Taiwan has been in the news during the last few weeks because of the noisy military posturing by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) around the island state. Located about 80 miles off the eastern coast of China, Taiwan has frequently been a source of friction between the United States and the PRC.
When in 1949 the PRC won China’s civil war, the losers, Chiang Kai-Shek and his Kuomintang followers, identified as the Republic of China (ROC), retreated to Taiwan and established their base of operations there, still dreaming of a future return to power. The PRC on the other hand has insisted that Taiwan is a province of China and should be reunified with the mainland under its control. That has never happened. Why is not all that mysterious.
Fundamentally, there are doubts about the legitimacy of the PRC claim. Some Taiwan governments and the United States (US) have accepted the PRC concept of “One China, Two Systems,” but with caveats, the main one being that the PRC cannot use force to achieve unification. There is also the fact that Taiwan has never been under the control of the PRC.
Named Formosa by early Portuguese explorers, the island had only about 25,000 people in 1624 when it was colonized by the Dutch. The Dutch encouraged immigration from China, but they left in 1661. Ostensibly, the island came under control of China’s Qing dynasty when the Dutch departed, but the Qing did not encourage migration to Formosa. Only around 2.5 million people were living on the island when the Qing ceded Formosa to Japan in 1895 after losing the Sino-Japanese War. When Japan surrendered in 1945 and ceded the province back to ROC, the population had grown to slightly more than six million.
As a graduate student in August 1967, I participated in a research project examining economic development in Taiwan with Chiang’s government still in control. The study was led by the chair of the University of South Carolina’s Department of Government and International Studies, Richard L. Walker, considered one of America’s leading China scholars. Walker was fluent in Mandarin Chinese, but the other members of our four-man US team depended upon the assistance of local academics to help us survey conditions in Hualien, Taiwan’s eastern most province, also the least developed economically.
I had some familiarity with the island having visited briefly a couple of times earlier; once on the way home in 1963 after my tour of duty in Vietnam as a US Army officer and again in 1965 as a student delegate to the 11th Annual Conference of the Asian Peoples’ Anti-Communist League. The conference had been held in Manila, but the ROC delegation invited the US attendees to return home via Taiwan where we had an audience with the Generalissimo.
Through interviews, observations and examination of existing data, our project acquired insights about obstacles to development at the time. Although Taiwan has enjoyed incredible economic and political achievements since 1967, some of what we learn about the country then is still relevant in judging the possible outcomes of the PRC’s ambitions.
First is the demographic reality of Taiwan. With a population of nearly 24 million, Taiwan today is the 57th largest country in the world. There are few people in Taiwan today who have ever lived under PRC rule, or for that matter, under ROC rule before 1949.
In 1967, our project found the population sharply divided among at least three groups: aborigines, pre-World War II immigrants from China proper, and Chinese from the mainland who had followed Chiang to Taiwan in 1949 and their descendants. The last group was in effective political control in 1967, still harboring dreams of returning to power in China, but friction already existed among the groups, especially between the earlier arrivals and Chiang’s followers.
A poll conducted in early 2021 by the Election Study Center of National Chengchi University and published in the Taipei Times, July 24, 2021, indicated that 63.3 percent of Taiwan’s public regard themselves as Taiwanese, while those identifying as both Taiwanese and Chinese has fallen to less than a third. Only 2.7 percent identified as solely Chinese.
Reflecting the reality of their situation, support for independence was only 5.9 percent, while preference for the “status quo” attracted 79.5 percent. Immediate unification with PRC attracted only 1.5 percent of responders, while another 5 percent said they “leaned” towards unification.
Given the likely lack of a warm reception from locals, the PRC would find occupying Taiwan a serious geographic challenge. Resistors in Hong Kong have been easily contained or rounded up, but two-thirds of Taiwan is mountainous which could provide ample cover for dissidents engaging in guerilla warfare.
Even invading Taiwan could be problematic. The country has been compared to Cuba geographically, although it is somewhat smaller. Like Cuba, Taiwan possesses natural resources that would make it difficult to starve the population into surrender. There are also easily defendable shorelines, and the Taiwan military is much better armed and trained than Castro’s ragtag rebels.
Finally, there is the question of international prestige. How will it look for the PRC to follow up recent events---suppressing freedom in Hong Kong and building concentration camps in Xinjiang---with a blitzkrieg of a thriving democracy? That thriving democracy is also an economic powerhouse that has played a key role in the economic rise of the PRC, providing more than $200 billion in investments in China since 1991.
An economic comparison between the two countries does not create a favorable image for the PRC. Although China’s GDP is much larger Taiwan’s, when per capita GDP is measured, Taiwan’s $33,011 is almost three times China’s.
Many American media pundits place the blame for the latest PRC tantrum over Taiwan on the Speaker of the US House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi (CA-D). Pelosi has long history of hostility towards the PRC and of being a vocal defender of Taiwan. Her concern about issues in Asia, however, should not be a surprise since nearly one-third of the population in her California congressional district are of Asian descent.
Although much has been said and written about the fact that Pelosi was the first Speaker to visit Taiwan in 25 years, little attention has been given in American news media to earlier visits this year by US government and former government officials:
In March, President Biden sent to Taiwan a delegation of former defense and national security advisors, led by Mike Mullen, the former chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff;
In April, Senator Bob Menendez (NJ-D), chair of the US Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, visited Taiwan for two days, accompanied by five senate colleagues including Senator Lindsay Graham (SC-R);
In May, Senator Tammy Duckworth (IL-D), on her second visit in a year to Taiwan, met with President Tsai Ing-wen to “emphasize our support for Taiwan security;”
In July, a member of the US Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Rick Scott (FL-R) arrived to meet with officials of the Taiwan Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
There were loud complaints from the PRC in response to all of these visits and in some cases, saber rattling as well. But the American public knew little about any of the earlier events.
US President Joe Biden has stirred PRC ire on several occasions during the past two years, repeatedly affirming that the US will respond militarily if China uses force in pursuit of unification. Biden has even compared our commitment to Taiwan with the US obligation to its NATO allies.
This has been interpreted by some as a change in the previous US policy of “strategic ambiguity” when describing the US commitment to defend Taiwan. Biden’s stance is consistent, however, with recommendations made by Richard Haass, the former head of the Council on Foreign Relations. In an article appearing in the September issue of Foreign Affairs, Haass and his co-author David Sacks, a research fellow with CFR, write that the US needs to be firm and transparent in asserting its support for Taiwan.
Despite the obvious risks, it is hard to argue with the logic of the recommendation. If the US fails to respond to Chinese bullying, the democratic citizens of Taiwan may lose hope, and American allies in Asia will conclude the US cannot be relied upon. That may lead them to either accommodate China, or seek nuclear weapons to become strategically self-reliant. In either case, US interests will not be served.
https://datausa.io/profile/geo/congressional-district-12-ca#demographics
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2021/07/24/2003761369
https://think.ing.com/articles/taiwan-economic-outlook-2h22/
https://think.ing.com/articles/china-economic-outlook-for-the-second-half-of-2022/
https://www.axios.com/2022/05/31/us-congressional-visit-taiwan-tammy-duckworth
https://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2022/07/08/2003781377
https://www.fpri.org/article/2022/05/believe-biden-when-he-says-america-will-defend-taiwan/
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/american-support-taiwan-must-be-unambiguous