Under China's Darkening Shadow, Taiwan Is...
On the Global High Bar. Don't Look Down!
Reprinted from Air Mail December 9, 2023. With their permission and my thanks.
A Chinese invasion of Taiwan is neither immediate nor inevitable. This is what General Mark Milley, the just retired chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; Jake Sullivan, national-security adviser to President Biden; and Ambassador Raymond F. Burghardt, the former chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan, have all concluded in the last year.
Taiwan is an island democracy of 24 million people, with national elections coming in January. The People’s Republic of China, across the South China Sea, considers Taiwan a province of the mainland to be reclaimed. Timing to be determined.
From a distance, the question in Washington is when and how the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, will carry through on his commitment to absorb Taiwan—with military force, economic pressure, or (as was the case with Hong Kong) political machinations.
Berlin, Germany’s divided capital, was considered after World War II the potential spark for a superpower conflagration if the Soviet Union moved to take the western half of the city, surrounded by Communist East Germany, by force. Today it is Taiwan that is deemed (choose your cliché) a flash point, a trigger, a lit fuse for war on a massive scale if China should act against it. And as the producer of most of the world’s advanced semiconductor chips, Taiwan is a strategic asset on a scale far greater than its size.
Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel, on October 7, and the Gaza war that erupted with horrific violence, is a reminder that vulnerability in perilous locales around the globe should not be underestimated. Literally overnight, everything can change.
A few weeks ago, I arrived in Taipei, Taiwan’s bustling capital. A typhoon had just swept through, so it took a day or so for the streets to fill up, the young in T-shirts, sneakers, and baseball hats, the global uniform of their generation, older downtown shoppers at Chanel, Gucci, et al. For a big city, there was little graffiti and seemingly few panhandlers.
All this made pervasive predictions of a major crisis seem much less a concern than headlines like these did:
HOW CHINA’S MILITARY IS SLOWLY SQUEEZING TAIWAN, from the Financial Times.
TAIWAN’S IMPOSSIBLE CHOICE: BE UKRAINE OR HONG KONG, from The Wall Street Journal.
In fact, the article I kept coming back to on our visit was from The New York Times’s Business section, headlined FOR TAIWAN, A UNIQUE IDENTITY IS BEING FORGED IN THE KITCHEN.
I can attest that we had many memorable meals during our five-day stay. Two of the restaurants highlighted in the The New York Times—HoSu (Good Island) and Mountain and Sea House—were fully booked. We did get a table at nku (in English lettering), a bistro-style space with an open kitchen where the chef, Li-Han Lin, who had European training, carefully explained how ingredients had been adapted to Taiwanese fine dining. At the other end of the culinary scale was the endearing cacophony of the dumpling chain Din Tai Fung, where waits can be three hours and, as far as we could tell, cheerfully endured.
Today it is Taiwan that is deemed (choose your cliché) a flash point, a trigger, a lit fuse for war on a massive scale if China should act against it.
Taiwanese cooking defines its culture in the way that, for example, variations such as Cantonese and Szechuan do on the mainland.
A brief historical recap. In 1949, the Kuomintang (KMT), or Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, having lost a civil war to the Communists, fled to Taiwan in the expectation that in time the KMT would return to the mainland in victory. So, the early years of what was called the Republic of China were marked by a sense of impermanence and a rigid politics of martial law.
In time, especially after Chiang’s death, in 1975, and the departure of his wife, the formidable Madame Chiang, who died in New York in 2003 at 105, Taiwan gradually evolved, developing a vibrant economy and democratic processes. The current president, who is term-limited, is Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party. The next presidential election is next month, with the D.P.P.’s candidate, the vice president, ahead in the polls against both the KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party contenders.
Deciphering the stances of the two parties on the all-important issue of relations with the mainland, for an American visitor, risks missing nuances. Roughly, the D.P.P. is considered more of the independence party and the KMT is inclined toward closer integration with Beijing. Their differences in campaigns and legislation are discernible to voters, less so to a visitor.
But, as any number of the Taiwanese—including several of the country’s most important business figures and respected thinkers, writers, and historians—told us, the concept of a declaration of independence is unthinkable and unnecessary, as “we already have independence.” A forcible takeover by the mainland is dreaded. They said outright calls for independence “would not fill a room.”
