Rocking boats, shaking mountains - To bewilderment in China, neither Hong Kong nor Taiwan seems to want to follow its script

THE “China dream” of the president, Xi Jinping, is of a rejuvenated, rich and strong country that will once again enjoy the respect and fealty in Asia commanded by the empires of old. That last part is not happening: from a recalcitrant young despot, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un, on its north-eastern border, to those ungrateful Vietnamese Communists to the south, flirting with America, insolent insubordination abounds. And perhaps most alarming of all, the people of “inalienable” territories wrested from the motherland by predatory imperialists—Hong Kong and Taiwan—show no enthusiasm at all for a return to its bosom.

Events in recent weeks have highlighted China’s difficulties in both places. In Hong Kong a visiting senior official from Beijing, Zhang Dejiang, had to scurry around under high security to avoid meeting protesters. Paving stones were glued down in case they became projectiles. And in Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen, at her swearing-in on May 20th, rejected months of intense Chinese pressure to pay lip service to the notion that there is “one China”.

Mr Zhang presented a friendly face in Hong Kong, prompting the Big Lychee, an acerbic local blog, to note: “Few sights are more painful to behold than a senior Chinese Communist Party official attempting to be nice. They do it with undisguised distaste, only when the usual thuggish methods like violence and bribery have failed.” As for Ms Tsai’s performance, China did not mask its disappointment. Its Taiwan-affairs body, unabashed at treating a popularly elected leader like an underperforming fourth-grader, called it “an incomplete test answer”. Some democracy-loving Chinese citizens showed more sympathy, with supportive posts online (soon deleted), and a rally (soon dispersed) by a handful of people in the city of Chongqing to mark the inauguration.

In Hong Kong and Taiwan China’s tactics are much the same. It uses economic sticks and carrots combined with occasional heavy-handed displays of power. It ignores or suppresses views it does not like and appeals to pan-Chinese patriotism. But it should know by now that these methods do not work. For example, to help Hong Kong recover from the SARS epidemic in 2003, China eased restrictions on the numbers of mainland visitors. The resulting throngs of Chinese tourists soon became yet another of the locals’ grievances. Similarly, in Taiwan, a massive expansion of trade and tourism links with China under Ms Tsai’s predecessor, Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang (KMT), caused huge protests in 2014. Yet Mr Zhang spent his time urging Hong Kongers to focus on the economy and not to “rock the boat”. He dodged issues that have angered people, notably China’s refusal to allow proper elections for Hong Kong’s chief executive. That decision, also in 2014, triggered large demonstrations, too.
China’s approach to Ms Tsai suggests it has few new ideas, either, on how to handle Taiwan. She was elected in January despite China’s warnings. It abhors her Democratic Progressive Party, which leans towards formal as well as functional independence from China. So China insists that Ms Tsai must accept what is known as the “1992 consensus”—that there is only “one China”, however defined, of which Taiwan is part. Mr Xi last year thundered that if Taiwan rejects this “the earth will move and the mountains shake.” To emphasise the point, last November he made a remarkable concession for a Chinese leader by travelling to Singapore to meet Mr Ma, then Taiwan’s president. That was a reminder of the importance to China’s leaders of reclaiming Taiwan: the unfinished item in its agenda of national recovery from a “century of humiliation”. Since 1981 they have been trying to woo Taiwan with a “one-country, two-systems” arrangement comparable to the one later offered to Hong Kong, but giving Taiwan even greater leeway. Hong Kong’s enjoyment of 50 years of autonomy after its reversion to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 was supposed to be an advertisement of the advantages of this arrangement. It has turned instead into a warning of its dangers.
Since January, China has turned to its usual battery of economic, diplomatic and strong-arm methods to bring Ms Tsai into line. Tour operators report a sharp drop in the number of Chinese tourists. China has signalled an end to the “diplomatic truce” it had been observing by not competing with Taiwan for recognition from poor countries: in March it established ties with Taiwan’s former partner, the Gambia. It has also bullied Kenya into sending Taiwan citizens, detained on suspicion of fraud, to China. And, just before Ms Tsai’s swearing-in, it staged military exercises on the coast opposite Taiwan, as if rehearsing an invasion.
The pageantry around the inauguration included a re-enactment of the brutal suppression of an uprising against mainland (then KMT) rule in 1947—a defining event for the island’s independence movement. But in her speech Ms Tsai bent over backwards to keep to her promise not to upset the status quo. She even acknowledged the “historical fact” of the meeting in 1992 at which the alleged consensus was reached. But she did not repeat the “one China” fiction. Struggling to appease both her pro-independence supporters and Taiwan’s domineering neighbour, she gave neither quite what they wanted.

Straitened circumstances

It is Hong Kong that seems to be learning from Taiwan, not the other way round. A small but vocal independence movement has sprung up there. But China is not changing course in either place. Its response to Ms Tsai’s speech was to resort to threats about cutting off contacts and to belittle her. The lack of specifics, however, has left China room for manoeuvre. It would be heartening to think that this means China’s leaders realise that the best way to win hearts and minds in Hong Kong and Taiwan is not to bribe, browbeat and bully, but to make China itself look a more attractive sovereign power. More likely, however, is that China has too many problems to deal with, at home and on its periphery, to risk another crisis in the Taiwan Strait just now.

Banyan for the Economist