The Little Country That Stood Up To China

Chinese President Xi Jinping speaks fluent English, yet there is one word he hasn’t heard often enough to master: “No.”

The Chinese Party leader presides over a global Communist colossus that has continued growing stronger as political leaders in the United States — but for a four-year interregnum between Democratic administrations — have essentially embraced managed decline. China wields its economic, diplomatic, demographic, and military power to bully and cajole anyone who gets in its way — apparently with unflagging success. Google censors search results at its command. YouTube blames the mass deletion of comments critical of the Chinese Communist Party on a mysterious “error.” Hollywood edits both forthcoming and decades-old blockbusters in obedience to Chinese tastes. Even a tech billionaire like the part-owner of the NBA Golden State Warriors, Chamath Palihapitiya, is so subservient to Beijing that he makes excuses for its persecution of the nation’s Uighur Muslims, saying the “very ugly truth” is that “nobody cares about what’s happening to the Uighurs.”

As a result, China could hardly believe its ears when the tiny, former Soviet nation of Lithuania defied its commands. In August, Lithuania allowed Taiwan to open a de facto Embassy in the capital city of Vilnius, and allowed it to be called the Taiwanese Representative Office. While several nations allow the island to open offices under the name of its capital city, Taipei, none had allowed Taiwan to use its own name because that would violate Beijing’s “One China” policy, which considers the independent, free-market nation part of the People’s Republic of China. Allowing Taiwan to open a diplomatic office shatters this illusion.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said the name of the office “had not been coordinated with me.” Still, when Beijing demanded that Lithuania change its ways, Lithuania refused. Because Lithuania supports “democracy and human rights as universal values,” its government “stands firm to its decision to welcome the opening of the Taiwanese representative office.”

The Chinese Communists immediately began ratcheting up the pressure. China tried to reclassify the Lithuanian representatives’ presence in Beijing in such a way as would strip them of diplomatic immunity, subjecting them to possible arrest and detention. “Essentially the Chinese are saying, ‘The security of your staff cannot be guaranteed until you, Lithuania, will bend your knees,’” said Steve Tsang, director of the SOAS China Institute in London.

China exerted its economic might to try to squeeze Lithuania. “As of last week, more than 1,000 containers bound for Lithuania were stuck, unable to leave China, and another 300 sent from Lithuania were blocked from entering,” reported the Wall Street Journal on January 27. The CCP then tried to enlist other countries, including the United States, to stop purchasing products made in Lithuania, according to Secretary of State Antony Blinken. The European Commission has also documented Chinese pressure tactics, including “a refusal to clear Lithuanian goods through customs, rejection of import applications from Lithuania, and pressuring EU companies operating out of other EU Member States to remove Lithuanian inputs from their supply chains when exporting to China.”

Chinese diplomats also tried to paint Lithuania’s action as immoral, with diplomat Zhao Lijian saying the CCP would like to “remind the EU to tell right from wrong, and stay wary of Lithuania’s attempts to take China-EU relations hostage” — an Orwellian turn of phrase, to be sure. Only Germany seems to have listened. Sources told Politico that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz had officers “calling everyone who speaks German in the [European] Commission” because, in the words of Politico, Scholz “feared the EU was becoming too aggressive in its defense of Lithuania against Beijing’s economic coercion.” (Score two for Orwell.)

The pressure of a nation with 2.8 million citizens has put the Marxist nation of a billion people in the unusual position of not getting its way. “The Chinese Communist Party is so threatened by Lithuania’s recent diplomatic recognition of Taiwan that they have pressured companies and other countries to cut ties with Lithuania. In retaliation against Vilnius, Beijing has put holds on or rejected completely imports from Lithuania,” Amb. Andrew Bremberg, the president and CEO of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, told me. “Beijing has once again shown the world that when a country takes an action that does not align with the CCP’s interests, they will take extreme measures.”

Why would Lithuania risk provoking the lethal wrath of the world’s most populous despotic power? Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis says Lithuania feels a “sense of kinship” with Taiwan. Both are small nations formerly held under the thumb of repressive Communist nations.

Lithuania was occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939, then by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1944, then “liberated” by the USSR again in 1944. Lithuanian leaders declared they would re-establish their independent republic on March 11, 1990 — something intolerable even in a collapsing Soviet Union led by Mikhail Gorbachev. First, Moscow economically boycotted