On November 7, 2025, recently chosen Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi made a statement at a session of the Japanese Diet where she claimed that a “contingency” in the Taiwan Strait would be a “survival threatening situation” for Japan. This prompted a strong response from the People’s Republic of China that this erroneous official statement from a sitting Japanese Prime Minister represented both a threat against China and a serious violation of the One China Principle.
Given the importance this question holds for world peace or world war—and in the interest of better informing our readers of the historic context of this contention—we present this guest opinion article by Mr. Liu Pengyu, spokesperson of the Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States of America.
The year 2025 marked the 80th anniversary of the Victory of the Chinese People’s War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War. Eighty years ago, the Allies, including China and the United States, defeated fascism shoulder to shoulder and defended the bedrock of human civilization. With the signing of the UN Charter in San Francisco, the post-war international order was established, with the United Nations at its core. But just as the world solemnly commemorated the hard-won victory, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi asserted that a “Taiwan contingency” could be a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan, implying that Japan may interfere militarily in the Taiwan Strait. This sends a highly dangerous and wrong signal.
The remark totally dismisses Japan’s historical responsibility. In history, Japanese militarists waged aggression more than once under the pretext of a “survival-threatening situation,” including invading China and North Korea and attacking Pearl Harbor, inflicting immense suffering on local people.
Taiwan has been part of Chinese territory since ancient times. Japan started the first Sino-Japanese War in 1894 and then forced the Qing government to sign the unequal Treaty of Shimonoseki in the second year, which led to Japan’s colonization of Taiwan for 50 years. In that darkest chapter in the island’s history, more than 600,000 people in Taiwan were killed. From 1931 to 1945, Japan ruthlessly invaded China and wreaked havoc on the Chinese nation, causing more than 35 million military and civilian casualties. The evidence is ironclad.
But after World War II, Japan has been reluctant to acknowledge its defeat, and has instead spread the “end of the war” narrative. Rather than making a clean break with the past, it has never fully repented for its history of aggression. The right-wing forces in Japan, in particular, have developed “selective amnesia” and tried every means to distort history. They have kept tampering with history textbooks, tried to deny or whitewash the atrocities of the Japanese aggressors, downplayed the Nanjing Massacre as the “Nanjing incident,” refused to compensate the “comfort women” and forced laborers, and glorified the war criminals as “national heroes”—14 convicted Class-A war criminals are still honored at the Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo till this very day. Moreover, Japan has long portrayed itself as a victim, emphasizing the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki while glossing over its aggression. A former Japanese Air Self-Defense Force Chief of Staff recently claimed that the attack on Pearl Harbor was due to the United States tormenting Japan for nearly 20 years, leaving Japan with no other choice.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Now, for the first time since the end of World War II, the Japanese leader has explicitly linked a “Taiwan contingency” to a potential “survival-threatening situation” for Japan in a formal setting, implied ambition to interfere militarily in the Taiwan question, and threatened China with force. Any sensible person would be alarmed and question what Japan is truly up to.
The remark blatantly tramples upon international law and the post–World War II international order. Taiwan’s return to China is an integral part of the post-war international order. On August 15, 1945, Japan announced unconditional surrender. On October 25 of that year, the ceremony to accept Japan’s surrender in Taiwan Province took place in Taipei, at which point China recovered Taiwan de jure and de facto. Instruments including the Cairo Declaration, the Potsdam Proclamation and the Japanese Instrument of Surrender explicitly required that all the territories Japan had stolen from the Chinese, including Taiwan, shall be restored to China after the end of World War II. In 1971, the UN General Assembly adopted Resolution 2758, resolving once and for all the question of the representation of the whole of China, including Taiwan, in the United Nations politically, legally and procedurally.
The one-China principle is both an internationally recognized norm, and a solemn pledge made by the Japanese government and the political prerequisite and foundation for the normalization of China-Japan relations. It is enshrined in the four political documents between the two countries and the three principles for the resumption of bilateral diplomatic ties.
