Written by Daniel Jia.
Image credit: Flags of the Cross-Strait entities.jpg by Supreme Dragon. Wikimedia: CC BY-SA 4.0 DEED.
Taiwan’s 2024 presidential election has concluded. The Taiwanese people have elected the China-defiant candidate as the new president. For Taiwan, the results of the election are important. But what is more important, in view of the presence of China’s meddling with Taiwan’s election, is to lay out new strategies to mitigate China’s interference in the future.
Introduction
China’s efforts to interfere in Taiwan’s election are of no surprise. “Reunification with Taiwan” has always been its political and nationalist goal after the Chinese Communist Party (CPP) took power in 1949. Since Taiwan’s first presidential election in 1996, China has tried for nearly 30 years to steer the outcome of Taiwan’s elections toward China’s goal of “reunification” with the self-ruled democratic island state.
With the 2024 general election approaching, China launched its latest reunification campaign, pressuring China-based Taiwanese businesses to support the China-pacifying Kuomingtang (KMT) and mobilising China-sympathizing Taiwanese on the soil of Taiwan to vote against the Taiwan-centred Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
CCP Chairman Xi Jinping proclaimed an inevitable reunification with Taiwan in his New Year’s address to the nation on December 31. Xi’s “reunification” in this context is a euphemism for a “take over by force”. This is because China under the CCP would not abandon its hostile stance on democracy and freedom in the foreseeable future. In contrast, Taiwan would not surrender its freedom to China without fierce resistance either. Both Taiwan and China understand the true meaning of the word “reunification” considering the current cross-strait relationship.
In a bid to reduce the risk of military conflict with China or to postpone the approaching moment of China’s invasion, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen called China to help maintain regional peace in her 2024 New Year’s speech.
Tsai’s appeal is reasonable to all listening ears, but China is not one of them. History has proven that maintaining peace, be it either domestic or global, has seldom been on China’s list of considerations. What China has been doing is quite the opposite, and the list goes way beyond China’s current aggressions toward the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea.
China’s peace-disruptive record
Since its establishment in 1949, China has provoked and actively engaged in a series of military campaigns with various countries.
In 1950, less than one year after its establishment (1949), China, together with the former Soviet Union, backed North Korea to invade South Korea, an independent nation already recognised by the United Nations. This led to the three-year Korean War, the bloodiest military conflict since World War II, causing 2-3 million civilian deaths.
In the 1960s, after being on the receiving end of ideological, financial and technological aid from the Soviet Union for decades, a stronger China decided that it was time to challenge the authoritative status of its generous patron and to place itself in the seat of big boss in the International Communist Movement. It attacked the Soviet Union ideologically and provoked border conflict militarily, leading the two Communist giants to the brink of nuclear conflict.
A decade later, in 1979, after Vietnam toppled the Chinese-backed extreme terror regime Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, China launched a large-scale invasion of northern Vietnam in the name of “self-defence”, a term also used in the Korean War.
Several low-profile conflicts are left out for readers to examine for themselves. These small but not uneventful conflicts include the 1950s annexation of Tibet, the 1962 Indo-China War, and the three major Taiwan Strait Crises (1954-55; 1958; 1995-96).
With this brief review of China’s track record of peace disruption, it is clear that “maintaining peace” not only does not make it to China’s priority list, it actually often goes in discord with China’s core agenda.
Taiwan needs a new strategy.
Taiwan has repeatedly extended olive branches to China in the past, only to have received missile firing in return. Tsai’s “peace call” to China this time before Taiwan’s latest presidential election will be no exception.
Now, it is time for Taiwan to implement effective countermeasures to mitigate China’s political interference and sabotage. To defeat China’s “reunification” offence, the in-coming government led by President-elect Lai Ching-te needs not only to respond to China’s meddling actions in Taiwan’s politics but also stay a step or two ahead of China’s activities.
First and of the utmost importance, the Taiwanese government must start to present to the Taiwanese public the real China in its full dimension, not only its economic might. In its 70 years of existence, China has been continuously committing horrifying crimes against humanity.
Shortly after its establishment in 1949, China started to roll out a series of nationwide brutal campaigns, with each one targeting a specific group of the population.
The campaigns in the 1950s were against the entrepreneur class, against bureaucrats, against the counter-revolutionary, and rich peasants. In the 1960s, against old intellectuals and anyone with a connection to traditional Chinese culture. In the 1970s, against local officials and those who questioned Mao’s personality cult. From the 1980s until now, against the school of thought that embraces the concept of liberty.
These campaigns have caused tens of millions of peace-time deaths in China.
Second, the Taiwanese government should convey clearly what “reunification with China” would mean to the Taiwanese people, and to the freedom and prosperity that they are enjoying.
China’s last decade-long campaign against liberty is the most ironic but also alarming one because, to an outside observer, this is the most liberal period in China’s history. But, in reality, China’s hatred for liberty during this period is just as immense as it has ever been since 1949.
The tragic loss of identity in Tibet and Hong Kong after being taken over by China should be presented to the Taiwanese public in an unmasked form instead of using sugar-coated narratives fed by China’s propaganda.
Third, Taiwan should introduce stricter laws governing political contributions and foreign affiliation. All political parties (e.g. KMT in particular, which was once a CCP’s deadly rival but is now a CCP’s proxy to promote its “One-China” agenda) should be obligated to reveal to the public of Taiwan the source of its funding, the connection of its donors with China, as well as the party’s stance on the trajectory of Taiwan’s sovereign status in the context of Taiwan-China relation.
Fourth, the government of Taiwan should present to the Taiwanese people the real living conditions that ordinary Chinese have been through to this day under the rule of the CCP. The CCP has projected a self-proclaimed new land of opportunities to win over the Taiwanese society. However, recent data from China has revealed that, there are one billion Chinese whose monthly income is less than 2000 RMB (U$300), among whom 600 million with monthly income under 1000 RMB (U$150). The majority of those in poverty do not have access to basic social protections that the Taiwanese people enjoy (e.g. universal healthcare, pension, etc.).
Fifth, the Taiwanese government must provide China-based Taiwanese businesses with accurate and up-to-date economic and political information about China and assist in divesting their interests in China. In the midst of foreign direct investments rushing out of China, it is puzzling that Taiwanese businesses are still clinging to the old-day illusion of making an easy fortune in China. The less the Taiwanese businesses are dependent on the Chinese market, the more difficult for China to meddle with Taiwan’s politics through the Taiwanese business community.
With these countermeasures, the public of Taiwan will be more capable of resisting China’s “reunification” sirens, and be more willing to stand up to its military threats.
Conclusion
China has beefed up its “reunification” campaign through both military threats and mobilising China sympathisers from within Taiwan. The Taiwanese government must, in addition to strengthening defence capability, develop new strategies to counter China’s non-military offences, which are eroding Taiwan’s identity and self-defence resolve.
Now is also the time for the free world, along with Taiwan, to recognise and stand up to the true China, a country that not only poses growing threats to the outside world but also hides its horrifying historical and current realities behind its economic mighty. These attributes of China have not yet been openly recognized or officially revealed to the public, which is extremely vulnerable to China’s ideological propaganda offences.
China’s track record of peace disruption, be it domestic or international, should serve as a wake-up call to the free world. China, under CCP’s iron-fisted rule, should always be regarded as a real threat to world peace.
Daniel Jia is the founder of the consulting firm DJ Integral Services. He writes analytical reports on public-related matters, focusing on China-related cultural and political issues. There is no conflict of interest to be disclosed.
This article was published as part of a special issue on ‘What does the 2024 Taiwan election tell us?’.
