Xi’s Taiwan rhetoric backfired at the ballot box

Chinese officials tout “Xi Jinping Thought on Diplomacy” as “epoch-making” and praise the “great insight” of Xi’s “Global Security Initiative.” When it comes to Taiwan, however, Xi appears stuck with a misguided and failing policy as underscored by the results of the island’s January 13 elections. 

China’s policy holds that Taiwan must subordinate itself to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) government in Beijing, handing over control of its foreign relations. Until this happens, the PRC will inflict pain through military pressure, economic coercion and restriction of Taiwan’s international privileges.

In the latest example, Nauru announced on January 15 that it would sever diplomatic relations with Taipei and recognize Beijing. The PRC presumably engineered the switch as a reaction to Taiwan’s voters selecting the presidential candidate least preferred by Beijing.

If it determines that voluntary unification has become impossible, China will go to war to forcibly annex Taiwan. PRC officials continue to say they will implement in Taiwan the same “one country, two systems” principle under which Hong Kong authorities are now imprisoning peaceful protestors, including some who merely stood outside holding blank pieces of paper.

Apparently thinking it would sweeten the deal, China’s ambassador to France said in 2022 that, after unification, China would carry out “re-education” in Taiwan. This “choose me or I’ll kill you” approach had a predictable counterproductive influence on Taiwan’s elections.

There was considerable unhappiness in Taiwan with the relatively anti-China Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). The opposition accused the DPP leadership of corruption and suppression of dissent. Young adults are disillusioned with the government’s failure to make housing more affordable. The supply of electricity has become unreliable because of the DPP’s controversial aversion to nuclear power.

Many Taiwan citizens strongly support the principle that no one political party should monopolize governance, and the DPP has held the presidency for the last eight years.

Despite these headwinds, current Vice President Lai Ching-te, the DPP candidate, won the presidential election, largely on the strength of the DPP’s anti-China stance.

Both the PRC government and Taiwan’s other large political party, the Kuomintang (KMT), argued that voting for Lai and the DPP was tantamount to voting for war. But Lai’s victory indicates this argument did not sufficiently persuade Taiwan’s voters that drawing closer to China would increase their security.

Surveys of public opinion on Taiwan show overwhelming, and increasing, support for two ideas:

• First, most of Taiwan’s people identify as “Taiwanese” rather than “Chinese.” They see themselves as a distinct nationality with a different political culture from that of mainland Chinese.
• Second, they want the status quo of a de facto but not de jure independent Taiwan to continue indefinitely. Beijing exercises no authority over Taiwan, but Taiwan continues to honor the Republic of China constitution, which stipulates links to mainland China.

The KMT proposed seeking peace with China through dialogue, economic integration and affirming that Taiwan is a part of China.

Lai and the DPP maintained that closer economic links with China would endanger Taiwan’s autonomy and put at risk its civil liberties. Instead, they called for economic diversification away from China, more robust military defenses, and closer relationships with the United States and other democracies to protect Taiwan from takeover by the PRC.

The presidential election result suggests Taiwan’s people believe that the political costs of further economic entanglement with China are outweighing the financial benefits. They also appear willing to endure continued cross-Strait tensions as the price of maintaining their identity and freedoms.

These outcomes are the exact opposite of what Beijing wishes its policy would achieve.

Framing the issue

The foundation of policy-making is rhetorical construction – how political elites frame an issue. Inevitably, any framing includes certain assumptions.

Erroneous assumptions lead to bad policy. There are many historical examples.

Japan wrongly assumed in 1941 that America was such a decadent and flaccid society that a sudden and successful strike against US military power in the Pacific would cause Washington to accede to a Japanese sphere of influence in the Asia-Pacific region.

Instead, the US immediately committed itself to fighting a war to roll back the Japanese empire and uproot Japan’s government and political system.

During the Cold War, the US military attempted to prevent the Vietminh from taking over South Vietnam based on fears that a shared communist ideology would make Vietnam a puppet of China and that the communization of Vietnam would lead to the same result in Thailand and Japan.

Today, however, Thailand and Japan remain US allies, and the ruling Communist Party of Vietnam government seeks US assistance to resist Chinese domination.

China’s current policy toward Taiwan is based on three questionable assumptions.

First, Xi has specifically said the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation,” defined as Chinese achieving a high material standard of living and acquiring sufficient military power to protect the country from molestation by foreigners (the old idea of “rich country, strong army”), cannot be complete without China’s “reunification” with Taiwan.

