Taiwanese help to soften China’s economic blows on Japan
As Beijing has ramped up its campaign of economic coercion against Tokyo, Taiwanese are coming to the support of Japan’s fishermen, tourism industries and even its “Empress of Pop”.
Taiwan’s love of all things Japanese only seems to be growing, as Beijing hits out at Japan’s fishermen, its tourism industries and now its “Empress of Pop”.
The mayors of Taiwan’s two biggest cities on Monday pledged support for any future concert by Ayumi Hamasaki – a Japanese star of Kylie Minogue proportions – after Chinese authorities abruptly cancelled her concert in Shanghai on Saturday.
Taipei mayor Chiang Wan-an, a rising star in Taiwan’s “One China”-affirming Kuomintang, political party, said his city would welcome additional concerts by Hamasaki, who performed in the capital earlier in the year.
Kaohsiung mayor Chen Chi-mai indicated that support for the Japanese pop star was bipartisan.
“Concerts and cultural events should not be subject to political interference,” said Mr Chen, a member of the independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party.
The pop star collateral comes as Beijing continues to erupt four weeks after Japan’s new Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi said an invasion by China of Taiwan would constitute a “survival-threatening situation”.
On Monday evening, China’s foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian said Japan’s leader should engage in “soul-searching” and “retract the erroneous remarks”.
Beijing has been wary of Ms Takaichi, well known for her hawkish views on China, since long before her election as Japan’s first female prime minister in October.
Senior Japanese officials who have spoken privately with Ms Takaichi have told The Australian her support of Taiwan is deeply held.
In April, she paid a visit to Japan’s former model colony, which was ruled by Tokyo from 1895 to 1945. During her visit to Taipei, she met with Taiwaneses President Lai Ching-te, another figure Beijing loathes.
Only three years earlier, as Taiwan’s vice-president, Mr Lai became the most senior sitting Taiwanese official to visit Japan since Tokyo switched recognition to Beijing in 1972. Mr Lai’s trip was to attend the funeral of Ms Takaichi’s political mentor, Shinzo Abe, whose death led to a huge outpouring of grief in Taiwan.
While a backbench member of Japan’s Liberal Democratic Party at that April meeting, Ms Takaichi still managed to infuriate Beijing by using her trip to suggest Tokyo and Taipei should build a “quasi-security alliance” with other democracies in the region.
As Beijing has ramped up its campaign of economic coercion in an attempt to force Ms Takaichi to back down, Taiwan’s President has sought to cushion the blows. Shortly before Beijing reimposed a ban on Japanese seafood imports, Mr Lai’s administration lifted a ban on seafood from Japan that had been in place since the Fukushima nuclear meltdown in 2011.
“What are you guys eating? Maybe now is a good time to eat Japanese food,” said President Lai in a social media post showing him eating a sushi lunch he said was made with a mixture of Japanese and Taiwanese ingredients.
Support for Japan is widespread in Taiwan and has grown over the past decade. A public opinion survey by the Japan-Taiwan Exchange Association in 2024 found more than three quarters (76 per cent) of Taiwanese ranked Japan as the foreign country they most liked.
Shin Kawashima, a professor of international relations at the University of Tokyo, has said the rising popularity of Japan has followed an increase in aggression from Beijing and concerns about the reliability of Washington.
Almost half (44 per cent) of all overseas trips made by Taiwanese in 2024 were to Japan, a measure of its extraordinary popularity as a tourist destination.
China was a distant second, last year making up 14 per cent of overseas trips by Taiwanese.
Visits from Taiwan surged by more than 40 per cent in 2024, according to the Japan National Tourism Organisation. Last year, there were almost as many visitors to Japan from Taiwan (six million) as from China (seven million), despite China’s 1.4 billion population being more than 60 times that of Taiwan’s.
Thanks to Beijing’s travel ban, Taiwan is set to overtake China as Japan’s second biggest source of tourists, after South Korea.
In Taiwanese politics, support for Japan is particularly concentrated in Mr Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party, which has its roots in the island’s pro-democracy movement and was banned by the KMT until the end of martial law in 1987.
Pockets of the opposition KMT party, who many Taiwanese considered a successor colonial power when it took control of the island from Japan, are much less enamoured.
Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan’s last president from the KMT, last month denounced Ms Takaichi’s remarks as “rash and escalatory”.
“I have repeatedly emphasised that cross-Strait issues must not be outsourced to foreign intervention; they must be addressed directly by the two sides. The Chinese people on both sides of the Strait possess the wisdom and the capability to settle their differences peacefully,” Mr Ma wrote in a lengthy post on Facebook that has been widely spread by Chinese state media.
Waves of anti-Japanese comments continue to swell over China’s internet, but the recent extension of Beijing’s fury to beloved pop stars has some prominent Chinese nationalists questioning parts of the country’s coercive tactics.
Former Global Times editor in chief Hu Xijin told his millions of social media users that, while cancelling a Japanese pop star’s 14,000-person concert demonstrated “China’s resolve”, it had some downsides.
“Chinese performance companies will face costs from breaching contracts,” he wrote.
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