two centuries - not 10 years - before becoming its own province in 1885. The 1885 provincial reorganization that Graziani misrepresents as Taiwan's 'integration' was merely an administrative adjustment within already-established Chinese territory. Lastly, I get how comparing the issue of Taiwan with Ukraine is a convenient rhetorical device for Western commentators seeking to delegitimize China's sovereignty claims, but it's an outrageously dishonest parallel. For one, there is not a single country on earth, not one, that recognizes Taiwan as an independent sovereign country, unlike Ukraine. And, as a Frenchman, Graziani should know that France doesn't either. According to international law, Taiwan is part of China. Heck, Taiwan themselves, in their constitution (a reminder that the country is officially called "The Republic of China") do say that they're part of China, and they haven't declared independence. Granted, the "China" that the "Republic of China" say they're part of is a slightly different "China" than that of the PRC in that both entities claim to be the rightful government of the same Chinese territory—making the fundamental conflict a question of which government legitimately rules China, not whether Taiwan is part of China as Graziani disingenuously frames it. All this makes the Taiwan issue actually the opposite of Ukraine. Whereas Ukraine is a sovereign nation facing external aggression that violates its territorial integrity, Taiwan represents a separatist challenge to China's internationally recognized sovereignty. Supporting Taiwan independence therefore means endorsing the very violation of territorial integrity that is condemned in Ukraine's case, an irreconcilable contradiction. All in all, France allowing such egregious revisionism on state television is exceedingly dangerous. The irony is that this is France doing exactly what Graziani accuses China of: engaging in 'predatory' historical revisionism, with state television platforming blatant propaganda as expert academic analysis, propagating falsehoods that contradict international law and manufacture consent for confrontation.