Speaking at a public Beijing event to a Chinese audience, British journalist, editor, academic, political commentator, and author Martin Jacques reportedly commented on the Taiwan question saying, “China has waited for more than 70 years, it’s been very patient.”  

According to news reports, Jacques said “Mao Zedong (毛澤東) once said China can wait a hundred years to resolve the Taiwan question,” and followed up his comment by suggesting that patience and steadfastness is the best strategy. 

The comment seems to imply that since China has been waiting so patiently for 70 years, Beijing should be forgiven for taking action to resolve the “Taiwan question.” In other words, the world should be understanding if China decides to invade and annex Taiwan, and support China’s actions. After all, poor China has held back the impulse to do so for so many years. 

Seen this way, this comment is serving as a thinly veiled justification for war. 

It is embarrassing to see a senior Western scholar reduced to a mouthpiece trying to curry favor with an authoritarian, expansionist regime by imparting an air of expertise to what amounts to rationalizing a murderous invasion of another state.  

Even on its face, the comment does not hold any value. On the “Taiwan question,” China did not have to wait 70 years. 

It does not have to wait a single day longer. China can immediately resolve the Taiwan Strait tension unilaterally by formally recognizing Taiwan's democratically elected government. 

China has the choice to coexist with Taiwan peacefully with mutual dignity and benefit, eliminate any “tensions” between the two countries, and earn itself the international community's respect.  

Yet Beijing has chosen to do the opposite. It has insisted that it has the right to invade and occupy Taiwan, and has pressed on this mutually destructive option as a threat. 

It has held on to the possibility of war as blackmail to protest any other state in the world from having normal relations with Taiwan, from trade pacts to simple visits by elected officials. It has goaded the international community into recognizing China’s territorial claims over Taiwan, a people that Beijing has never governed. 

And it has hurt its own economy and the prosperity of its own people by alarming trade partners causing them to de-risk their supply chains and markets away from China. 

Fundamentally, this comment is based on the assumption that China has the right to claim Taiwan (and therefore not having acted on that right is something laudable). The assumption follows China’s narrative of Taiwan being separate from China due to the 1949 Chinese Civil War. According to this narrative, the civil war has not ended, so Beijing is well within its rights to finish it. 

But this narrative is no more than reaching into the past to find excuses for actions in the present. The narrative has been debunked on its historical merits: the government in Taiwan is not the same people as the ones who fought in the civil war; the people who now choose the government have time and time again clearly voted against Taiwan being part of China in any form. The Taiwanese were not a party to the Chinese Civil War, nor do they want to have anything to do with it today. 

But if China cannot use the civil war narrative, it will cherry-pick further back into history. It will make claims about Taiwan being part of bygone ancient kingdoms or rulers from the Asian continent with which the Chinese Communist Party has no connection whatsoever. 

It picks and chooses the history on Tibet, East Turkestan, Hong Kong, and the South China Sea. Beijing grasps at historical straws. Yet as Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te (賴清德) commented on Manchuria and Russia’s Far East, China remains silent. 

For imperialist powers, history is always no more than a tool, as are foreign scholars willing to toe the line. 

To quote a common Chinese idiom, Beijing can immediately “drop the butcher’s cleaver and turn into Buddha” (放下屠刀立地成佛). But Beijing has clenched this cleaver and has found a foreigner to whine about how long it has raised the cleaver and not used it for 70 years. 

Meanwhile, Taiwan has patiently waited 70 years, if not longer, for recognition and peace. That, indeed, has been too long.