Taiwan elections
PLA asleep or awaiting?
The beautiful sunshine from Christmas day subsided into an extraordinarily dense fog over Spa Creek today, lifting only early afternoon. This makes us appreciate how pretty and unusual yesterday’s moderate temperatures were. We saw perhaps a dozen craft of various sorts, including Santa on a paddleboard (for which my lens was not available to capture him), out yesterday afternoon. I confidently predicted this morning we would see no one in the soupy conditions but, of course, someone proved me wrong about 1130 as a small powerboat came out of the fog into view. Shows what I know!
When Congress reconvenes next week, it confronts a raft of funding bills, immigration disagreements, and many other items requiring attention in an election year. I expect we will also hear a tad about Taiwan as that island’s presidential election is a mere fortnight from this coming Saturday.
I saw a couple of headlines over the weekend, both in stories circulating among a chat room, that perhaps surprised people. One was that Taiwan’s demographic challenges are every bit as bad as the mainland’s. All of Northeast Asia has similar demographics with fewer births, fewer males to serve in their militaries, and declining populations. Taiwan has known this for decades.
The other article noted that the mainland is holding back on its aggressive military threats against the island during this period, unlike several prior election periods. While CCP leaders back to Mao Zedong (born 130 years ago today) invariably harangue Taibei about separatists tendencies, its military intimidation coinciding with Taiwan’s free elections only commenced with the 1996 campaign for the presidency.
Chiang Ching-guo, son of the Guomindang (GMD) president Chiang Kai-shek, transitioned the island from a mainlander-centric dictatorship between 1949 (upon its establishment as the Republic of China, on Taiwan) to a more open but not fully elected political system by the late 1980s. Chiang appointed Li Denghui as vice president during his final presidential term. Upon taking the presidency Li after Ching-guo’s death early in 1988, the Taiwanese-born leader faced mounting public pressure to hold free and open elections for the presidency and the legislative yuan.
Running atop the GMD ticket in the first open election in 1996, Li faced China’s wrath at the suggestion of an election for the island’s leader in a state apart from the PRC. Ending the fiction of a single set of ideas about governing the people on both sides of the Strait led to the PRC actively intimidating Taiwan’s voters not to consummate the election.
In March 1996, President Clinton famously sent two carrier battlegroups to the area surrounding the island after the PLA launched missiles off both the southern and northern coasts in the weeks before the vote. Taiwan’s citizens ignored the mainland threats, facilitating Li Denghui’s victory as the first ever leader elected head of an ethnically Chinese state. Most observers believe the intensive modernisation of the People’s Liberation Army dates to the 1996 incident where Beijing believed Clinton humiliated CCP leadership.
Li showed his nationalist credentials in 1999 by reinforcing the distinction of Taiwan by discussing ‘state-to-state’ relations with the PRC. Neither Li nor any other Taiwanese president has ever categorically vowed that Taiwan was a sovereign nation but his remarks upset the mainland leadership dramatically. Li as a GMD member (until he was expelled in the early 2000s for his ties with Chen Shui-bien) still represented a party with a formal position that the Republic of Taiwan would reconquer the mainland while the Democratic Progressive Party, a rising opposition largely constituted by Taiwan-born rather than mainland-born Taiwanese, established and retains a formal plank in the party platform advocating independence.
Chen Sui-bien’s 2000 and 2004 narrow victories for the DPP both followed significant PLA harassment of the island during the election campaigns. Mainland leadership appeared to believe the adage that China is big and big states get what they want, a paraphrase of the Foreign Minister’s remarks regarding the South China Sea in 2010.
Chen hinted repeatedly at Taiwan’s separatism, though he similarly never advocated crossing Beijing’s ‘red line’ of declaring formal independence, a step triggering PLA response. Chen’s language caused much anxiety in Washington as well as Beijing, causing President George W. Bush to declare in the Rose Garden on 9 December 2003 that the United States did not seek anyone changing Taiwan’s status quo as a non-sovereign state.
A friendlier GMD president served between 2008 and 2016. Ma Ying-jeou opened travel options with the PRC, significantly enhanced trade ties under an economic framework agreement between Taiwan and the mainland, and met Xi Jinping in Singapore in 2015. Beijing warmed to Ma’s position, shown by the high number of mainland tourists who regularly visited the island during his presidency. At the same time, the PRC leadership never moderated their position that Taiwan cannot participate in international organisations requiring statehood as a condition for entry.
