OPINION:
Taiwan today is under an existential threat of a mainland Chinese takeover — perhaps as never before — if Chinese President Xi Jinping’s July and October declarations vowing to reunify the “Motherland” and “smash” Taiwan’s growing independence movement are any indications.
Mr. Xi’s declarations in early October coincided with the People’s Liberation Army’s largest incursion ever into Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone; 148 jets and nuclear bombers skirted Taiwan’s coast. This month, Ely Ratner, assistant defense secretary for Indo-Pacific security affairs, testified before Congress that China is pursuing tactics of economic, cyber and military coercion while preparing for a potential attack against Taiwan. In late November, Mr. Xi reiterated to President Biden that America was “playing with fire” in its support for Taiwan, warning that “ideological demarcation” would accelerate the superpowers’ descent into another cold war.
I take these threats seriously because I’ve lived and taught in Taiwan and Beijing. In fact, during the 1970s, when Taiwan was perceived as both a bulwark against Maoist Communism and an exemplar of free-market economics, I lived in Taipei as a young journalist and Mandarin Chinese student.
My host family, the Jens, belonged to the Chinese Nationalist Kuomingtang (KMT) military class, at once fiercely loyal to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and perfectly cognizant of how China’s Civil War and prior invasion by the Japanese had produced horrific suffering on all sides. My adoptive Chinese mother, Mary Jen, described how she had prepared, as a “white” Chinese, to suffer interrogation and torture at the hands of the Red Army. She lost both parents in Civil War.
At the time, my university studies focused on Mao’s ideology and his concept of “uninterrupted revolution.” But then I learned that an estimated 20 million people had died during his Cultural Revolution, ostensibly to rid his country of elitists and class enemies. In Taiwan, I learned that ideologies have a price. Too often, they become thinly disguised masks of power and autocratic fantasy.
Today, China and its satellites are reeling in fantasy. China’s economy has slowed down, its military aggression has sped up, and Mr. Xi seeks to capitalize on U.S. military weaknesses and, potentially, the Biden administration’s reluctance to act firmly. Now that the CCP has cracked down on the “one country two systems” model in Hong Kong with its new security laws, Mr. Xi is ripe to talk “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan under the same model — and very likely, with the same result.
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen rejects Beijing’s overtures, although oppositional politics among Taiwan’s two major parties — the KMT or “blue coalition,” and Ms. Tsai’s “green” Democratic People’s Party — have produced real tension over how Ms. Tsai should handle Beijing’s repeated threats.
It’s easy to argue that Taiwan has become a mere pawn in a seven-decade ideological stalemate. But to me, the less familiar danger is that Taiwan is becoming a conceptual abstraction, so much so that most Americans, especially U.S. officials, know little to nothing about the realities of Taiwan life.
I’m talking about 23 million people who’ve grown under an entirely different set of values, political assumptions and core social structures. Almost all of them are progressive, focused on individual enterprise and tolerance for dissenting opinions.
Years ago, when I lived there, Taiwan was an extraordinarily open landscape filled with tea terraces, marble canyons and hardworking, jubilant people. The economy boomed with strong tax incentives for industrial growth, heavy emphasis on agrarian science and manufacturing, along with free elementary to junior high education. I recall teenage boys with crewcuts wearing military uniforms and girls dressed in navy uniforms walking to school holding hands. Little girls ran up to me to touch my long blond hair, calling me ‘golden dragon,’ asking questions about what America was all about.
Arguably, Taiwan today is a different entity — modernized but also vulnerable. Ms. Tsai’s declaration of Taiwan’s right to exist is a clear warning signal, not just to China but to the West, that peaceful reunification, given the ideological fault lines, is virtually impossible to achieve.
And it shouldn’t be achieved – at least not now. China’s repression is reason enough to believe it won’t allow Taiwan to steer its own course economically or politically. Beijing’s control means puppet control — and CCP’s resounding affirmation of Mr. Xi’s lifelong leadership is a good reason to believe that China is going backward, not emerging as a liberalized player in the 21st century.
Taiwan and the U.S. both need to affirm — unambiguously — their alliance, mutual pacts of defense and commercial exchange. Vague assurances of cross-strait “crisis” defense from the Biden administration are insufficient. Taiwan’s claim to sovereignty is indeed a proxy battle for the future of democracy worldwide. The island nation remains a bulwark of progressive values in a world increasingly run by despots. We should defend its right to exist and its ability to do so on its own terms.
• Arielle Emmett, Ph.D., is a U.S. Fulbright Scholar and Contributing Editor to Smithsonian Air & Space magazine. She returned from Africa in 2019 after studying Chinese Belt & Road infrastructure projects and their impact on Kenyan labor, economic welfare and human rights.
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