Anacondas do not kill their prey with a venomous bite. Instead, they gradually coil around the quarry, squeezing it until it suffocates.
The reptile thus aptly lends its name to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) strategy of coercing Taiwan through a sustained campaign below the threshold of armed conflict – seeking to asphyxiate the self-ruled island democracy without a decisive bite. Beijing’s “anaconda strategy” plays out in all five traditional domains of warfare, and it also increasingly manifests itself in political warfare deployed in the “sixth domain,” i.e., the cognitive domain.
Chinese cognitive operations adopt the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) concept of political warfare to the modern information environment and target stakeholders in Taiwan and other countries around the world. Beijing’s political warfare is operationalized as the “Three Warfares”—psychological, public opinion, and legal—and seeks to create an information advantage for China. Specifically concerning Taiwan and its international space, the deployment of political warfare aims to help China shape how the global public thinks and talks about the “Taiwan issue,” creating a social license to support and propagate the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) view of Taiwan-China relations and use (and misuse) legal tools to legitimize coercive and subversive Chinese actions vis-à-vis Taiwan. As a part of its legal warfare arsenal, the distortion of United Nations (UN) Resolution 2758 by China aptly illustrates the implementation of CCP’s “anaconda strategy” of psychological and legal asphyxiation of Taiwan.
While UN Resolution 2758 was concerned exclusively with the issue of which government – the Taipei-based “representatives of Chiang Kai-shek” or the People’s Republic of China – should hold the “Chinese seat” in the UN and did not address the issue of Taiwan’s status, China seeks to distort the meaning of the document and frame it as a legal basis of its claim over Taiwan. Moreover, Beijing seeks to establish an equivalency between UN Resolution 2758 and its “one China” principle, positioning the latter as a norm of customary international law. Beijing continues to frame any engagements with Taiwan, including informal exchanges in economic, social, and cultural domains, as efforts “to distort, fudge, and hollow out the one-China principle.” Consequently, Beijing recently doubled down on its efforts to conflate UN Resolution 2758 and its “one China” principle to further constrict Taiwan’s international space and throttle its ability to engage in informal albeit substantial partnerships with third countries.
South Africa’s recent request to relocate Taiwan’s representative office outside of Pretoria is a case in point. While South Africa terminated diplomatic relations with Taipei in favor of Beijing in 1998, both sides continued substantive engagements with one another through the Taipei Liaison Office in Pretoria and the Liaison Office of South Africa in Taipei. Following the September 2024 visit to Beijing by the South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, Pretoria and Beijing issued a joint statement in which South Africa recognized “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China” and supported “efforts made by the Chinese Government to achieve national reunification.” Subsequently, in October, the South African government cited UN Resolution 2758 in its request to relocate the Taipei Liaison Office from the capital city of Pretoria to Johannesburg and rename it as a “trade office.” According to Taiwan’s foreign ministry, China has pressured South Africa to relocate Taipei’s mission at least since the 2023 BRICS summit. Taiwan’s foreign minister Lin Chia-lung (林佳龍) stated that Taipei would not comply with the request. While it remains to be seen how the issue will be resolved, it is alarming that China is intensifying its coercive efforts vis-à-vis third countries that engage with Taiwan through dubious interpretation of documents such as UN Resolution 2758.
The conflict over Taipei’s presence in Pretoria is not the only case of distortion of UN Resolution 2758 that directly affected Taiwan’s bilateral engagements. Two days after the January 2024 elections in Taiwan, which resulted in the Democratic Progressive Party’s unprecedented third presidential term, Nauru terminated its diplomatic relations with Taipei in favor of Beijing. When announcing the switch, Yaren cited the UN Resolution 2758 as the basis for its decision. Moreover, during this year’s annual meeting of the World Health Organization’s Executive Board, Beijing successfully encouraged Belarus, Egypt, Laos, Nicaragua, Pakistan, Russia, Sri Lanka, Syria, Venezuela, and Zimbabwe to duplicitously assert that “Resolution 2758 has settled the status of Taiwan” in their statements. These examples further illustrate the centrality of the UN document in China’s legal warfare arsenal.
While most countries in the world have formulated their “one China” policies, they do not prevent the development of non-diplomatic relations with Taiwan in various domains. This includes the right of third countries to exchange non-diplomatic representative offices with Taiwan. China’s gradual efforts to constrict Taiwan’s international space, similar to an anaconda’s constriction of its prey, are aimed at depriving Taiwan of its external sovereignty. Despite its contested status, Taiwan has proven to be a reliable member of the international community. It is thus imperative that democratic states counteract China’s political warfare by correcting its rhetorical distortions, including those related to UN Resolution 2758, and assert Taiwan’s right to engage in substantive exchanges with like-minded partners.
