How Shinzo Abe Saw Through China’s Great Illusion
When I jumped the guardrails of the Chinese embassy in Tokyo in 2010—a failed attempt to turn myself in to Beijing as a wanted student leader and draw much-needed attention to exiled dissidents worldwide—I knew I would either end up in the hands of the People’s Republic of China or in those of the Japanese authorities.
Secretly I’d calculated it would be the Japanese who would seize me. If the PRC had seized me, I would no doubt have disappeared into the CCP prison system for the rest of my days.
As luck would have it, Japanese police caught me in the act and detained me under Japanese law. I’ve thought about that day many times since. In a dictatorship like China—where I would have languished as Hong Kong publisher Jimmy Lai is tragically languishing today—the law is an instrument of power. In a democracy, the law, at its best, is a limit on it.
The Country That Chose to Care
In Tokyo, I was treated with respect, held for a couple of days in a comfortable cell, and incidentally got to at last read a novel by famed Japanese writer Haruki Murakami—a name I’d been hearing for years in Taiwan, where his writing is adored.
It was not my first time in Japan. When China forced me into exile after the Tiananmen massacre in 1989, I was a very young man, a leading figure in an uprising that ended in bloodshed I’d dreaded and tried to head off.
Adrift at the time, before a long sojourn in the United States, Hong Kong gave me refuge, as did France. That was when I visited Japan as an exiled dissident, not as a tourist.
I grew up Uyghur in a Chinese world. Though I was a citizen, I felt like an outsider in a country that had effectively put a wanted sign on my head. I half expected to spend the rest of my life adrift, homeless.
But Japan surprised me. Politicians, scholars, reporters and ordinary people took an interest in the fate of a generation of Chinese students most of them Japanese could never expect to meet—and they took an interest in my story.
Some of those friendships have lasted more than 30 years. At the risk of sounding sentimental, Japan fixed a conviction I have held ever since: a country reveals itself in whom it chooses to stand by.
The Great Miscalculation
All the same, for decades an “if” had hung over every conversation I had in Tokyo. It was whether Japan’s establishment could see through a worldwide shared bet.
That bet was that trade and engagement would, in time, transform China into an international team player that could be trusted with international rules.
I always knew that bet was wrong, and I said it to anyone in politics or the media who would listen.
Today I take no pride in saying I was right. There’s no glory in being right about the worst outcome.
China grew rich without embracing diversity. The Party tightened its grip at home and pushed harder abroad. The wealth that came to China, far from bringing liberalization, bestowed it to the contrary with ever-growing buck-the-rules confidence—to the point that today the PRC openly dismisses the post-WWII global order as a spent force.
After so many years of vast investment, the General Party Secretary of the CCP Xi Jinping encourages his fellow coterie of autocrats and plutocrats to seize a “once in 100 years” opportunity for change. This is changing for the worse—for Chinese-style governance on a global scale.
Abe’s Strategic Warning
This is why former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe—tragically assassinated in July 2022—mattered. And why he still does today.
Abe’s real remarkable move was not so much his parliamentary leadership policies but his words in a December 2021 speech after he’d resigned as prime minister: “a Taiwan contingency is a Japanese contingency, and therefore a contingency for the Japan-US alliance.”
When the longest-serving prime minister in Japan’s history speaks as such, it’s not simply rhetorical flourish. In Japan, a pronouncement from a man of Abe’s stature is a deliberate intervention in long unchanging tides that a nation, the world, sits up and notices.
What’s more, once the words were said they could not be unsaid. Look at a map and he’s simply naming what geography makes obvious. Okinawa and the Sakishima Islands sit so close to Taiwan that Japan is inside any Taiwan conflict zone whether it likes it or not.
From Warning to Policy
Abe spoke from outside office—16 months after his resignation as prime minister—providing the opportunity to move the ground without committing the state to his convictions. But he had set changes in motion. His words were an opening salvo, and three prime ministers on, in a landslide victory Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi took ownership of Abe’s salvo.
Takaichi now holds a commanding mandate, the largest of the postwar era, and she has used it to say from inside the office what Abe could only say from beyond it—in stronger and more precise terms.
On November 7, 2025, as prime minister, she said a Chinese naval blockade of Taiwan backed by military force could constitute a “survival-threatening situation” for Japan—the precise statutory threshold, written into the 2015 security legislation, that would permit Japanese forces to exercise collective self-defense.
Beijing reacted as expected, demanding the Japanese prime minister retract her words. But Takaichi did not. What Abe made sayable, Takaichi has made policy. That is the line that runs from one assertion out of office to the next in office, rendering the threat of a China-Taiwan standoff something it had not been before.
Holding the Line
A Taiwan conflict is a conflict involving the so-called “first island chain,” and that chain has two gates. Japan holds the northern one. The Philippines holds the southern, where Luzon and the Batanes islands look straight across the Bashi Channel—the water the PLA navy must control to keep American forces at bay from the south.
For decades Beijing has planned against one ally at a time. A Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan united means that both gates of ingress are closed. It’s a game-changer for Taiwan: not a coalition of the many and reluctant, but a small bloc of the genuinely committed.
Abe suggested Japan might stand up again given changing circumstances in its regional vicinity. Takaichi has reframed it as a non-question. The alignment that can hold the line for Taiwan is being built now, in real time, by three democracies that have each decided the cost of standing is lower than the cost of yielding.
What remains is the hardest part—holding it after the applause fades, when Beijing’s patient pressure begins to bite. I have staked my adult life on the belief that such lines are worth holding. It is my hope that Japan—and let’s not forget the Philippines – will hold true to that same belief that has defined my life.
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Author: Wu’er Kaixi
Wu’er Kaixi was the student leader of the 1989 Tiananmen Democracy Movement and now living in exile in Taiwan.