are we listening on Taiwan?
different trajectories
The venerable Financial Times had a highly relevant, if substantially different, explanation of Taiwan’s internal politics this week.1 The author, Katherin Hille, has long term experience studying the island’s politics over many years. And the story she tells is considerably broader than most U.S. understandings of Taiwan’s trends today.
This matters because Beijing yet again threatens retaliation after House Speaker Kevin McCarthy met with Tsai Ing-wen on U.S. soil today.
As you are aware, the Democratic Progressive Party (a.k.a., DPP, the ‘Greens’ or the more pro-Taiwanese party) and current national Tsai is de facto touring the United States under the cover of ‘stopovers’ or ‘transits’ as she visited one of Taiwan’s few remaining allies, Guatemala. Reports indicated she gave a sober, well-articulated explanation of why she values the support from so many voices in the United States today. I did not hear the speech but have read several references to her appearance before a New York audience hosted by the Hudson Institute, a long-standing think tank.
Ms. Tsai is a hard-nosed technocrat-turned-government head on the island. Beijing sees her as leading the radicalised independence mob but my limited experience a decade ago with her senior advisor (and now de facto ambassador in Washington) indicated a measured, calculating lawyer aware of missteps her party could well make. She is not radical but she definitely is not interested in reunifying with the mainland. Punto final.
At the same time, her Guomingdang (GMD, or Nationalist Party) predecessor as head of state, another lawyer named Ma Ying-jeou (for those of you who don’t spend you lives immersed in China, surnames usually precede given names in Chinese. Taiwan is a little less predictable on this than the mainland but Tsai and Ma are family surnames), is on a twelve day tour of the mainland. If former president Trump’s indictment was a first yesterday, the idea of a former president of the ‘Republic of China’ touring the People’s Republic of China on mainland is equally precedent-setting.
The GMD always had a greater affiliation with the mainland because its political base was those whose families fled with Chiang Kai-shek as the CCP won the civil war in the 1940s. Nationalists marginalised the Taiwanese, the core DPP constituency, through the dictatorship from the late 1940s through 1988. The GMD still had a few voices asserting it could retake the mainland from Communist control as late as 2011 when a junior officer at proclaimed confidently to my colleague that Taiwan would win back against the communists in China (my colleague was astonished to hear this). Most in the GMD no longer expect to conquer the mainland but they welcome greater ties.
Ma’s tenure as head of the Taiwan regime between 2008 and 2016 included somewhat more open links with the mainland. In response, Chinese tourists came to Taiwan in greater numbers, postal services were strengthened, and overall trade soared. It bears repeating that China is Taiwan’s primary trading partner. Ma actually met with Xi Jinping in a 2015 Singapore meeting but any warming between the two sides of the strait ceased when the newlly-elected Tsai refused to acquiesce on any possibility of reunification against the desires of the Taiwanese.
Ma began praising the mainland’s development while also advocating for peace between the ‘Chinese peoples’ on both sides of the Strait upon his arrival in China last week, satisfying the nationalist Global Times.2 Tsai’s administration accused him of subservience to Beijing but it is noteworthy he is still a senior, if former president, official of the major opposition party on the island.
Indeed, while many advocates for Taiwan in the United States cite various indications the citizens on the island are moving more assertively to declare themselves as Taiwanese rather than Chinese, Hille in the Financial Times makes clear this is considerably more nuanced that simply people identifying as pro-Green independence Taiwanese and pro-Blue (the symbol for the GMD) reunify Chinese.
Taiwan’s population, Hille notes, ‘has long shown overwhelming opposition to unification and an increasingly strong Taiwanese, rather than Chinese, identity. Only 1.2 per cent are in favour of unification as soon as possible, while another 6% prefer the status quo now and moving towards unification at an unspecified future date, according to the latest instalment in a long-running poll by National Chengchi University.
Meanwhile, 60.8 per cent identify as Taiwanese only, almost doubt the ratio of people seen as bi-cultural. This poll sees only 2.7% of the island self-identifying as only Chinese.
