Nearly 75 years ago, China’s civil war ended. Mao Zedong’s Communists conquered the Chinese mainland; the defeated Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island of Taiwan. Technically, that war continues. No peace agreement was signed, neither side officially recognizes the other, and Beijing regularly threatens to forcibly “reunite” with what it insists is a wayward province. Bent on that geopolitical goal, China has been ramping up its military and economic provocations, increasing its naval presence around Taiwan and sending warplanes on near-daily forays across the maritime median line separating China from Taiwan.
In addition to pursuing its debatable territorial claim, Beijing engages in this bullying because the island, with its population of 23 million, exemplifies what its Communist rulers cannot abide: a functioning Chinese democracy. (This is also why China has snuffed out demands for political freedom and universal suffrage in Hong Kong.) Indeed, the Economist Intelligence Unit rates Taiwan as the freest society in Asia and the 10th-freest worldwide. Freedom House calls Taiwan “free,” scoring it higher for political rights and civil liberties than the United States and Britain.
All of these attributes will be on display Saturday, when Taiwan holds its eighth direct presidential election, a competitive affair whose outcome is crucial to the future of global politics — and impossible to predict.
China’s belligerence is intended to influence the result, to be sure. The goal is to scare Taiwanese voters into supporting candidates who favor deepening ties toward China. China used the same tactic before Taiwan’s first free election, in 1996, test-firing missiles near the island’s two main ports (and provoking a near-confrontation with the United States). China’s attempted coercion backfired: President Lee Teng-hui of the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), hated by Beijing for flirting with pro-independence sentiment, won in a landslide.
Chinese pressure is likely to fail this time, too. The campaign to succeed the term-limited incumbent, President Tsai Ing-wen, has been hard-fought among three candidates. The front-runner in early polls was Vice President William Lai of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party, whom Beijing’s propaganda labels a dangerous separatist. Beijing’s preferred candidate has been Hou Yu-ih of the KMT, which has modified its policies to be more Beijing-friendly. A wild card candidate is former Taipei mayor Ko Wen-je of the newly formed Taiwan People’s Party, who has emphasized local livelihood issues over cross-strait relations but wants to avoid confrontation with Beijing. The three’s differences are more nuanced than fundamental, since all have disavowed formal independence for Taiwan and largely favor maintaining the status quo: de facto sovereignty.
There is another reason for China’s refusal to accept Taiwanese democracy: It came about because of a peaceful transition from authoritarianism. In the first decades after China’s civil war, the two governments across the Taiwan Strait were both ruled by single authoritarian political parties. Taiwan went through a “white terror” campaign of political repression. And yet, with U.S. support, it ended martial law roughly four decades ago — expanding personal freedoms, allowing opposition parties, lifting military censorship and reckoning openly with the past.
That last one — honesty about the past — is especially worrisome for China’s Communists, who presided over decades of violent purges, chaotic political campaigns and economic backwardness before embarking on an economic opening and reform in 1979. (The bloody crackdown at Tiananmen Square in 1989 is a subject Beijing is especially loath to explore.) But no political opening followed, despite the widespread hope in the West that, integrated into the global economy and with a growing, wealthier middle class, the People’s Republic might evolve politically — as Taiwan did. In 2012, a Chinese premier who styled himself a reformist, Wen Jiabao, ventured that China’s move toward free elections was inevitable but only “gradually” — after citizens first showed they could vote responsibly for local offices. In hindsight, that was a kind of high watermark for liberalization: Xi Jinping came to power the same year and has since made himself essentially president for life, doubling down on a Mao-style, personality-driven dictatorship.
Tension across the strait might rise after the election, and, with wars still raging in Ukraine and the Middle East, some in the United States might be reluctant to get involved. But deterring Chinese designs on a democratic Taiwan is a vital American interest and a long-standing U.S. commitment. That commitment has become more essential strategically, as China has invested the fruits of economic growth in a military buildup and, more important morally, as Taiwanese democracy has flourished.
A successful election in Taiwan exposes the big lie at the heart of the Communist Party’s shifting claims to legitimacy: that Chinese people don’t really care about supposedly Western-style democracy and prefer allegedly efficient state-centered dictatorship. In that sense, it does not matter which candidate gets the most votes Saturday because Taiwan itself has already won.
