Newscriticism: "Japan PM fails to achieve breakthrough in row with China – but polling shows public backs her" (Guardian, November 24, 2025)

[From The Guardian's article.]

SUMMARY

Japan’s Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi failed to secure a face-to-face meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang at the G20 summit in Johannesburg, leaving unresolved tensions over her recent remarks about Taiwan. Her recent comments, which suggested Japan could justify military action if Taiwan were threatened, have deeply strained relations with Beijing. However, despite the diplomatic setback, and the intensification of the tensions after the remark, a Kyodo poll shows strong public backing for Takaichi: nearly 70% of respondents approved of her handling of the crisis, and almost half supported Japan’s right to collective self-defense in a Taiwan conflict. However, China has responded forcefully, accusing her of crossing “red lines” and threatening the UN with claims of aggression, while also reimposing travel advisories and cultural restrictions on Japan. Takaichi, however, maintained that dialogue remains open, saying she still supports “mutual understanding and cooperation” even as she stands firm on her Taiwan stance.

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NEWSCRITICISM

For some time now, recently over Taiwan, China and Japan are exchanging a flurry of tensions across both civilization-societies even though Taiwan is essentially - if it realized it had free will - its own sovereign identity. Decades, if not, centuries, of societal interactions (both positive and negative) from many civilization-societies had shaped Taiwan into a smorgasbord of identities coalesced into one as its final evolution. Taiwan is a product of the clash and dialogue of many civilizations rolled into one: starting with the Austronesians who migrated into Taiwan 8,000 years ago, then the Chinese came, then the Mongols (via the Great Yuan), then the Dutch, then the Spanish, and then lastly, the Japanese.

But it doesn't stop there. Consider the Indonesians, the Vietnamese, and the Filipinos - all with their Five Pillars each brought to Taiwan; there's even Americans in Taiwan, if you look hard enough in their existential demography, even a one-off trade with America that formed Taiwanese Americans! There's even Indians in Taiwan, and even Tibetans and Jews!

All of these makes for a society that isn't monolithic, as in purely Sinitic or even purely Western: this Taiwan embodies a multilayered civilization that is on its way to form its own unique identity whose diverse historical inheritances now shape and complicate its role in rising Sino-Japanese tensions. But China, Japan, and the wider world still insists on things that are contrary to what Taiwan actually is existentially, most notably (of note) in that the Chinese Civil War did not end: because the Republic of China exists as an entity within the Taiwanese civilization, this meant that the island’s evolving civilizational identity remains constrained by unresolved geopolitical claims that continually entangle Taiwan’s present autonomous sovereignty with the unclosed narratives of its contested past and its identity in the world.

While China and Japan are still "diplomatically fighting" over Taiwan, now as a spat between Sanae Takaichi and Li Qiang in a war of words, the Taiwanese do wonder: do we have free will? Now they face the deeper question of whether a civilization so composite can ever fully determine its own destiny amid powers that continually script its future for them.

Hence, better yet: the people of Taiwan would like to say a word (or, throw a sandal) against both in an insulting match of two powers in the Asian Cold War.

Joshua Kyle T. Rovero

Estado Rovero

November 25th 2025