A Taiwan researcher points out these numbers are considerably more volatile than the identification of ethnicity, however, as the answers shift relative to perceived threats to the island. In particular, as Xi Jinping pressured Hong Kong about four years ago, preferences to reunify dropped precipitously as residents of the island were defiant about maintaining their freedoms and standard of living.
With greater attention to the cross-Strait problem in Washington and statements from Xi creating a sense of probable action to force reunification, the anxieties grow. In particular, as Washington pressures Taiwan to increase its preparedness in the face of an ever more daunting military threat, researchers on the island see more spoken desire to maintain the status quo—an undefined status which might satisfy Beijing as true for the past 44 years.
In particular, Taiwan’s population recognises it might be a pawn between two superpowers rather than an independent actor in the eyes of either. One researcher noted that perhaps 56% of those surveyed did not see the United states as credible for Taiwan’s defense.
Tsai’s bookend tour of New York and California this week attempts to thread a needle. She recognised in her speech the invaluable nature of U.S. support and the fierce spirit of her island. However, she is not a firebreathing radical as Beijing claims. Her opportunities, such as her inaugurals in 2016 and four years later, were measured to satisfy her supporters while not throwing gasoline on Beijing’s fire of frustration over its inability to guarantee independence will never arise. She will depart office, however, with a new president elected next year.
The lesson in April 2023 is that Taiwan is becoming a much more overt object rather than an independent, autonomous entity. I was recently at a conference where two prominent national security speakers, each a strong supporter of Taibei, both acknowledged they are not as concerned about Taiwan as they are about China. The crux of most Washington conversations seems to be deterring, if not neutering China but that potentially puts Taiwan in the heart of a bullseye completely beyond its control.
I firmly believe Taiwan must take responsibility for its own national security as has Ukraine and as does any nation-state. Tsai has substantially increased efforts to strengthen those defenses over the past 13 months but it will take time and an island of 24.5 million with a GDP of $774 billion (2021 statistic) struggles to match a behemouth of 1.3 billion people (even if that number is decreasing) and a GDP of $14.7 trillion in the same year (the United States stands a smidge below 21 trillion for comparison).3
The point here, however, is that we risk looking at only a sliver of the Taiwan views if they coincide with a predominant argument in Washington. My question, however, is whether we really are focusing on Taiwan or are we actually ignoring the variety of views this fabulously energetic democracy holds?
Why does that matter? If Taiwan’s population were to decide to reunify with the mainland to avoid the assured devastation from a war, how would the United States react? Would we understand? Would we try changing the minds of Taiwan’s leaders?
As I noted last week, few things in the world are inevitable. The Financial Times story hardly argues that Taiwan would welcome reunification but the sentiment 100 miles off the Chinese coast is fare more complicated that simply that of a democracy under siege from a huge power seeking to coerce it. The particular conditions of the process might matter if the people feared losing not only their standard of living but their lives.
We need be more thoughtful as we consider how another democracy could evolve in the future. After all, Taiwan’s democracy, raucus and hyperbolic as it is, celebrates political participation in a marvelous manner. But we are not Taiwan nor are they us and we have no guarantees how their future desires will evolve over the long, long term. FIN
Katherin Hille, ‘Tsai Ing-wen’s US trip: the deepening political divide in Taiwan’, Financial Times, retrieved at https://www.ft.com/content/b625d080-5d48-4374-b1d7-9d668530eb3a
Wang Qi, ‘Ma Ying-jeou calls for cross-straits peace, revitalizing Chinese nation on first day in Nanjing’, Global Times. 28 March 2023, retrieved at https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202303/1288130.shtml
Evelyn Cheng and Yen Nee Lee, ‘New Chart shows China Could Overtake the U.S. as the World’s Largest Economy Earlier than Expected’, cnbc.com, 1 February 2021, retrieved at https://www.cnbc.com/2021/02/01/new-chart-shows-china-gdp-could-overtake-us-sooner-as-covid-took-its-toll.html