Beijing’s Blind Spot on Taiwan

During the middle years of the last decade, I had a front-row seat to what seemed like potential epochal change unfurling across East Asia.

Landing in Taipei in March 2014, I witnessed some of the most stirring moments of what had come to be known as the Sunflower Movement, a series of gigantic rallies of civil society and—most of all—young people who filled the streets to affirm their right to their identity as Taiwanese and their attachment to democratic rule.

Visiting Hong Kong two years later, I reported on what would be the last big push in a historic wave of political protests in that unique city. These had begun in 2014 under the name of the Umbrella Movement, which centered on demands for reforms of the tightly controlled electoral system, and culminated in 2016, with big pro-independence rallies for the first time in Hong Kong’s history.

On the surface, there were only loose links between these two sets of protests, but underneath, the connections were profound. Both were aimed at ensuring the survival of a degree of political autonomy and cultural space in the face of mounting pressures from what was then still a fast-rising People’s Republic of China.

The interests that these two vastly smaller societies held in common were more than passing matters of the moment, though. In a way seldom seen in the world, the one, Hong Kong, stood out in real time as a living laboratory, or test case, for the other, Taiwan. And in this experiment, from the perspective of both of these places, China was failing.

When Chinese rule over Hong Kong was restored in 1997, ending the 156-year run of British colonial dominion, the political agreement for a peaceful handover from London was achieved through some remarkably supple diplomacy by both sides. There had never been any question that Hong Kong was part of China, or that Beijing could have reasserted its rule over this southeastern extremity with minimal force if it chose to. In fact, during parts of the late 20th century, a cakewalk like this would have been applauded by many Hong Kongers.

Hoping to win over many more people, both in Hong Kong and around the world, Deng Xiaoping wisely resisted this temptation, though, and endorsed a novel proposition. It was called “one country, two systems,” which meant that Hong Kong would revert to China but be allowed broad autonomy in its self-government, economic management, and—let’s be candid here—semi-democratic rule. This qualification is necessary because Hong Kong was no democracy throughout most of the British colonial period and was only a partial and embryonic one at the time of the handover.

Deng and China won enormous credit for accepting such an arrangement, and for many it fed hopes that in time, China itself might become open to greater democracy. This was wishful thinking all along, though, and as the years rolled by, not only did China fail to evolve in that direction, but its tolerance for Hong Kong’s relative openness and striking freedom of expression disappeared.

In time, this led to a tightening of the noose around Hong Kong, the protests of the Umbrella Movement, and what is now a thoroughly boxed in and intimidated civil society, as well as a population that has been brought to heel. Hong Kong’s elections became increasingly less free as the city’s political class has serviced Beijing’s agenda for the former colony. To assure popular compliance, the Hong Kong government has even encouraged Cathay Pacific airlines to fly in so-called patriots —Hong Kongers living in mainland China—to vote in local elections.

Things like this have fed a profound deepening of disbelief in Taiwan in the idea that there could be any kind of deal with Beijing that would preserve adequate space for the people of that island to live as they wish—meaning with democratic procedures, the rule of law, and free expression.

This is one side of the three-sided puzzle presented by the Taiwanese election that will be held this weekend to determine the successor of the island’s outgoing two-term leader, Tsai Ing-wen. There are two main parties in contention. Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party, which has a history of flirting with outright independence but which more recently  become more of a status quo force. Historically, its big rival, the Kuomintang, leaned toward “reunification” with the mainland. It, too, though, has become more status quo-oriented, supporting continued autonomy for Taiwan while advocating better political and economic relations with China.

The second side involves a very different aspect of local identity. Over the last two decades, there has been a steady growth in the belief that the Taiwanese are a true and unique people, not merely a politically distant offshoot of the Chinese whose separation resulted from a quirky artifact of China’s mid-20th-century civil war.

This happened when Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist Party defeated the Kuomintang party of Chiang Kai-shek in 1949. With large numbers of his partisans, Chiang took refuge on Taiwan, where he set up a kind of Chinese government in exile. Because people who trace their ancestry from mainland China predominate in Taiwan, for decades so did a sense of Chinese identity.

With Taiwanese prosperity and democracy, and its roots in the lifting of martial law in 1987, though, each new generation of young people has come to feel more and more Taiwanese—and far less Chinese.

Paradoxically, to Beijing’s frustration, the more that it insists that Taiwan is an irrevocable part of China nowadays, the more it feeds this sentiment among the island’s increasingly worldly youth, who are also proud that their society has emerged as a globally indispensable leading manufacturer of advanced microchips.

This is a much more complicated problem than China seems to grasp. How does one stop the organic growth of what is in effect a national identity? A resort to rhetoric about China’s impressive new might, which stirs many hearts at home, only sounds threatening and alienating to younger Taiwanese. An appeal based on the notion of China’s dizzying economic rise is also a sword that cuts two ways. It is good to have strong economic ties with a behemoth like China, so long as it doesn’t mean being utterly dominated. How to parse the two? Moreover, China is no longer growing at rates that once made its rise seem irresistible. Indeed, more and more, its economic model looks as suspect as its political one.

The third side of this triangle is largely international. Neither China nor the United States is willing to speak with complete candor about the stakes in the Taiwan Strait. China’s arguments about Taiwan having always belonged to the mainland have important flaws that few in Beijing have patience to discuss. In fact, for a country with a past as venerable as China’s, the history of its direct control of the island is strikingly brief. Taiwan has been ruled in part or in whole by the Spanish, the Dutch, and the Japanese—the latter leaving a deep imprint on local culture, government, and even infrastructure.

In reality, much of this rhetoric is political theater. A major motivation for China in its desire to control Taiwan is its deep and long-standing aspiration to preside as the dominant power in East Asia, and even falling short of declaring independence, Taiwan’s flinty self-assertiveness stands as one of Beijing’s biggest impediments.

Similarly, the United States often invokes Taiwan’s democracy as the leading reason for its support of the island. Taiwanese democracy is genuine and admirable, but this, too, amounts to less than complete candor. China complains that the United States seeks to “contain” it. With the exception of cutting-edge technologies that have clear military applications, I largely take Washington at its word when it frequently insists that it does not seek to stop China’s rise. There is another enormous caveat to this, though, and its name is Taiwan.

If China were to take over the island, its navy and other forces would have free rein in the Western Pacific in ways that would vastly diminish U.S. influence and power in that important part of the world, and the repercussions of this would be enormous. Every U.S. ally in Asia would begin to reconsider its reliance on the United States as an economic partner and security guarantor.

So where does this leave the Taiwanese as they vote? With no easy solutions. Opinion polls suggest a modest to narrow win for the candidate from Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party, Lai Ching-te, who would be expected to continue the pro-autonomy-but-not-quite-independence politics of the outgoing government, and this would greatly displease Beijing.

Taiwanese voters may balance things by electing an opposition-led parliament. This would represent a cautious check on provocative initiatives by Lai, who has flirted with pro-independence stances in the past. Because a push for independence, even if it were merely rhetorical, could bring about military action by Beijing, a split outcome like this might be the rare sort of thing in today’s world that pleases both the United States and China, too.