This is untrue. Taiwan’s being de facto independent has not prevented the standard of living of mainland Chinese from rising dramatically in recent decades.  Nor has an autonomous Taiwan interfered with the PRC bulking up militarily to the point where no country wants to fight China.  The argument works only as a syllogism: not controlling Taiwan is a threat to China’s security if Taiwan is defined as Chinese territory.

In a second flawed assumption, Xi and other PRC officials say the problem is not “Taiwan compatriots,” but rather “outside forces and the few separatists.” Blaming foreign agitation for political unrest is a common theme in official PRC commentaries about Xinjiang and Hong Kong, and Beijing applies it to Taiwan, also.

But this narrative seems willfully ignorant of the public opinion surveys in Taiwan indicating that strong and rising majorities do not self-identify as “Chinese” and never want Taiwan to politically unify with China.

Finally, the official PRC position, summarized in a 2022 Chinese government white paper, asserts as an “indisputable fact” that “Taiwan has belonged to China since ancient times.”  This “fact,” however, is quite disputable.

Taiwan’s indigenous inhabitants are not ethnically Chinese. In pre-modern times, Chinese governments saw Taiwan as barbarian territory and as a haven for pirates and political dissidents. The rulers in Beijing wished Taiwan didn’t exist. Spain and Holland controlled parts of the island in the 1600s. China’s Qing Dynasty government annexed Taiwan in 1684 mainly to prevent its use as a rebel base.

Taiwan was a Japanese colony for the 50 years prior to the end of World War II.  Mao Zedong himself supported independence for Taiwan while it was under Japanese occupation, changing his position only after the rival KMT government claimed sovereignty over Taiwan during the 1943 Cairo Conference.

With the KMT’s defeat in the Chinese Civil War and expulsion from the mainland, Taiwan became the seat of the Republic of China government. The CCP regime has never ruled Taiwan.

The most objectionable part of Beijing’s claim to sovereignty over Taiwan is that it disregards the principle of self-determination. The vast majority of Taiwan’s people don’t want to be PRC subjects. Asserting a right to seize a country against the will of its inhabitants seems an anachronism in the 21^st century.

Xi inherited what has become a disastrous rhetorical framework – not only misconceived but continuously and widely reiterated through the Chinese education system and media. Today it entraps the CCP leaders. 

They have, in effect, proclaimed that they are not worthy to rule if they “lose” Taiwan. According to a Taiwan media report, when Xi met with KMT leader Hung Hsiu-chu in 2016, he expressed the fear that “the Communist Party would be overthrown by the people” if his government failed to stop Taiwan from becoming formally independent.

The PRC’s current approach to Taiwan not only deepens the conviction of Taiwan’s people that they never wish to be ruled from Beijing; it also potentially obligates Chinese leaders to start a war even if they do not believe they can win.

As formidable as the Chinese armed forces have become in recent years, it is far from certain the PRC would win a cross-Strait war against probable US and very likely Japanese intervention.

Credible simulations run by the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington in 2022 found that both US and Chinese forces would suffer heavy losses; China would devastate – but fail to conquer – Taiwan; and the CCP would be in danger of ouster at home.

How to escape the trap

Both inside China and externally, the PRC leadership could and should begin to dismantle its rhetorical construct of the China-Taiwan relationship.

If it should wish to do so, the Chinese government could aim for something akin to the relationships between other pairs of states with large communities that share culture and ethnicity, such as the United States and Canada, Australia and New Zealand or China and Singapore.

Substantively, a new narrative could discontinue China’s claim to owning Taiwan. Instead, it could emphasize points such as these:

• China recognizes that current political and legal arrangements are the result of historical events and will take a long time to settle.
• Regardless of these circumstances, much of the population of Taiwan is unalterably “Chinese” by way of ancestry and culture.
• China therefore supports and celebrates Taiwan’s successes as Chinese civilizational success.
• China welcomes additional cooperation with Taiwan, and confidently looks forward to demonstrating to Taiwan the benefits of closer integration. 

This would flip the game to China’s advantage, with positive spillover effects in China’s relationships with the US and other countries.

Alas, Xi seems either unwilling or unable to escape from the trap his party manufactured.

Reports in early 2023 said Xi had assigned CCP ideologue Wang Huning to formulate a new principle for China’s Taiwan policy to replace “one country, two systems.” A year later, Beijing has not announced even a superficial change in a Taiwan policy that serves the PRC so badly.

Denny Roy is a senior fellow at the East-West Center, Honolulu.