OPINION:
On the last day of 2022, Chinese leader Chairman Xi Jinping extended an olive branch to Taiwan in his New Year’s address: “The people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait are members of one and the same family.”
Mr. Xi’s reference to Taiwan was uncharacteristically friendly and thus unusual, given his track record of hard-line dealing with Taiwan and the West alike.
Bringing Taiwan back under its control has been China’s national dream for over 70 years. In the past three decades, China’s robust economic growth had lent its ruling Chinese Communist Party the illusion that Taiwan would voluntarily embrace the mainland for the sake of economic prosperity. This confidence grew stronger with time, especially from 2008 to 2016, when Ma Ying-jeou was Taiwan’s president. A peaceful reunification seemed a sure thing in the eyes of China’s leaders.
But things changed unexpectedly for China since 2018. China found itself struggling with ever-stronger headwinds coming from all directions. With its economic and international political leverage over Taiwan diminishing, China was left with no other choice but to turn to military action as its last resort to keep the reunification scheme alive. China’s increased airspace incursion into Taiwan’s territory and more frequent military drills in the South China Sea marked the drastic change in China’s approach to Taiwan.
Before its downturn began in 2018, China’s Taiwan strategy banked on building up its military capacity further for an ultimate takeover of Taiwan by force with absolute military superiority. Back then, time was on China’s side, as the entire world was expecting China to surpass the U.S. as the world’s largest economy. But the series of setbacks since 2018 not only tanked China’s economy but also put China’s military dominancy dream in danger.
China once viewed itself as the third-strongest military power, after the U.S. and Russia (the Russian Federation and its predecessor, the USSR). Russia’s struggle in the war with Ukraine since it invaded that country last February made China think twice about its own military capacity and about the probability of losing military superiority over Taiwan in the near future.
With a new era of China-Taiwan and China-West relationships unfolding, the only way for China to mitigate its down spiral is to make Taiwan halt its military readiness process and buy time for China to regain its superiority. And this is where Mr. Xi’s Taiwan-friendly speech came from and what it meant to achieve.
China has used this strategy repeatedly in the past to fool its adversaries in order to gain enough strength to turn against them. Its honeymoon with the USSR ended with the 1960s’ breakup. Its sweet relationships with the U.S. and Japan led to China’s predatory trade practices that have become so common and intolerable to the West in recent years. And its accommodating policies, designed to lure capital and skills from Taiwan in the early needing phase of its economic reform in the 1980s and ’90s, helped China grow so rich later that it waved its cash at the people of Taiwan: Surrender your liberty and come grab the wealth!
For China, Taiwan’s presence is a constant reminder of the existence of a hellish state ruled by the CCP in a progressing world. China’s desire to take Taiwan is not because it wants Taiwan’s wealth and territory, as part of its South China Sea territory claim strategy, or to just use the nationalist zeal to quench rising domestic unrest, although all three are valid explanations. The real motive behind it is that China is desperate to erase the striking contrast between the two sides with the same cultural road.
A free Taiwan is the biggest challenge to the CCP’s claim that its goal of staying in power is to bring prosperity to the land and to the people. And a free Taiwan is a deafening manifesto that a prosperous, democratic society can be successfully built and enjoyed by Chinese people, contrasting with what the CCP has being trying hard to convince the people in China that the universally accepted concept of democracy is not suitable and thus not good for China.
For Taiwan, if deprived of liberty, will be just one of the other destroyed territories of China (e.g., Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, etc.) in all aspects (culture, language, environment, trust, faith, etc.). And without liberty, Taiwan would no longer be Taiwan, and its prosperity would wither quickly, just as it has in Hong Kong.
While the world is nervously monitoring China’s aggressive maneuver aimed at disarming the morale of the people of Taiwan, China’s CCP knows that all of this aggression is driven by a deep fear of the very existence of the free and prosperous Taiwan.
• Daniel Jia is the founder of the consulting firm DJ Integral Services. He writes analytical reports on public-related matters, with special focus on U.S.-China and Taiwan-China relations. There is no conflict of interest to be disclosed.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.