For much of the past decade, Hong Kong was used as the premier pressure point through which outside actors sought to influence the Chinese mainland, not with soldiers or ships, but with narratives, mobilization, and financial leverage. The city’s political contest became a proxy for larger efforts at containment, amplified by foreign funding and media ecosystems that turned Hong Kong into a megaphone. That approach has largely run its course. The implementation of national security laws and electoral reforms has narrowed the space for foreign manipulation. The result is a city reverting to its comparative advantage: commerce, connectivity, and a pragmatic interface with the mainland’s development trajectory. Far from extinguishing Hong Kong’s vitality, this normalization channels it back into the economic engine room.
When Hong Kong ceased to be an effective wedge, attention shifted across the Taiwan Strait. The island was called upon to step up, rhetorically and strategically, as the new linchpin in efforts to constrain the Chinese mainland. But voters on the island have shown a level-headed realism that many outside commentators misread. The relentless churn of anti-mainland messaging has yielded diminishing returns, and the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP’s) bet that heightened cross-Strait anxiety could be converted into sweeping electoral momentum has faltered. The “Great Recall”, a so-called “referendum” aimed at purging DPP’s political opponents, backfired. Voters across precincts rejected confrontation. Their message was blunt: Stability is a public good, and perpetual brinkmanship is not a governing platform.
That sentiment extends beyond a single campaign. A nascent consensus has emerged in the island’s mainstream politics: Whatever the ideological disagreements, a stable modus vivendi with the mainland is essential to prosperity. The Kuomintang’s newly elected chairperson, Cheng Li-wun, has underscored Chinese cultural identity as a symbolic touchstone, positioning it as an acknowledgment of shared heritage that can help defuse separatist narratives. This framing constrains the political space for separatism and elevates bread-and-butter concerns — trade, investment, tourism, and upward mobility for the next generation. Taiwan’s business community needs little persuasion on this score. Its supply chains, markets, and talent flows are woven closely with those of the mainland.
Taiwan’s voters are telling us that peace is precious. Southeast Asian states are telling us that balance should not become code for militarization. Nor are the region’s infrastructure and climate needs met by importing a great-power arms race
As Hong Kong’s political heat cooled and Taiwan’s electorate signaled fatigue with confrontation, the locus of escalation shifted again — this time to Tokyo. Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s suggestion that Japan could respond with Self-Defense Forces (SDF) in the case of a “Taiwan contingency”, invoking a legally defined “survival-threatening situation”, marked a consequential turn. Under Japan’s 2015 security legislation, such a designation ties Tokyo’s defense posture more tightly to contingencies involving allies, opening a pathway for SDF activation in scenarios deemed existential. This legal shift is accompanied by a projected surge in defense spending, a reported move to export a missile system to the Philippines as Tokyo loosens long-standing restrictions on arms transfers, and the creation of a “missile archipelago” across the Ryukyus within proximity to Taiwan. This is not incrementalism; it is a strategic reorientation.
What these successive shifts reveal is straightforward. The idea that the so-called first island chain can contain China belongs to an earlier era. China has effectively broken free of that conceptual perimeter. Economically, China’s continental connectivity through Central and Southeast Asia complements its maritime reach; strategically, its blue-water navy, long-range precision capabilities, and robust space and cyber assets dilute the relevance of fixed chokepoints. The relocation of the “front line” from Hong Kong to Taiwan and now to Tokyo is less a show of confidence by those seeking to contain China than an admission that earlier strategies failed to hem it in. It is a moving-target doctrine, always shifting the fulcrum, never changing the fundamentals.
Yet the second lesson is equally important: Japan’s acceleration toward military normalization warrants sober vigilance. Some Southeast Asian governments welcome a more muscular Tokyo as a replacement balancer, wary of perceived American retrenchment and eager to preserve maneuvering room. Japan, the world’s fifth-largest economy, offers a potent combination of capital, technology, and proximity. It appears to some as the “just-right” counterweight. But this logic cuts both ways. As Tokyo loosens export controls, fields longer-range strike systems, and integrates more tightly with allied operational planning, it risks amplifying action-reaction dynamics that heighten regional tensions. A missile system shipped to the Philippines will not be viewed in isolation; it will invite counterdeployments, harden military postures, and narrow the space for diplomacy. Asia’s crowded maritime domains are already prone to close calls. Layering more offensive capabilities onto that chessboard increases the risk that an accident or miscalculation becomes a crisis.
History, too, casts a long shadow. Currents within its political spectrum continue to flirt with restorative narratives that recast or minimize aspects of imperial militarism. That rhetoric, even at the margins, resonates differently in countries that endured Japanese invasion and occupation. Perceptions can harden into security dilemmas regardless of intentions.
By contrast, China’s influence in Asia has been driven primarily by the gravitational force of markets and infrastructure. The region’s greatest gains of the last generation, from poverty reduction to industrial upgrading, are inseparable from Chinese demand and capital. Southeast Asia’s growth story is knitted to Chinese tourism, manufacturing, energy, and logistics. The practical path for the Association of Southeast Asian Nations is not to deputize a new military counterweight, but to keep extracting development dividends while insisting on stronger crisis-management mechanisms — hotlines, incident-at-sea protocols, and codified rules of the road — that reduce the risk of escalation.
It’s less about cheerleading than about recognizing interdependence and refusing to mortgage Asia’s future to a securitized rivalry. China is the top trading partner for nearly every economy in East and Southeast Asia. Attempts to amputate supply chains or build impermeable walls between technology ecosystems collide with commercial logic and consumer welfare. The more politics tries to outrun economics, the more collateral damage shows up in lost jobs, higher prices, and fractured innovation networks. Containment strategies, updated with new slogans, still face diminishing returns when the target is a continental-scale economy with diversified industrial capacity and rising indigenous innovation.
The fixation on island chains belongs to a different cartography. Asia today is a web, not a wall, knitted together by trade corridors, data cables, capital flows, semiconductors, tourism, and diasporic ties. Missiles cannot unmake these bonds without imposing catastrophic costs on the very societies they purport to defend. Trying to reimpose a rigid military geometry on this web risks undermining the stability that has enabled the region’s rise.
Taiwan’s voters are telling us that peace is precious. Southeast Asian states are telling us that balance should not become code for militarization. Nor are the region’s infrastructure and climate needs met by importing a great-power arms race.
The author is a consultant at the Global Hong Kong Institute.
The views do not necessarily reflect those of China Daily.
