During a visit to China, in a TSN interview (Television News Service, a Ukrainian daily news program), our Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba suddenly said words that may not just surprise, but rather shock. “... I drew this parallel with China today at the talks, I said that China is a model that no matter who once took something from you, when you have a strategy, patience, and resources, you will return everything to the last square meter.” “Did you also talk about Taiwan?” my colleague Natalia Nagorna asked him. “I was talking about Ukraine,” Kuleba replied. And he continued: “I don't understand, by the way, why is the emphasis on Taiwan? The one-China policy is universally recognized. No one questions China's sovereignty over Taiwan. None of our key partners in Europe, in America... I'm sorry, it's just a philosophical digression.” 

The problem is that this is a ‘philosophical digression’ from reality and our value principles. From the democratic values for which we have been fighting for eleven years. For example, in 1999, China “returned to the last meter” Hong Kong, which had been a British colony for a century and a half. In recent years, it has been grossly violating its “one country, two systems” commitments by introducing censorship, breaking up demonstrations, kidnapping people, and changing the electoral system so that there are no longer people in power who are disloyal to the mainland. This is systematically condemned by all our Western partners, but the foreign minister of a democratic country sees this as a reason to compliment him. Hoping to improve China's attitude toward Ukraine... although, most likely, during this interview, he was already familiar with the Chinese statement, which did not mention any support for Ukraine's territorial integrity. But there was a mention of the fact that Ukraine shares the principle of one China. 

Will China, which issues such a summary of the meeting with the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, give up its persistent attempts to make us “just stop shooting” according to the Russian scenario? I don't see that coming. Should we demonstrate to all our Western partners the flexibility that could be applied to us at any time? I don't see why. 

But to explain how the One China Principle differs from the One China Policy, and why they should not be contextually mixed in one sentence, and generally confused by people who are committed to living in Ukraine, not on Ukraine (up until today “on Ukraine” is grammatically correct in the Russian language), I will have to write and you will have to read a lot of letters. 

So, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the Chinese Qing Empire, which had been in decline for some time, finally collapsed; after a short break, militarists led by Yuan Shikai tried to establish a new monarchical dynasty (as had happened for many dynasties in a row on this land), and the local “father of the nation” Sun Yat-sen was categorically against it; in short, protracted civil war where everyone was against everyone began, which lasted until World War II. To simplify as much as possible: on the one hand, there was a kind of nationalist Kuomintang party led by Chiang Kai-shek, which tried to unite the entire territory of the former Qing Empire into a state called the Republic of China; on the other hand, there were communists who first fought with the Kuomintang against the militarists and then began to fight the Kuomintang itself, and then again, together with the Kuomintang, they fought the Japanese, who in the thirties, just like the Russians, without declaring a formal war, simply invaded Manchuria and established puppet state there (for those who are interested and like good movies, I recommend The Last Emperor by Bertolucci). The League of Nations has expressed serious concern and even condemnation over this and called for a peaceful settlement. Not at all disturbed by these calls, the Japanese moved further and further, in fact, from 1937 it can already be called a full-scale invasion, read about the Nanjing Massacre to understand the scale of the disaster. In short, until the end of World War II, China fought the Japanese... and then returned to what the Japanese were distracting them from.

The island of Taiwan was under Japanese rule all this time. The Qing Empire gave it to the Japanese back in 1895 under the Treaty of Shimonoseki. At the same time, the Qing Empire recognized the independence of Korea (still united back then). That is, none of the Taiwanese (among whom there were not so many Han Chinese at that time) were involved in all the wars of state-building, they had a completely different pain.

1945. Liberated from the Japanese, Taiwan came under the administrative control of the newly created UN administration for aid and reconstruction by the anti-Hitler coalition. In the same year, the island is handed over to the Kuomintang, which declares it a province of the Republic of China. The Western allies do not recognize this in any legally binding document. De jure, Taiwan continues to be under Japanese rule.

1949. In the civil war that resumed in China after the Japanese left, the Communists, with the active support of the Soviet Union, convincingly won. 2 million party members, relatives, and supporters of the Kuomintang retreated to Taiwan, taking with them everything they could. The Indigenous islanders, some of whom spoke no Chinese at all, were again not asked.

