There is an airport in Asia almost nobody has heard of, being built next to a city most will never visit, opposite an island now largely forgotten, which sits at the heart of a story warning the world about China’s ambition and what it’s prepared to risk to achieve it.
Kinmen Island is known for its seafood and rural calm. It is home to some 140,000 people who remained loyal to Chiang Kai-shek, the nationalist leader in China’s civil war. The island helped hold back the Communist Red Army, so today it is part of Taiwan, as the Republic of China is commonly known, and they have their own small airport.
The other side of a strait so narrow a dissident once swam across is the Chinese city of Xiamen. There, the new airport is being built. Xiamen’s growing population of 5 million is demanding better connections, and the new international hub expected to open later this year will meet that demand.
So far, so normal. Civilian airports often sit close together — in this case six miles apart — and have overlapping airspace. That causes problems, but the solutions are now standard: share data, agree on procedures and set up a hotline. Taiwan’s civil aviation authority has been asking to do just that for years. It has been ignored.
But this isn’t some bureaucratic oversight. It isn’t about airports or airspace. It’s about control and China’s attempts to undermine Taipei and exercise control over the rebel province, and about how it wants to shape the world.
Taiwan attended the triennial assembly of the International Civil Aviation Organization as a guest in 2013. It participated in the World Health Assembly as an observer from 2009 through 2016. Beijing subsequently blocked Taiwan’s participation in both bodies, claiming the one-China policy meant it was the sole voice for both the People’s Republic and the Republic of China.
Both of these decisions have made life more dangerous — for everyone. Excluding Taiwan from the international airline safety body makes Chinese airliners less safe, too. And during covid, Taiwan was one of the first countries to respond successfully; its removal from the WHA puts us all at risk.
Global safety is not China’s primary concern. Suborning international institutions to its own ends is.
Every empire inherits the roads its predecessors built and shapes them to its own nature. In the ashes of World War II, the empire the victors built is, by historical standards, strange. They built structures not to extract tribute but to export hope.
Democratic accountability, open trade and rules instead of force were a reflection of our predecessors’ desires to avoid war at all costs by ensuring at least tacit consent from every nation and sharing prosperity to embed peace. The United Nations and other global institutions were created to diffuse power under the norms the victorious powers made.
China, then governed by the nationalists, was a founding member.
With notable exceptions, this generation succeeded. The world has been more prosperous and peaceful in the past 80 years than in almost any other previous tract of time. Few have profited more than the People’s Republic. But Beijing is now destroying the platform on which its wealth is built and returning to an imperial system Chairman Xi’s predecessors in the Forbidden City would have recognized: tribute and coercion, not cooperation and engagement.
Chinese coast guard ships ram and water-cannon Philippine vessels resupplying a garrison inside Manila’s own exclusive economic zone. Fishing militias form floating barriers miles long. Military jets regularly harass Taiwanese planes at the edge of its airspace.
Earlier this summer, a Chinese submarine fired a ballistic missile about 4,500 miles into the South Pacific Nuclear-Free Zone, which was established in a treaty whose protocols China signed in 1987. You don’t have to be a hawk to find that threatening.
Just like those who signed the U.N. Charter, Beijing’s rulers are mirroring abroad what they practice at home. The friction between centralizing authoritarianism and devolved cooperation risks more than an air accident.
Until recently, Beijing’s officials simultaneously ran four of the 15 U.N. specialized agencies — more than any other country — and more when you count the client states that vote as directed. Those seats are being used to undermine both Britain’s reach and America’s defense.
Britain wrongly agreed to surrender the Chagos Islands, a crucial U.S. air base in the Indian Ocean, in part due to worries that the International Telecommunication Union, an agency run until 2022 by a Beijing nominee, might one day be used to challenge control of the radio spectrum that keeps the outpost operating. The argument was that once one U.N. agency denies British jurisdiction, other claims would surely follow.
This is the python’s creep of encirclement. China is using organizations built to defend rights to exploit weakness.
That’s why Kinmen’s airport episode matters — not for the island itself but for the message it sends. A threatened judgment scared Britain’s diplomats out defending British territory. A stated policy scared ICAO members from defending Taiwan’s place in the agency and protecting air traffic.
One can recognize that both sides of the Taiwan Strait believe they are part of one country while also recognizing that each administration has jurisdiction over its own affairs. And at the same time, know that the order that built today’s prosperity can be defended without taking a position on Taiwan’s final status.
A carefully worded acceptance of a one-China policy, which most of the West recognizes, forces no one to reject Taiwan’s participation in international institutions.
Diplomacy must be able to manage ambiguity. But it should not tolerate bullying, especially when the bullying threatens us all.