In her National Day Address on October 10, President Tsai called for continuing “peaceful coexistence” with China.
“My administration has kept its promises and maintained the status quo,” she said. “We do not provoke, we do not act rashly, and we will absolutely not bow to pressure.”
Nuance is especially important. Take the visit last summer of former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi against the recommendation of the Biden administration and to the fury of Beijing, which ramped up military harassment in the surrounding seas to protest her visit—a response that transcended actual KMT or D.P.P. affiliation.
What we heard was “Thanks for the gesture,” but also variations of “Don’t poke the bear.” U.S. political-grandstanding support is appreciated up to a point but comes in second to confidence that, if or when there really is a challenge, the confusions of American politics will not slow the process of military backing.
American politicians of both parties have focused increasingly on tensions with China over the past few years—the new Cold War. The Taiwanese do not want friction to evolve into the self-fulfilling prophecy of conflict. In her National Day speech, President Tsai said that the pursuit of a mutually acceptable coexistence with Beijing “is not only the shared responsibility of Taiwan’s political parties; it is also an unavoidable historic responsibility and common mission across the strait.”
Politicians’ rhetoric on Taiwan’s fate is strikingly more dire in American politics than on the island itself.
A forcible takeover by the mainland is dreaded. We were told that outright calls for independence “would not fill a room.”
Not surprisingly, there are Taiwanese who maintain assets abroad, so that no matter what happens, they will have enough money to regroup. This is doubtless true of the business moguls, but a mathematics professor at National Tsing Hua University, who is originally from Malaysia, said that he regularly sends part of his salary back to Kuala Lumpur so that, he said, “if I ever have to run, I’ll be able to buy lunch when I get to safety.”
Like the professor, there are many Taiwanese who have arrived there from elsewhere in Asia, including those who fled the mainland with Chiang Kai-shek, in 1949, and their descendants. To understand how to parse identities when almost everyone is ethnically Chinese, consider the United Kingdom, where you can be British and also think of yourself as English, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish.
One of the reasons American visitors can have so many meaningful conversations in meetings and over meals is that their Taiwanese host may well have gone to Stanford, U.S.C., Georgetown, or Boston University and is sending his or her progeny back for similar educations.
Paradoxically, we were surprised to find English spoken haltingly in places where you might expect it to be smooth, such as hotels and banks. In a rush to meet one of Taiwan’s most important business leaders—we had been instructed firmly to be on time—we went to one of his many addresses and had to frantically search for someone who could direct us to the right one in English.
One explanation is that the coronavirus interfered with schooling. If that is the case, and the way Taiwan seems to work, it won’t take long for any shortcomings to be improved. Everything about Taiwan seems robust—even if the unspoken questions about the long term are real.
I was surprised to see that a Taiwanese political series, Wave Makers, with the animated spirit of The West Wing, made it to The Economist’s best of 2023 television lists. (The banter was so fast that I had trouble keeping up with the subtitles on Netflix.) I turned to my friend Ambassador Raymond F. Burghardt, whom I first met in Saigon 50 years ago at the start of his diplomatic career. His last, somewhat misleading title was director and chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan, because technically the U.S. doesn’t have formal ties with the island.
I asked Ray to give me his comments, and here is some of what he said:
“I agree with the administration mantra that a Chinese military assault on Taiwan is ‘neither immediate nor inevitable.’ I believe—and top officials in Taiwan also believe—that Xi Jinping is a rational actor.... Our task is to ensure that Xi continues to believe that a fast and decisive outcome cannot be achieved.”
“Continued deterrence will be a long, difficult, and expensive endeavor for Taiwan, the U.S., and our allies. It can succeed.”
In the meantime, Taiwan is well worth the trip. A warm welcome, superb cuisine, an impressive capital with beautiful country landscapes. A resort trip to the south had to be canceled because of the typhoon.
All in all, there is a sense that when the present is so satisfactory, living for expected catastrophe seems unreasonably stressful.
Berlin made it to the 21st century; the East, repressed but unscathed and re-united with the West. Taiwan’s objective is not to be re-united with the mainland but definitely to avoid being scathed.
