Arab News
Date: May 27, 2020
By: Dr. Theodore Karasik

The island nation of Taiwan is watching warily as China’s National People’s Congress implements stronger measures and a specific national security law on Hong Kong that threatens to rewrite important geoeconomic and security issues in this strategic space.

Taiwan’s nationalist President Tsai Ing-wen, who has just started her second term in office, accused Beijing of the “predation” of Hong Kong through fiscal extraction. Her use of the word predation is important in terms of Taiwan’s sovereignty issues. China sees Hong Kong as a national security priority based on ideas of secessionism, terrorism and foreign interference, which comes from what Beijing views as American and, more specifically, Taiwanese subterfuge. Tsai’s recent landslide election victory was driven by the Taiwanese youth vote against the mainland-friendly Kuomintang candidate Han Kuo-yu, making internal Taiwanese politics an important factor.

No doubt China’s national security law will prompt nationalist Taiwan to revoke the special status it extends to Hong Kong, thus establishing a wall between the mainland and Taiwan. This move could damage interconnectivity for Taipei, which is important for family connections and trade ties. More to the point, such a break in connectivity would bring to the forefront the sharpening divides between Taiwan and China.

Obviously, the ongoing fight between Beijing and Taipei over Hong Kong is not new, but it fits into a larger geostrategic problem. In January 2019, Chinese President Xi Jinping said that Taiwan “must and will be” reunited with China, and he meant it. In a speech marking 40 years since Beijing’s call to end the military confrontation across the Taiwan Strait, Xi warned that China reserved the right to use force to bring about a reunification.     [FULL  STORY]