On the 80th anniversary of Taiwan’s restoration, however, the Japanese leader broke promises and openly tied China’s Taiwan to Japan’s so-called “security interests,” in an attempt to fabricate excuses for Japan’s military obstruction of China’s reunification. This is a violation of the spirit of the four political documents and the commitments made by Japan, and a breach of the principle of prohibiting the threat or use of force in the UN Charter. It has not only fundamentally undermined the political foundation of China-Japan relations, but also posed a serious provocation to the outcomes of World War II and the post-war international order. Not only have the Chinese people expressed strong indignation, but the Japanese people from various sectors, including a number of former Prime Ministers, have also voiced opposition and criticism.
The world should remain on high alert against the resurgence of Japanese militarism. The Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Proclamation clearly demanded that militarism must be eliminated and Japan should not be permitted to rearm for war. Japan also committed to the “exclusively defense-oriented principle” in its pacifist constitution. But the reckoning with Japanese militarism has never been completed. On the contrary, we are seeing a rising trend of reviving militarism in recent years.
The Japanese side has been hyping up so-called “external threats” to unbridle itself, and has been hollowing out the pacifist constitution step by step. Apart from removing the ban on exercising the right to collective self-defense and expanding military capabilities, Japan recently announced the deployment of medium-range surface-to-air missile units in the Yonaguni Island only 110 kilometers (about 68 miles) away from Taiwan, a deliberate move that breeds regional tensions and stokes military confrontation. Prime Minister Takaichi’s linking of Japan’s “survival-threatening situation” with a “Taiwan contingency” and implication of the use of force against China obviously goes far beyond Japan’s “exclusively defense-oriented principle.”
Japan has also been increasing its defense budget for 13 consecutive years, and the number reached 2% of GDP ahead of schedule in fiscal 2025. Its draft budget for fiscal 2026 approved in recent days set defense spending at over 9 trillion yen (about 58 billion U.S. dollars), hitting a new record high. According to the Yearbook 2025 of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), five major Japanese defense firms saw their combined arms sales surge to approximately 13.3 billion U.S. dollars in 2024, up by 40% year-over-year, recording the world’s fastest growth.
Japan is even attempting to alter the “three non-nuclear principles” (namely, not possessing, not producing, and not permitting the introduction of nuclear weapons into its territory), and a senior official from the Japanese Prime Minister’s Office who is close to Prime Minister Takaichi brazenly claimed that Japan should have nuclear weapons.
Especially alarming is that Japanese militarists are skillful disguisers: Every time they intended to wage aggression, they would pretend to have no other option under heavy pressure. And once the time was ripe, they would stop at nothing to achieve their aim. In history, Japan started undeclared wars many times, and sent a diplomatic mission to the United States as a smokescreen before attacking Pearl Harbor.
Today, “neo-militarism” is no longer a lurking undercurrent, but an imminent threat to global peace and development. The lessons of Japanese warmongering are not distant, and Japan’s adventurism should sound an alarm. The international community should never allow past tragedies to repeat themselves. We should never tolerate, connive at or yield to militarism, and should stay vigilant against and oppose any attempt to resurrect it.
The Chinese nation is a peace-loving nation, and our people are peace-loving people. We remember history not to perpetuate hatred, but to take history as a mirror, look ahead to the future, and pass the torch of peace from generation to generation.
As the world’s two largest economies and permanent members of the UN Security Council, China and the United States shoulder special and important responsibilities for world peace, stability and prosperity. Preventing militarism from harming the world again is in the common interest of both our countries. We should rise above differences, cooperate with each other, and live up to our obligations as major countries. To do that, we should work together to resolutely safeguard the outcomes of World War II, champion international fairness and justice, uphold the post-war international order, and thwart any plot to revive the spectre of militarism, so that the noble goal of “saving succeeding generations from the scourge of war” can truly become a reality.
