Japan and Taiwan hold security talks as Quad navies prepare for China

Beijing warned Tokyo its support for Taiwan is ‘tantamount to provoking a war’.

President Tsai Ing-wen last week said ‘Taiwan must not rely only on the protection of others’. Picture: AFP

China has warned Japan its rising support for Taiwan is “tantamount to provoking a war”, as President Xi Jinping’s regime bristles at the thickening security ties between Taipei and Tokyo.

The ruling parties of Japan and Taiwan held their first ever bilateral security talks on Friday – provoking a predictably bombastic response from China.

“Taking risks on the Taiwan question is tantamount to provoking a war,” warned the Global Times, a jingoistic tabloid controlled by the Chinese Communist Party.

“Japan’s playing tricks will only make itself lose on both sides – becoming cannon fodder for US interests on one hand and provoking the Chinese mainland and asking for trouble for itself on the other.”

The virtual dialogue – the initiative of Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga’s Liberal Democratic Party – comes as Tokyo steps up its co-ordination with allies and partners to counter Mr Xi’s increasingly aggressive China.

Japanese maritime forces are currently training with their “Quad” partners, the US, Australia and India, in the Philippine Sea for the annual Malabar navy exercises. They are being held as the People’s Liberation Army continues to increase the tempo of its military exercises in the region.

Mark Harrison, senior lecturer in Chinese studies at the University of Tasmania, said Friday’s meeting was the result of years of development of the relationship between the ruling parties of Taiwan and Japan.

“Before she was elected president, Tsai Ing-wen visited Japan for meetings that were reported to include Nobuo Kishi, the brother of the then-prime minister Shinzo Abe, and now Japan’s defence minister,” Professor Harrison told The Australian.

“(Friday’s) meeting is another example of signalling across the region about Taiwan’s international status and concern about Beijing’s belligerence towards Taiwan, including from Australia,” he said.

Mr Kishi earlier this month called on the international community to pay greater attention to the “survival of Taiwan”.

That rhetorical escalation came after Japan for the first time directly linked Taiwan’s security with its own, in a defence white paper in July.

“(I)t is necessary that we pay close attention to the situation with a sense of crisis more than ever before,” said the Japanese Ministry of Defence document.

Japan has been responding to the increasingly strident claims by Mr Xi’s regime for Taiwan, a democratically governed island of 24 million people that Beijing considers a wayward province of China.

Liu Jieyi, head of the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council, warned it was “futile for ‘Taiwan independence’ forces” to resist the mainland by partnering with others.

“When foreign forces play the ‘Taiwan card’, they just regard the island as a chess piece to damage the interests of the country and interfere with the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” he said in a speech published in state media on Friday.

Bao Chengke, a professor at the Institute for East Asian Studies in Shanghai, said that Mr Xi’s July 1 speech marking the CCP 100th anniversary used the word “smash” for the first time to describe the mainland’s attitude towards “Taiwan independence”.

“It shows that there is no room for separatist acts, and the mainland will resolutely crush them by any means, including by force,” Professor Bao said.

Japanese parliamentarians Masahisa Sato and Taku Otsuka – who is also the chief secretary of the Japan-Australia Parliamentary Association – represented the LDP at Friday’s security-­focused meeting.

Lo Chih-cheng, a politician who heads the Democratic Progressive party’s international department, and Tsai Shih-ying, a member of the Taiwanese parliament’s foreign affairs and defence committee, represented Taiwan’s ruling party.

A survey released on Thursday by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, a think tank, found for the first time just over half of Americans surveyed supported defending Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion.

President Tsai Ing-wen last week said Taiwan must not rely only on the “protection of others”, in a statement released as its key security partner America was retreating from Afghanistan. “Taiwan’s only choice is to become stronger, more united and absolutely resolute in our determination to protect ourselves,” she said.