Yesterday saw a landmark of sorts, as the United States began pushing back on China’s attempts to enforce its own version of political correctness on foreign companies that do business in China.  David Shepardson of Reuters reports:

The White House on Saturday sharply criticized China’s efforts to force foreign airlines to change how they refer to Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau, labeling China’s latest effort to police language describing the politically sensitive territories as “Orwellian nonsense.” (snip)

…the White House said China’s Civil Aviation Administration sent a letter to 36 foreign air carriers, including a number of U.S. carriers, demanding changes.

The carriers were told to remove references on their websites or in other material that suggests Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau are part of countries independent from China, U.S. and airline officials said.

The White House said in a statement that President Donald Trump “will stand up for Americans resisting efforts by the Chinese Communist Party to impose Chinese political correctness on American companies and citizens.”

“This is Orwellian nonsense and part of a growing trend by the Chinese Communist Party to impose its political views on American citizens and private companies. ... We call on China to stop threatening and coercing American carriers and citizens.”

China actually already has come a long way on tolerating airlines that serve both China and Taiwan since it first opened to the West. When the first foreign airlines asked to serve Chinese airports, the government insisted that they could not serve both Taiwan and China, but allowed a technical ruse. I was living in Japan at the time, and remember well that Japan Airlines went to the trouble of establishing a separate, wholly-owned carrier, called “Japan Asia Airways” to serve Taiwan, repainting aircraft, and designing slightly different uniforms for the cabin and cockpit crews. KLM did the same thing, as I recall.

Now, not only can carriers fly to Taiwan, there are many airline flights directly from Taiwan to the mainland, in part because Taiwanese firms are massive investors in China, where labor is considerably cheaper than in Taiwan, which now enjoys a Western European standard of living. So, the Chinese are willing to tolerate immense direct relations between itself and Taiwan (and Hong Kong and Macau), but insist on the formality of calling Taiwan a renegade province, soon to be reunited with the mainland.

And China is willing to bully to enforce politically correct language on those who do business with it.

I believe that all of this is coming to a head because Taiwan is a democracy where native Taiwanese comprise 80% of the population or more, as opposed to the mainlanders and their descendants who took over Taiwan when the Chiang Kai-shek Nationalists fled from the mainland and established the Republic of China in Taiwan, complete with a parliament representing “constituents” on the mainland who could not vote. The Taiwanese, who speak a different dialect than Guo-yu (Mandarin), are tired of this fiction and may want to become a “Republic of Taiwan” and give up the dreams of reconquest and reunification. Those were the goals of the mainlanders, anyway.

One sign of this movement is the renaming of the Taipei’s large, intercontinental airport, which used to be named “Chiang Kai-shek International Airport,” with the IATA airport code CKS.  Now, it is named for the district in which it is situated: "Taoyuan International Arport" with an airport code TPE.

This is absolutely anathema to the mainlanders. China is ultra-sensitive about breakaway territory, owing to a long history in which dynastic decline led to centrifugal forces breaking up its territorial unity, and the more recent history of Western and Japanese imperialism. Taiwan was seized from China by Japan in 1895, and redress for that history is a goal that will not go away, as Taiwan's move from Japanese colony, to occuppied territory to de facto independent nation ranles.

Hong Kong and Macau, much smaller territories lost to Portugal and Britain, are not nearly as sensitive because to all intents and purposes, China is able to get whatever it wants with them, and both already have reverted to Chinese control, with a special status that enables them to function under different legal frameworks. Taiwan, on the other hand, maintains a formidable military and expresses the intent of defending itself against an invasion and behaves as a separate nation.

It is all the more remarkable that just as the United States is using Chinas help in dealing with North Korea, and just as it is addressing the trade imbalance, that the Government has chosen to make an issue of linguistic bullying. Perhaps this is a bargaining chip? It is, of course the right thing to do, as we cannot let China control our free speech.

Stay tuned to this one, for it could get quite interesting.