Thread by @GeringTuvia

🚨 The Chinese Communist Party's mouthpiece recently published an article comparing Taiwan's ruling party to the Nazis, in an unprecedented rhetoric reminiscent of Russian justification for its illegal invasion of Ukraine.

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Prof. Wang Yingjin, head of the Center for Cross-Strait Relations at Renmin University, wrote in today's edition of the People's Daily that the Democratic Progressive Party's (DPP) recall campaign was partisan manipulation disguised as democracy.

Specifically, Wang argues that the Kuma Academy and Bluebird Movement "actively operate throughout the island and maliciously cause disturbances, exposing the dangerous tendency of 'Taiwan independence' forces becoming increasingly Nazi-like."

In reality, the former is a civil society non‑profit aiming to train and empower citizens in emergency response, civil defense, media literacy, and disaster readiness; the latter is a grassroots pro-democracy civic movement started in May last year, advocating for greater legislative transparency and government accountability.

Wang's accusation mirrors Russian rhetoric about Ukraine, where "Nazification" is invoked as a pretext for invasion. As Manoj Kewalramani (@theChinaDude) noted in his Tracking People's Daily newsletter, Beijing is now aligning with Moscow’s most toxic narratives.

This dangerous rhetoric didn't come out of nowhere. Firstly, during large-scale PLA drills around Taiwan in April, Chinese party-state propaganda arms depicted Taiwanese President Lai as a green insect or "parasite," including in an animated video shared on the PLA Eastern Theatre Command’s official Weibo account. This portrayal, which showed Lai held by chopsticks over a burning Taiwan, exemplifies China's dehumanization tactics toward Taiwanese elected leaders through state-controlled social media platforms.

Secondly, TW's Kuomintang (KMT) pro-Beijing chairman Eric Chu, who met Xi Jinping in Beijing back in 2015, echoed the same line just this year, likening the DPP to Nazi Germany. Chu's remarks drew strong rebukes from Germany and Israel's de facto embassies in Taipei (@IsraelTaipei), both calling out the offensive trivialization of Nazi atrocities and the memory of the Shoa (Holocaust).

Yesterday, the Chinese embassy in Israel marked the 80th anniversary of the "War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War" at the Museum of Jewish Soldiers of WWII.

Beijing has recast the plight of Jewish refugees in Shanghai into a tale of deliberate national benevolence. Under Japanese and Nationalist split control and war, Shanghai was one of the very few places in the world where Jews fleeing Nazi persecution could enter without needing a visa or entry permit. This policy made it a haven for over 20,000 Jewish refugees at a time when most countries had pushed them away.

In this narrative, China is presented as an "Oriental Noah’s Ark" that "with open arms welcomed Jews,” a revisionist form of "historical statecraft" that erases Jewish voices while casting China as savior, global moral protector, and rightful civilizational center, as argued by Prof. Mary Ainslie.

On August 17, the US and China released simultaneous annual reports, each a blistering indictment of the other's human rights record. The State Department report's very first word was "genocide," a term used to describe China's actions against predominantly Muslim Uyghurs and other minorities in Xinjiang.

In a pointed escalation, China's State Council Information Office (SCIO), a front of the CCP's Propaganda Department, accused the US of aiding the "genocide" in Gaza, the first time an official Chinese document has leveled a charge of genocide against the Jewish state.

Since Hamas' invasion on October 7, 2023, and the subsequent Israeli operation in Gaza, the PRC's open hostility toward Israel has resulted in an unprecedented trend in mainland discourse, with Israel's war against jihadist Hamas and the Iran-backed axis being compared to the Nazis and Imperial Japan.

On June 14, Xue Jian, the Chinese consul in Osaka, compared the State of Israel to Nazi Germany. Other posts by the Chinese diplomat after October 7 compared Israelis to the Japanese Imperial Army and shared AI illustrations of Israeli Palestinians as "baby-devouring demons," to use his exact words. Since there was no apology, I have to ask again: are these blood libels Beijing's official positions?

Not only does Beijing actively rework the memory of WWII and the Shoa, but by claiming the mantle of anti-fascism, it justifies attacks on rivals, puts pressure on international partners, and, ironically, distracts from what is going on at home: the most aggressive military buildup since 1945.

To illustrate:

- In 2025, China announced a 7.2 percent increase in defense spending, reaching 1.78 trillion yuan (about US$246–249 billion).
- The PLA Navy has more than 370 battle-force ships, projected to reach about 395 by 2025 and 435 by 2030, building at nearly triple the US rate.
- China now fields over 600 operational nuclear warheads as of mid-2024, with projections of 1,000 or more by 2030.
- US INDOPACOM commanders have warned that this constitutes the largest peacetime buildup since the Second World War.

Works such as Prof. Rana Mitter’s Forgotten Ally rightly highlight the sacrifices of the Chinese people in that war, both communist and nationalist, including contributions to the fight against Japanese imperialism. That history should be recognized.

But in 2025, the parade of "anti-fascist" solidarity will be attended not by Western allies, but by Putin, Kim Jong-un, Iran’s Pezeshkian, and Myanmar’s dictator Min Aung Hlaing.

We may honor China's past, but this episode should give us pause about what this means for its present and future.

/End

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