GenZedong

If you understand this story, you’ve understood much there is to understand about geopolitics around Taiwan.

The current DPP government is quite literally cheering its own carve-up - as long as it annoys Beijing.

Here is what happened.

So recently, May 28th, Japanese PM Takaichi and Philippines President Marcos Jr. issued a joint statement (https://www.mofa.go.jp/files/101035755.pdf) announcing they would open negotiations to delimit their overlapping EEZ and continental-shelf boundaries.

As a reminder, an EEZ - Exclusive Economic Zone - is the area extending 200 nautical miles from a country's coastline within which that country has exclusive rights to exploit all natural resources.

Small problem: their EEZs directly overlap with China's, both from Beijing’s standpoint and Taipei’s, as they are less than 200 nautical miles from Taiwan’s coastline.

In effect, what Japan and the Philippines are announcing here is that they're agreeing bilaterally - without Beijing or Taipei at the table - to split between themselves waters that belong, in part, to someone else.

Unsurprisingly, that didn't sit well with Beijing. They issued a statement the day after - 29th of May - where they "strongly deplore and firmly oppose the so-called maritime delimitation talks between Japan and the Philippines" (https://english.news.cn/20260529/bf580c55d8ac43bfb38a298af63248e3/c.html).

Any rational person would have expected Taipei to issue a similar statement because, whatever you think of Beijing's claims, it's the EEZ around Taiwan we're speaking about here: surely they'd object to other countries carving up the resource rights off their coastline.

It's actually one thing Beijing and Taipei have aligned interests on: neither wants its maritime entitlements carved up by third parties.

As a reminder Taipei rejected the infamous 2016 Hague arbitration ruling on the South China Sea - siding with Beijing against Manila - for the same reasons: because the tribunal downgraded Taiping (Itu Aba), the largest feature in the Spratlys that Taipei occupies, from an “island” to a “rock,” which would have stripped it of its 200-nautical-mile EEZ.

In other words, defending their own EEZ is normally sacrosanct for Taipei.

Except... not this time. Taipei issued an angry statement, yes, but where the anger was entirely directed at Beijing. The statement (https://en.mofa.gov.tw/News_Content.aspx?n=1330&sms=274&s=122413) explicitly “commend[ed] Japan and the Philippines for working to resolve maritime differences”, reserving its sharp language to China because it "has no right to comment on the territory and appertaining waters of the Republic of China (Taiwan)."

Think for a moment about what it says about Taipei’s current DPP independentist government: the party that claims to champion Taiwan's sovereignty literally celebrated, as its first instinct, two countries announcing they'd carve up Taiwan's maritime territory between themselves. All because Beijing opposed it.

This caused quite a stir in Taiwanese politics, with the KMT calling the statement “humiliating,” warning that cheering the talks without seeking a seat in negotiations over the overlapping EEZs could seriously hurt Taiwanese fishermen's livelihoods in the future (https://focustaiwan.tw/politics/202606020013).

So much so that Taipei’s MOFA had to issue a new statement on June 2 specifying that the Japan-Philippines talks "should not impair our country's rights", with MOFA spokesperson Hsiao Kuang-wei finally acknowledging the delimitation waters “highly overlap” with Taipei's EEZ.

But then, confusingly, 2 days after - June 4 - Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung undercut his own ministry’s correction entirely (https://www.cna.com.tw/news/aipl/202606040247.aspx). The Japan-Philippines talks, he explained, are “aimed at China” and therefore, fundamentally good - Taipei's EEZ being carved up in the process being, apparently, a minor detail.

China protesting the talks, he said, is “getting cause and effect backwards” and he branded “the handful distorting the issue and shifting the focus” - i.e. anyone pointing out that Taiwan's EEZ is being carved up - as “falling into a trap and letting China benefit.”

So the same ministry, within 48 hours, both (a) asked Tokyo and Manila to guard against a danger to Taiwan's EEZ, and (b) declared that danger nonexistent and smeared anyone naming it as a Beijing stooge. Go figure 🤷

But this is actually just one part of a much bigger story - one about colonial nostalgia, about the three competing visions at play for Taiwan, and about why the West champions the one party in Taiwan that does NOT actually defend sovereignty and democracy.

I wrote it all up here: https://open.substack.com/pub/arnaudbertrand/p/the-sovereignty-fraud-taipei-is-now

xitter link: https://xcancel.com/RnaudBertrand/status/2063201615885320599#m