The newly minted Prime Minister of Japan, Sanae Takaichi, has caused a diplomatic firestorm between Japan and China, rapidly escalating tensions across the region.
[We publish here a joint statement signed by members of the RCI in Japan and Taiwan. This statement can also be read in Chinese and Japanese.]
During a session in parliament on 7 November, Takaichi declared that a military deployment against Taiwan would constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan. In effect, Takaichi is pledging direct Japanese intervention should a conflict break out between China and Taiwan.
This provoked a furious protest from China, which considers Taiwan a part of its territory.
A few days later, on 13 November, it was reported that the Japanese government intends to rename officer ranks in Japan’s Self-Defence Forces (JSDF) to revive the names used by the old Imperial Japanese Army. This was announced under the guise of “complying with international standards” and “boosting morale.” Yet these are thinly veiled excuses to whip up national chauvinism at home, which inevitably involves affronting countries that were ravaged by Imperial Japan’s brutal expansion during World War II, above all China.
Most seriously, on 23 November, Japan’s Defence Minister Shinjiro Koizumi visited Yonaguni, an island military base merely 110 kilometres from Taiwan, and affirmed Japan’s plan to deploy missiles to the base there.
In response, China announced two rounds of live-fire military exercises in the Yellow Sea, in addition to halting several planned diplomatic meetings with Japan, blocking Japanese seafood imports, and issuing warnings against Chinese nationals travelling to Japan.
In just a few weeks of Takaichi becoming Prime Minister, Asia’s two most powerful countries have become embroiled in one of their most serious bouts of sabre-rattling in decades.
Takaichi is playing with fire
The root of this sudden escalation lies in the Liberal Democratic Party’s – Japan’s ruling party for the last seven decades – desperate attempt to reverse its rapid decline in popularity by embracing militarism more than ever.
In recent years, Japanese capitalism has gone from the ‘lost decades’ of stagnation into obvious decline. Its GDP dropped from the world’s third largest to fifth in a mere two years. The government debt-to-GDP ratio remains the highest in the world at 230 percent. Japanese labour productivity now ranks among the lowest of the OECD countries.
Workers are being relentlessly squeezed by the ruling class. Real wages remain more or less the same as they were in 2000, while firms increasingly rely on part-time or casualised workers, which now account for over 40 percent of the country’s workforce.
Meanwhile, in 2022 Japan began to experience serious inflation, leading to a dramatic cost of living crisis. Rising food costs in particular see no signs of abating.
This senile decline of Japanese capitalism was presided over for decades by Takaichi’s LDP. In particular, former PM Shinzo Abe, whom Takaichi considers to be her mentor, dramatically increased public debt to stimulate the economy, which massively enriched the biggest corporations and the wealthy while the conditions of the working class stagnated.
Abe was succeeded by a series of LDP prime ministers, all of whom resigned in disgrace over various scandals. This was all but inevitable. The LDP has long been the main tool of the Japanese ruling class to rule over its population. It is tied by a thousand threads to the interests of the capitalist establishment, and all of its decay and corruption.
Popular anger in Japan is being channelled into the rising right-wing populist party Sanseito, which blends reactionary anti-foreigner and anti-Chinese sentiment with nostalgia for the imperial era. Meanwhile, its economic programme superficially appears to address the masses’ grievances, at the expense of the rich and powerful.
It was in the context of Sanseito’s rising popularity that Sanae Takaichi became PM in late October, at the head of a minority government that could collapse at any moment. It is therefore not difficult to see that her sudden confrontation with China is simply a manoeuvre to shore up domestic support by mimicking the most reactionary elements of Sanseito’s platform.
In service of short-sighted electoral interests, Takaichi is playing with fire. But her games threaten to engulf the masses of China, Japan, Taiwan, and all of Asia in war.
Taiwan’s fate in the hands of the imperialists
The Taiwanese masses are once again being treated as pawns in the machinations of foreign powers. While the vast majority of Taiwanese people oppose annexation by China, more than 50 percent of Taiwanese people also favour maintaining the status quo rather than declaring de jure independence, which would risk provoking a Chinese military response. Has Ms Takaichi consulted the Taiwanese masses about any of this before using their fate as an excuse to sabre-rattle with China?
Yet politicians from Taiwan’s ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) have been eager to jump on the bandwagon of Japanese militarism on behalf of all Taiwanese people, despite their steadily declining support after 12 years in power. President William Lai Ching-te filmed himself eating a box of sushi as a show of support, while the Ministry of Foreign Affairs called on the public to drink Japanese beer over the weekend. DPP legislator Chiu Yi-ying even suggested the government issue a NT$10,000 payment to all citizens to go on holiday in Japan.
Behind these antics lies the fact that the DPP – and the pro-US wing of the Taiwanese bourgeoisie backing it – has also been losing support as the main steward of Taiwanese capitalism in recent years.
Domestically, it has carried out the same attacks on the working class as its pro-China predecessor, the KMT, while relying on war hysteria to paper over Taiwan’s deepening social crises. It presents dependence on the United States as the only way to ‘defend Taiwanese democracy’ from Chinese authoritarianism.
Yet Donald Trump, already apathetic towards defending Taiwan, is even less interested in taking on China over this question, after having lost two rounds of trade wars against the latter. In fact, Trump called Takaichi and asked her to back down after the former had a call with Xi Jinping.
But US imperialism is far from a passive onlooker in the latest rise of militarist tension in East Asia and the efforts to curb China’s rise. The Biden Administration, with Japan and South Korea behind it, significantly ratcheted up tensions with China over Taiwan. The Trump Administration has also pushed the governments of both Japan and Taiwan to increase military spending.
More fundamentally, after World War II, US imperialism’s presence in Asia shaped the entire situation on the continent, which is the root of the present conflict.
Workers in none of the countries involved will benefit from this conflict between their ruling classes. The Japanese working class cannot support Takaichi’s latest provocations or her appeals to imperial nostalgia. Imperial Japan oppressed workers at home and massacred the masses abroad. It was the heroic resistance of the Chinese, Taiwanese and other peoples – along with the powerful struggles of the Japanese masses after World War II – that kept this militarism in check. Takaichi is now attempting to resurrect that imperial legacy.
The Taiwanese workers should also refute our dependent, servile ruling class’ attempt to link the entire country’s fate to the manoeuvres and machinations of foreign imperialists, above all those of the US and its sidekick in Asia, Japan. As a small country in a capitalist world, the only fate for Taiwan is to be dominated by one great power or another. Only through an international revolutionary struggle can the Taiwanese masses secure a chance to determine their own fate.
In the final analysis, capitalism as a world system, especially in its terminal decline, only promises more misery, conflict, and instability. The bosses and their governments have plenty of money to boost military spending, while the masses suffer worsening conditions. The real ‘survival-threatening situation’ for any worker is not simply the conflict between nations but capitalism itself. The workers of all countries, when united in class solidarity, are the only power that can bring an end to this chaos.
- Down with imperialist sabre-rattling!
- Down with militarism!
- US imperialism out of Asia!
- End all wars through class war!
- For a socialist revolution across Asia!
- For a socialist federation of East Asia as a part of a World Socialist Federation!
Signed,
Japanese members of the RCI
The Spark – Taiwanese Revolutionary Communism (RCI Taiwan)
