China doesn’t want just Taiwan or just the Philippines or just Korea or just Singapore. It wants it all. “All” is whatever is under the sky.
Kenneth Fan, author of the book Chatting with Xi Jinping About Taiwan and China, says he got a major clue about the mentality and intentions of Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi Jinping in the summer of 2013, not long after Xi got the top job (“It’s not about Taiwan, stupid. It’s about Tianxia,” Taiwan News, October 14, 2023).
At that time, an advisor to Xi visited Fan in Taiwan to discuss the island country. The advisor reported his observations of various Southeast Asian countries, including Japan, Korea, and Singapore, and he “wanted to know what made Taiwan so different. Approaching the end of the discussion, I praised him for his international exposure, and he responded by saying ‘For someone who has never left China, I’m hardly international.’ ”
Fan was shocked. Had Xi’s advisor been lying about observing all those other Asian countries firsthand? No, the other said scornfully: “I didn’t leave China. Those places are all domestic!”
Now the question was whether Xi was of like mind. It didn’t take long for Fan to determine that yes, for Xi, the point is always tianxia rather than any particular country regarded as a sovereign separate country.
Chinese for “under the sky” or “under heaven,” the term “tianxia” refers to “the entire world that one can conceive.” It is an ancient imperial precept that “precludes the notion of mutual sovereignty among states…. Taiwan may serve as the excuse to kick off a military campaign to realize Xi’s Tianxia vision, and it would also serve as China’s scapegoat…. However, the flashpoint of military conflict with China could also shift to some other regional locations, say, the Philippines, Okinawa, or even a U.S. territory, such as Guam.”
If you think that all the other countries really belong to your own country despite current appearances to the contrary, you may well feel entitled to transgress the boundaries of any other “country” at will and to make a lot of importunate demands of that “country” as if you owned the place. In your view, you do.
