Taiwan’s inconsistency in asserting its sovereignty is giving Beijing a narrative opening. Taiwan needs a coherent doctrine for when and how to contest border disputes, even if it makes different arguments to different countries.
On 13 August, Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council sharply condemned a planned Chinese–Indonesian naval exercise in waters east of Taiwan. The council accused Beijing of having used the drill to create the false impression that it exercised jurisdiction there. The council further called China a ‘troublemaker’.
However, Taipei’s initial response was markedly different in May when Japan and the Philippines announced plans to negotiate their overlapping maritime claims in waters that are also claimed by Taiwan. Taiwan’s foreign ministry said it would ask its representative offices to verify the details, and President Lai Ching-te stressed that pre-existing bilateral fisheries arrangements with Japan and the Philippines would protect Taiwanese fishermen’s rights. Only after opposition lawmakers raised concerns about Taiwan’s fishing rights and sovereignty did Taipei’s language become more explicit about the need to account for Taiwan’s exclusive economic zone claims.
Same maritime space, very different vocabularies. Taiwan does not need to treat a strategic partner the same way it treats a rival that still threatens force against it; calibration is not, by itself, the problem. But the contrast raises a harder question: what consistent principle actually governs Taiwan’s assertion of its own sovereignty?
The pattern recurs. July marked 10 years since the South China Sea arbitration ruling, an occasion for Taipei to reaffirm its longstanding position that Taiping Island is an island rather than a rock. This distinction determines whether the island can generate a 200-nautical-mile exclusive economic zone under the law of the sea.
This year the government’s posture was initially restrained. It was only when opposition lawmakers from the Kuomintang pressed the point at a legislative committee on 22 July that Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung stated plainly, ‘Taiping Island is of course an island’. Lin also acknowledged Taiwan had kept a low profile because its South China Sea claims overlap substantially with Beijing’s. If Taiwan emphasised the claims publicly it could have complicated relations with potential partners.
That explanation is strategically understandable but it also illustrates the dilemma at the heart of Taiwan’s sovereignty policy: restraint may serve short-term diplomatic interests, but without a clearly articulated principle it can look like selective commitment. A similar ambiguity marks Taiwan’s approach to the Diaoyutai/Senkaku Islands. These have been long kept a low-friction issue with Japan – perhaps for sound reasons – but again without explanation of how that restraint fits any broader doctrine.
This matters because China is working multiple channels at once to shape how Taiwan’s status is understood internationally. Gray-zone military pressure is the most visible; less visible, but potentially more durable, is Beijing’s effort to reinforce historical and legal narratives. In May, China erected a monument at the Mena House Hotel outside Cairo commemorating the 1943 Cairo Declaration – the Allied pledge to return Chinese territory occupied by Japan. Its inscription reads: ‘Taiwan’s return to China is an important component of the victory in World War II and the post-war international order’. The monument gives physical, permanent form to the narrative Beijing has long built on the Cairo Declaration and the Potsdam Proclamation.
Beijing has pressed the same narrative diplomatically. In August 2025 China’s foreign minister argued that the Cairo Declaration and Potsdam Proclamation required Taiwan’s return to China. Taiwanese Foreign Minister Lin countered that the San Francisco Peace Treaty, as a binding international instrument, superseded those wartime political statements, and that the People’s Republic of China has never ruled Taiwan.
The problem, then, is not that Taiwan has failed to answer Beijing; it has. The problem is that its responses have been largely episodic and reactive – rebuttals issued when Beijing advances a particular claim – rather than part of a sustained effort to explain Taiwan’s own position internationally. Nor is the issue insufficient assertiveness in some general sense, or a need to copy Beijing’s tactics for their own sake. Taiwan need not treat China and democratic partners identically. The deeper problem is the absence of a coherent doctrine explaining why sovereignty is invoked loudly against one actor and quietly, or not at all, against others.
A coherent doctrine would not require Taiwan to protest every negotiation involving a friendly government or maximise every claim regardless of cost. It would require Taipei to explain the principles determining when it asserts a claim, when it exercises restraint and how those choices stay consistent with its stated commitment to a rules-based order. Without that framework, Taiwan’s sovereignty rhetoric risks looking tactical rather than principled: useful for signalling resolve toward Beijing, but less clearly grounded in an argument Taipei is prepared to make consistently to its friends.
That gap carries costs beyond any single reef or exclusive economic zone. Every part of Taiwan’s maritime and legal position left underdeveloped is space Beijing can fill on its own terms – in the East China Sea, the South China Sea and the wider international conversation about Taiwan’s status. Taiwan does not need to make the same sovereignty argument to every country. But it does need to explain why its arguments differ, or Beijing will have greater opportunity to make Taipei’s arguments for it, with consequences extending well beyond Taiwan’s shores.
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