China Colonel Likens Taiwan's Public to 'Tumor'

A senior Chinese colonel has likened Taiwan's popular anti-unification sentiment to a cancerous growth that should be surgically removed from the body politic after China launched military exercises around the island over the weekend.

"It could escalate tensions around the island of Taiwan. It's possible," military researcher Zhao Xiaozhuo said of the exercises on a state media program that aired on Tuesday. However, he denied the Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) was to blame.

"It is like a sick person with a cancerous tumor, a malignant tumor," he said. "We have to operate and excise this tumor. The body may hurt, but what causes this pain? Scalpels or the tumor? The tumor, of course."

Zhao is a senior fellow at the Beijing-based Academy of Military Sciences, the PLA's top research institute. His comments to CGTN, the international arm of Chinese state broadcaster CCTV, came after China announced it had successfully completed its three-day "encirclement" drills around Taiwan on April 10.

The exercise called "Joint Sword" was a political-military signal pointed at Taipei and Washington, China watchers said, after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy hosted Taiwanese leader Tsai Ing-wen for talks on U.S. soil last week.

Beijing claims Taiwan as its own and calls the island's president a separatist with a "Taiwan independence" agenda. Her democratically mandated policy is to indefinitely prolong the cross-Taiwan Strait status quo, under which the island exists as a country with limited recognition, but which ultimately remains free from Chinese Communist Party rule.

Tsai's unambiguous rejection of unification, however, conceivably falls under China's widening definition of pro-independence sentiment, even as her party insists it doesn't seek a change to Taiwan's complex political status.

"But who has caused these tensions? Is it the PLA drills or Taiwan independence? I think it is Taiwan independence that is causing the tensions," said Zhao. "Forces seeking Taiwan independence forced the PLA to respond."

"If we do not remove this tumor, it will affect our physical health. So the root cause, the instigator, is Taiwan independence. Therefore, it requires surgery, and scalpels do not bear responsibility," he said.

The Chinese defense ministry couldn't be reached for comment by phone or email before publication.

China's leaders say they seek a peaceful unification of the two sides, but they refuse to renounce the use of force to achieve their aim. Beijing's saber-rattling is especially loud when Taipei looks to Washington and other Western capitals for support.

In public remarks, the Chinese leadership describes Taiwan independence, or anti-unification, as the will of the few. It almost never acknowledges the changing public opinion landscape in Taiwan, which democratized in the 1990s.

Surveys, such as index polling done by National Chengchi University's Election Study Center in Taipei, find less than 10 percent of the Taiwanese public favors a political union with China—now or in the future. Preferences for immediate de jure independence are equally low, also in single digits.

The center's biannual update published in January showed more than 80 percent of respondents favored maintaining the status quo, either indefinitely or until an unspecified point in the future.

"According to Maoist ideology, the Communist Party represents the entire people. The party has scientifically established the objective interests of the majority of the Chinese people, including the Taiwanese 'compatriots.' Therefore, by their definition, only a small minority and the foreign forces who supposedly back them can be opposed to the party," said Sense Hofstede, a research fellow at the Clingendael Institute in the Netherlands.

"If you talk in abstract terms, you don't have to deal with people's individuality. The CCP likes to talk in big categories like the vast majority of the people versus the extreme minority. In both cases, the individual disappears within the group," Hofstede told Newsweek.

"This is quite common also in Xinjiang, where they talk about a virus of terrorism and extremism that has to be exterminated. These are very worrying but also very abstract terms that allow you to feel like you have to treat a sick body," he said.

In state media appearance in the past week, Zhao has led a public awareness campaign to explain the Chinese military's decision-making.

On Saturday, China demonstrated its ability to rapidly mobilize forces to control the air, sea and information spaces, he said. On day two, the PLA simulated precision strikes on key military and political targets in Taiwan.

On the last day, Zhao said, the PLA blockaded the island and stopped "foreign forces" from intervening from the Western Pacific.

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