Takaichi’s Taiwan Remarks One Year On: China-Japan Ties Frozen
China’s Foreign Ministry said ties with Japan face “serious difficulties,” attributing the deterioration to Takaichi’s comments that a Taiwan crisis could threaten Japan’s survival.
ASIA,POLITICS
Global N Press
11/7/20261 min read
Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said on 6 November 2026 that China-Japan relations face “serious difficulties” and that “the responsibility rests entirely with Japan,” tracing the rupture to Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s remarks in the Diet roughly a year earlier that a Taiwan contingency could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” permitting Japan to exercise collective self-defense. Guo said Japan had “still not shown the sincerity or action to reflect and correct its course”. A day earlier, Guo accused Japan of “hurriedly revising its three security documents, sharply increasing military spending and developing offensive capabilities,” calling Tokyo’s “remilitarization” a threat to regional peace and stability.
Japan’s Mainichi Shimbun acknowledged in a 7 November editorial that a year after Takaichi’s remarks, “no opportunity to improve relations with China has been found”. Beijing has also adjusted its regional security posture, sending only a defense attaché to the 13th ASEAN Defense Ministers’ Meeting-Plus in Cebu — its lowest representation in years — to deny Manila a high-level platform on the South China Sea, while keeping channels open through Premier Li Qiang’s attendance at the 29th China-ASEAN Summit in Manila on 15–16 November. The standoff is structural, spanning history, the Taiwan Strait and the East China Sea, with Tokyo using “Taiwan contingency” as a lever for military normalization and Beijing managing escalation through a mix of high-level refusal and sustained frontline presence.
