Opinion
Taiwan’s elections next month will once more focus attention on the difficulty of any future move by Beijing to absorb Taiwan.
James CurranInternational editor
Regardless of the result of the January 13 Taiwanese election, it is almost certain Chinese Communist Party leadership in Beijing has never given serious thought to the risks of absorbing 20 million Taiwanese into the coastal, corporate, industrial and cultural life of China.
This is not an argument to not care about Taiwan. Neither does it claim special knowledge of President Xi Jinping’s intentions nor that reunification is inevitable.
The Taiwanese elections in less than a month will again bring to the fore powerful issues related to identity Bloomberg
But anything other than a relatively peaceful absorption of Taiwan into China will likely prove deeply problematic for the current leadership in Beijing. And the armed options for reunification, which could escalate quickly into a possibly nuclear war and devastate Taiwan and much of East Asia, are too horrendous for Beijing to contemplate at present, or unless the leadership was under severe internal pressure.
But the question is worth raising: are Chinese leaders capable of understanding the nature of the political system that has evolved in Taiwan, and would that undermine the positive equation they calculate for integration? Do they comprehend the real risk to following through on this stated ambition?
For a Taiwan inside China might become a focus for dissent and potentially a Trojan horse over time. The cultural assumptions of the Taiwanese would be difficult to suppress: freedom of speech, travel, social media expression, capitalist strength in the economy and a lack of tolerance for state financial institutions directed from the mainland. These assumptions are now generations deep, including within the Kuomintang.
Taiwan is already part of the corporate and industrial life of China, and doubtless if reunification came it would appropriate Taipei’s world leading semiconductors for its own national purposes. That would be a serious negative for Taiwan and form the core of business resistance.
But fundamentally this relates to the issue of what it means to be Chinese.
Xi and some of those around him may not wish to confront the fact that Chinese communities can become genuine democracies.
Their assumption is that blood will out and that different political systems, as in the case of Hong Kong, can be absorbed. But it is not certain the apparent Han tolerance of authoritarian government will predominate when it comes to Taiwan. For the Taiwanese to give up freedoms they have become used to would not be easy.
The desire of so many Han Chinese inside China for change was shown at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, and though that movement for change was brutally crushed, it has not entirely disappeared, as protests over COVID-19 lockdowns showed. Where many in China give public assent to the direction in which the party is taking the country and the economy, private dissent remains.
It means there remains fertile ground for China to move to something different even if they don’t know what it might be at this point.
For now, however, Xi is going in the opposite direction: entrenching more centralised authority while struggling with the other side of the contract: economic advance.
Taiwan’s Vice President Lai Ching-te is the current front-runner for January’s election. AP
So he is caught in something of a cleft stick. On top of this comes the regression in women’s rights in China, seen most clearly in the recent call from Xi for women to either have babies or return to the home to care for children and the elderly. That comes on top of a clampdown in recent years where, as The New York Times reported, discussion of sexual harassment, gender violence and discrimination have been silenced on social media.
Bonnie Glasser, who manages the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund, wrote recently that “Domestic support for a potential bloody war over Taiwan might not last long. Because of China’s now-lifted one-child policy, its armed forces are mostly composed of sons with no siblings. Their parents expect those soldiers to support them in old age and may take to the streets if casualties were to rise”.
The question here also relates to Taiwan’s intellectual ties with the world outside China, particularly the United States, where ties are deep. Yet, it is not clear at all how deep are these kinds of intellectual connections with Australia.
It should be remembered that despite the generosity of the Hawke government to Chinese students studying in Australia at the time of the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989, the bulk of those students involved in the protests in Beijing headed west to Europe and the United States, not south – not even to Singapore. This time the Hong Kongers have in big numbers gone to Taiwan.
What appears not to shift is the persistent finding in Taiwanese polls that more than three fourths of the Taiwanese population want the status quo with China to continue: they do not want to join mainland China.
Lai Ching-te, the current vice president of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is currently ahead in the polls.
While Lai recently told Bloomberg that “we don’t want to be enemies” with China, this will not suffice for Beijing, which wants a reaffirmation of the so-called “1992 consensus” that Taiwan is part of China.
And for all the talk about Lai’s disciplined rhetoric, Beijing will recall too that only in July, during a speech to supporters in eastern Taiwan, Lai said he wanted the Taiwanese president one day in the future to be able to do just as the leaders of Japan and South Korea do: enter the Oval Office in Washington to greet the American president.
Little wonder Beijing describes him as a “troublemaker”.
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