TAIPEI, Taiwan – The six-point victory of ruling party candidate Lai Ching-te in Taiwan’s presidential election last month removed a major concern for US policymakers trying to hold together a fragile coalition of Asian nations worried about China’s rising economic and military power.
A victory by the more China-friendly Hou You-yi, the candidate of the opposition Kuomintang, would have raised questions about a potential Taiwanese tilt towards Beijing, increasing the possibility that countries like Japan and South Korea might begin hedging their bets on the durability of the American commitment to countering China’s rise.
But even with the ostensible advantage of Lai’s election victory, the US still has a long way to go in ensuring the open-ended continuation of Taiwan’s de facto separate status from China, and with it, the survival of Washington’s Beijing-wary coalition. And the task became more difficult on Thursday with the election of the 2020 Kuomintang presidential candidate Han Kuo-yu as speaker of the new parliament.
Together with upgrading its own long-neglected military deterrent in the Indo-Pacific region, the US faces the challenge of convincing Taiwan’s government and people to begin taking the question of national resilience much more seriously than before, particularly in the realm of defense planning.
This will not be easy. Not only is Taiwan plagued by serious friction between Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party and the island’s Kuomintang-dominated military establishment, but large portions of its 23.5 million-strong population remain inured to China’s threat to their democratic freedoms, preferring to believe either that Beijing will never attack, or that the US will come to their rescue, obviating the need for urgent defense measures.
This laissez-faire attitude makes Taiwan the odd man out in the trio of American allies whose democratic systems are under serious assault from authoritarian regimes, the other two being Israel and Ukraine. Both Jerusalem and Kyiv have already made considerable sacrifices to protect themselves against their respective antagonists – Iranian-backed proxies in the case of Israel, Russia in the case of Ukraine – but Taiwan in key respects is widely seen in Washington as not pulling its weight, at least not to the extent the U.S. would like to see.
A comprehensive program to help Taiwan meet China’s considerable challenge would almost certainly feature far-reaching changes to the island’s military structure. But it would also have to include concrete measures to foster a civil society fully engaged in confronting the existential threat to the island’s future – not an easy task, particularly in light of the belief among some influential Taiwanese that outright capitulation is the only viable response to the Chinese threat.
This approach was given full-throated voice on January 10 when former Taiwan president and Kuomintang stalwart Ma Ying-jeou told the German state-owned broadcaster Deutsche Welle that Taiwan could never effectively defend itself against a Chinese attack. Ma mocked the idea that the United States would ever intervene.
Rather than building up its own defense capabilities or counting on Washington’s military support, Ma said, it made far better sense for Taiwanese to trust in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s supposedly benign intentions about their island’s future. Ma’s views reflect a significant body of opinion within the KMT.
Significantly, this China-submissive mindset could well come to dominate Taiwan’s newly elected legislature, where the DPP lost its majority and the prospect of close cooperation between the Kuomintang and an anti-DPP third party threatens any Lai spending measures aimed at deepening the deterrent capability of the Taiwan military.
That prospect received a significant boost on February 1 when Han Kuo-yu was elected parliamentary speaker. Han, who has, like Ma, called for closer ties between Taiwan and China, is a controversial figure. At the time he ran for president in 2020 he was serving as the mayor of the southern city of Kaohsiung. But a few months after his failed presidential bid he lost a recall vote and was ousted from the municipal post.
With the pro-China Han in charge of the legislature, the prospect of adding backbone to Taiwan’s flaccid defense posture will become harder still, and pressure could grow on a beleaguered population to reach a political accommodation with Xi Jinping’s ever-threatening Chinese behemoth.
This new political dynamic in Taiwan creates a serious problem for Washington in pursuing its goal of bolstering the incoming Lai government and solidifying a US-led coalition of Beijing-skeptical nations in the Indo-Pacific region. The US is still likely to push Taiwan to adopt far-reaching reforms of its prevailing defense doctrine, while simultaneously inculcating a deeper-seated sense of civic responsibility among a population that remains relatively blasé about the threat from China.
In the first instance, this would almost certainly mean working to wean the Taiwan military away from its addiction to flashy military platforms like F-16 fighter jets and domestically manufactured submarines in favor of asymmetric systems capable of surviving a Chinese attack.
But in a deeper sense it would also require securing agreement on the creation of well-trained local militias within the framework of a reformed reserve system. Most important of all, it would also involve further extending Taiwan’s mandatory military service, which only recently was increased from a virtually meaningless four months to a year.
Many Taiwanese will oppose this kind of change, not only within the Kuomintang and in the military itself, where conservative thinking predominates, but also among a significant portion of the population at large, where skepticism about the Chinese threat becoming reality is very deeply rooted.
With a weak incoming president and a divided government, the legislature dominated by pro-China elements, convincing Taiwanese of all political stripes to recognize – and respond to – Xi Jinping’s’ implacable threat to their democratic freedoms and separate political status, has now become an increasingly onerous challenge.
Peter Enav is the editor of the Taiwan Strait Risk Report and a former Associated Press Taipei bureau chief. Mike Chinoy is a consulting editor at the Taiwan Strait Risk Report, CNN’s former senior Asia correspondent and the author of Assignment China: An Oral History of American Journalists in the People’s Republic.
