A true story about China Airlines:
When Japan and the People's Republic of China signed their air transport bilateral agreement in the 1970's, the PRC made several demands on the Japanese government aimed squarely at the Republic of China. They demanded that Japan Airlines and All Nippon Airways halt their flights to Taiwan. They also made a more peculiar demand: that any airliner carrying the ROC flag be denied landing rights at any airport served by the PRC's airline, CAAC.
This last demand was all about CAL, which used the ROC flag as its logo. Under the new arrangement, they had to end their flights to Tokyo and Osaka to make way for CAAC. Later, a JAL subsidiary, Japan Asia Airways, came in to offer flights from Japan to Taiwan.
After the opening of New Tokyo International Airport in Narita, CAAC left the older Tokyo International Airport at Haneda, which was being redesignated as a domestic airport. Suddenly, China Airlines had a loophole to get back into the Japanese market. So CAL became the only international carrier at Haneda, using a miniscule little terminal that could barely accommodate their three daily 747 flights to Taipei.
This went on for a couple of decades. In the meantime, a new Taiwanese airline, EVA Air, had started flying from Taipei to Osaka. EVA, an airline operated and supported mostly by Taiwanese nationalists, would have rather taken a piss on the Kuomintang's flag than paint it on their planes, and since they didn't have the flag, they were exempt from the bilateral.
Once China Airlines changed to their cherry blossom paint scheme, they were also exempt from the bilateral, and in 2002, they moved their Tokyo flights from Haneda to Narita, smugly pulling into the terminal alongside planes from Air China. Thus, China lost a big battle to Taiwan: the battle over Japanese airspace.