1951. The demilitarized Japanese signed the San Francisco Peace Agreement, where, among other things, they already recognized Korea's independence and renounced territorial encroachment on Taiwan (which was then also called Formosa, because long before the Japanese, the Portuguese tried to colonize Taiwan, and this was how it was fixed in the English language until the third quarter of the 20th century). Among the signatories and observers of this agreement, there were several states, including Honduras and Luxembourg, but there is neither the Republic of China (a state headed by the Kuomintang) nor the People's Republic of China (a state founded in 1949 by the Communists, which we now call China). Some researchers say that this agreement makes Taiwan a terra derelicta or terra nullius, that is, a territory that is not under the sovereignty of any state. However, de facto, there are already Kuomintang troops on it, and the Communists are trying to get there, and soon they will also get involved in the Korean War. And, as the Taiwanese themselves told me, it was the Korean War that saved the Kuomintang from complete collapse, because there were too many American ships at sea. The Kuomintang was established as a natural ally of the United States in its confrontation with the Communists because there was no one else who the Kuomintang hated more. For the next 20 years, most UN states will recognize the Republic of China (which was limited to the island of Taiwan and adjacent tiny islands, but insisted that this is temporary). I made a documentary project about this at the beginning of the year, if anyone is interested in the details, check it out. The huge communist China sits in isolation until the 70s. Then it quarrels with the Soviet Union, and the United States, at Kissinger's suggestion, decided to make friends with Beijing and pull it further away from Moscow. At the same time, negotiations began on the return of Hong Kong and Macau, the principle of “one country, two systems” was born, and almost all states, one by one, withdrew their recognition of the Republic of China and recognized the People's Republic of China... but did not stop relations with Taiwan. They simply transferred them to a different plane.

From this point on, there are two points of view regarding Taiwan.

The People's Republic of China (PRC) considered itself the only possible China since October 1, 1949, according to the principle of succession, so the absence of Taiwan in its composition is a misunderstanding that needs to be corrected. The Republic of China (Taiwan) has insisted that the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China are two different sides of the Chinese Civil War, which has never legally ended.

This is how the One China policy emerged. It consists of the official recognition of only one Chinese state, despite the actual existence of two. This means that to establish diplomatic relations with China, it is necessary to break off relations with the Republic of China. And vice versa.

Why the Taiwanese are so nervous about the wording “One China principle”: this formulation, born in China, means that both Taiwan and mainland China are inseparable parts of a single China. The Kuomintang government, which has made a one-hundred-and-eighty-degree turn in half a century and is now the main driver of the island's rapprochement with the mainland (unlike the current democratic leadership of Taiwan), signed a declaration with Beijing in 1992. However, the signed document does not say a word about which of the two Chinas is considered the real China. And the official position of the modern Kuomintang expressed to us on camera before the election, is that we just need to survive the next emperor, and to do this, we need to not anger him too much so that he does not go to war.

How does Taiwan still maintain its de facto independence? These are American weapons, Taiwan's weapons, and the production of 90% of the world's most advanced semiconductors, which makes the threat of a potential military escalation in this region very unpleasant for the entire civilized world. We tried to explain all this in detail back in the spring when we made our documentary project. There are Taiwanese who come with humanitarian aid, there are Taiwanese who are fighting in the Ukrainian Armed Forces, and there was a Taiwanese man who died near Kreminna, we talked to his mother, who still does not understand why he went here, but she hopes that we will win. 

Long before that, in the early sixteenth century, the German Franciscan Thomas Murner gave Western culture the expression “das Kind mit dem Bade ausschütten”, which literally translates to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. 

I am worried that this is exactly what the Ukrainian establishment can do drop by drop in pursuit of at least some achievements. After all, China's understanding of the Western world has grown significantly since they started to regain Hong Kong, the then-party bosses were seriously afraid that Britain would take (or destroy) all its banks when they took their officials from there. 

The problem is that for China, we are an exemplary model for the propaganda that has been systematically fed to Taiwan for three years now. Like, look: they relied too much on America, and what did America give them? For this model, it is beneficial for China to see Ukraine lose, because then it may not have to fight Taiwan, and everything they want will happen on its own.

And I frankly do not understand why we still do not understand this.

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