The PLA against intimidated the Taiwan electorate in both the 2016 and 2020 campaigns as the DPP candidate, Tsai Ing-wen, proved quite popular. Feared on the mainland for her long-time participation within the pro-independence party, Tsai has proven over her eight year tenure a far more pragmatic politician than many analysts anticipated. She never acquiesced to Beijing’s demands that she accept their interpretation of reunification as the sole acceptable option. She deftly navigated the impossibility of advocating dialogue between Taibei and Beijing predicated on reunification, thus found the PRC unwilling to discuss things with her. The previously opened channels with the mainland, such as tourism, largely closed with trade a notable exception.
Tsai also found how becoming the ‘object’ of Washington’s politics had a cost as well. She served as greater anxiety in Washington about a modernising PLA led to calls for greater aid to Taiwan—and the need for her nation to prepare far more effectively to defend itself against anticipated PLA aggression. Tsai also received visits by two Speakers of the House of Representatives. In 2022, Nancy Pelosi’s visit sparked PLA retaliation through greater aggressive PLAAF and PLAN activities near near the island. A visit the following year by Kevin McCarthy led to lesser PLA activities directly linked to his visit which occurred in a period of enhanced overall military attention to Taiwan. By all indications, the PRC simply feels both more confident and compelled to remind Taiwan of its weaknesses and the U.S. involvement elsewhere around the world.
Tsai has increased defense spending and advocated reforming the Taiwan military system but these are late moves for a nation witnessing a substantial modernisation project underway by its primary adversary seeking to bring about reunification under any means necessary.
The election polls are close in Taiwan this year as they have been in all of the prior elections. A vibrant democracy, the president wins by plurality rather than by majority. Currently a three man race divides the vote although there are indications that either the DPP under current Vice President Lai Ching-ti and GMD candidate Hou Yu-hi will ultimately win the vote with the newer party, Taiwan People’s Party under Ko Wen-je, appearing to fade.
The U.S. Congress will likely focus on Beijing’s role in intimidating Taiwanese during this election but, as in any democracy, the voters will focus primarily on domestic issues such as energy (the DPP is a green party), jobs, and national defense. Youth in Taiwan, a major unknown in this contest, appears less interested in the latter issue than the former two. Frustration with Taiwan’s priorities may be the only thing linking Washington and Beijing these days on this matter.
All of which reminds us that Taiwan is not the United States nor is it the PRC. It is an island of 24 million people with the 14th wealthiest country, in at least one poll, in the world living a hundred miles off the coast of a nation with which is has a strained but at least four hundred year history.
The mainland will never surrender its claims to Taiwan. The rhetoric has become too enmeshed in the national narrative of China’s successes—and possible failures. Taiwan independence is a genuine red line for the PRC as they have, under five generations of CCP leaders, boxed themselves into a corner where Taiwan is now a definition of the Party’s success in holding the nation together against malevolent forces from abroad aiming ‘to hurt the feelings of 1.3 billion Chinese’.
The PLA is capable of taking up the usual intimidating actions against the islanders at any point over the next 18 days. Or, it may be that the mainland recognises the people of Taiwan understand they live in a perilous place so they will choose their future without paying attention to Beijing’s actions. Or, perhaps the mainland has decided the United States is too thinly stretched as we support Ukraine and Israel while we seemingly tear ourselves apart at home. Leaders in Zhongnanhai may well believe we can no longer walk and chew gum at the same time with Taiwan less important to us than to them.
What we do know is that the Taiwan saga will continue. The bigger question is how important our commitment is to the people there and how long we are willing to adhere to that. Our track record is mixed. We are wobbling on Ukraine and Israel while we have proven keenly determined to support Korea for seven and a half decades. The difference is that Koreans stood up their own defenses in lock step with ours for all of those years. Ukraine and Israel worry about their own defenses but recent events in each cast doubts about the capabilities they have wrought.
Where do you see Taiwan in our future commitments? Why?
I welcome your thoughts on this column and any others. I hope you will circulate this if you find it useful for others as my point is always to expand dialogue on actions creating consequences.
Be well and be safe. FIN
Ben Blanchard, ‘Taiwan not seeing signs of large-scale military activity pre-election‘, Reuters.com, 25 December 2023, retrieved at https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/taiwan-not-seeing-signs-large-scale-chinese-military-activity-pre-election-2023-12-26/?utm
Staff writer, ‘Taiwan Ranked 14th-Richest Country’, TaipeiTimes.com, 26 December 2023, retrieved at https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/biz/archives/2023/12/26/2003811149