Yi-Chuan Chiu
Four days after Taiwan’s National Day on 10 October 2024, China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launched another large-scale military exercise around Taiwan, dubbed ‘Joint Sword-2024B’. While Taiwanese and US officials condemned these drills as ‘military provocations’, China’s justification included a phrase key to understanding Beijing’s anxiety about recent tensions in the Taiwan Strait— ‘the internationalisation of the Taiwan issue’. The term reflects Beijing and Taipei’s different views of the status quo and how this complicates cross-strait dynamics.
‘Internationalisation’ refers to framing China–Taiwan relations as a state-to-state relationship and an international dispute open to third-party intervention. Though the term originated in the 1950s, it resurfaced in Chinese official discourse when Beijing resisted comparisons between Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and a possible Chinese attack on Taiwan. Such rejections reflect Beijing’s long-standing assertion that Taiwan belongs to China, is an unresolved issue of the Chinese Civil War and that solving the issue in any way is a domestic Chinese matter.
Beijing’s disdain for internationalisation has been repeatedly quoted in its justification for launching PLA exercises protesting Taiwanese President Lai Ching-Te’s inauguration speech in May 2024 and National Day address in October.
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