Is Taiwan Part of China?
For nearly seven decades Taiwan has maintained its sovereignty from mainland China. However, in the past year China has stepped up its efforts to — as it sees it — reunify China and Taiwan, begging the question: Is Taiwan actually part of China?
Sovereignty: The supreme authority within a territory. Sovereignty entails hierarchy within the state, as well as external autonomy for states.
Context
In 1949, China’s nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) government was driven out of China by Mao Zedong’s Communists after a 22-year long civil war. The KMT took China’s navy and gold reserves, and fled east to the island of Taiwan, which had been occupied by the Japanese from 1895–1945. Alongside the KMT came over 1.5 million Han Chinese refugees, all fleeing potential persecution by the Communists (1). After the divide, both the mainland government of the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and the exiled government in Taiwan of the ROC (Republic of China), claimed to be the legitimate Chinese state.
Over time, due to a mix of persuasion and coercion from the PRC, countries around the world began to switch their international recognition from the ROC in Taiwan, to the PRC in mainland China. In 1971, the UN would follow suit and China’s representative seat would be taken from the ROC and handed to the PRC. Today, only a handful of countries still recognise Taiwan, with this number growing smaller every year due to continued diplomatic pressure by the mainland China.
As the tides began to turn against Taiwan, the debate became less about which nation was the “real” China and more about whether or not these two nations were in fact still one country at all. Over the near-century that they had been acting independently from one another, the two had developed wildly different political systems, with the ROC being a bastion of liberalism and democracy in Asia, and the PRC being an authoritarian Communist state. In addition, the Chinese generation that had fled the mainland in the 40’s has begun to give way to a new generation of fundamentally Taiwanese citizens who, despite being ethnically similar to mainland China’s Han Chinese population, were acutely aware of their civil and political differences from mainland.
Despite these clear challenges, Chinese Premier Xi Jinping has linked reunification with Taiwan to his project of “National Rejuvenation” (2). This article argues that in the modern day, Taiwan is an autonomous nation with a vastly different national identity to mainland China and that reunification is both dangerous and unproductive for both sides.
External Pressures
Actions of the PRC
In the past few years, the PRC has stepped up efforts to integrate Taiwan into the Chinese state. One of the tools they have used in an attempt to draw concessions out of the ROC is intimidation. Military exercises, war games on the mainland and incursions into the Air Defence Identification Zone (ADIZ) of Taiwan are becoming almost routine occurrences.
In 1996, before Taiwan’s first direct election, the PRC conducted a series of missile tests in the Taiwan Strait aimed at intimidating Taiwanese voters. Most China analysts agree that those missile tests turned out to be counterproductive and since then, Beijing has been very careful not to over-react to Taiwan’s presidential elections (3). However, failing to learn from this, the PRC conducted war games a few days before the 2016 election in which the DPP, Taiwan’s more independence-friendly party, won a majority victory under Tsai Ing-wen (who went on to win re-election in 2020), ousting from power the KMT, Taiwan’s more China-friendly party and the same party that was driven from the mainland in 1949 (4).
In the aftermath of the election, PRC President Xi Jinping vowed that China would “resolutely contain Taiwan independence secessionist activities in any form” (4), with the new ROC President Tsai Ing-wen responding that her government would “not bow to pressure” and that China “should face up to the reality that Republic of Taiwan exists, and that the people of Taiwan have an unshakable faith in the democratic system” (4). The two nations have been at loggerheads ever since and relations have only become worse, with recent fears that conflict could ignite at any moment. The front cover of The Economist’s May 2021 edition even called Taiwan the ‘Most dangerous place on Earth’.
“We warn those ‘Taiwan independence’ elements — those who play with fire will burn themselves, and Taiwan independence means war.”
Wu Qian, Chinese Defence Ministry spokesman, 2021 (5)
In addition to intimidation, the PRC has diplomatically isolated Taiwan from the rest of the world, largely using financial aid to encourage countries to switch recognition from the ROC to the PRC or even break off relations completely. As mentioned in the previous section, only a handful of countries still recognise the ROC; The Vatican, due to the PRC’s rocky relationship with the Church, and a few countries in Latin America. On top of this, it is excluded from full membership to many major international or regional organisations such as the UN, the IMF, the World Bank, and the Association of South-Eastern Asian Nations (ASEAN).
Despite such bold and deliberate moves to draw concessions from Taiwan, the measures have largely backfired, causing Taiwanese citizens to double-down and even feel trapped in their identity as markedly separate from that of mainland China.
Contrast in Systems
The principal reason that the Taiwanese government and people are so against any form of unification with China is because of the vastly different state of civil and political rights in the two states. Since the 1990’s, Taiwan has been a free democratic society, a bastion of liberal democracy in Asia. Taiwan was even the first — and to date only — country in all of Asia to legalise same sex marriage. In stark contrast to this, the PRC is one of the most authoritarian regimes in the world, lacking free and fair elections as well as possessing a dire human rights record. As such, the PRC is ranked 151st in the Economist’s Global Democracy Index (2020), whilst the ROC on the other hand is ranked 11th, the highest in all of Asia and higher than both the UK and the US (6).
‘Because citizens of Taiwan have lived through a fundamentally different political and social environment, many of them no longer think of themselves as Chinese.’
Li, Yitan; Zhang, Enyu (2017) Changing Taiwanese Identity and Cross-Strait Relations: a Post 2016 Taiwan Presidential Election Analysis. Chinese journal of political science, Vol.22 (1), p.17–35. P25.
At the turn of the century there was hope for reunification under China’s new One Country, Two Systems model, adopted in 1997 for the mainland’s reunification with Hong Kong. Unfortunately, just over 20 years into their 50 year agreement with the UK, China violated their agreement and extended its anti-sedition laws to Hong Kong, allowing the Chinese government to imprison anyone who spoke out against them in Hong Kong. The effective takeover of Hong Kong sent shudders through Taiwan, with Chinese fighter jets buzzing through Taiwan’s airspace on a daily basis in the period leading up to Beijing’s imposition of the new national security law in Hong Kong, sending the unmistakable message of “You could be next.” (7). This all spelt the death of the One Country, Two Systems model, and with it any hope for peaceful reunification between China and Taiwan.
And so, whilst the two nations may share deep historical and ethnic bonds, the key to Taiwan’s independent identity is increasingly civic nationalism. Civic nationalism, unlike ethnic nationalism which is championed by the PRC and others such as the Arab Ba’ath Movement, emphasises a country’s shared values and experiences as a way of forming a collective identity. The Taiwanese people have been able to circumnavigate ethno-cultural unifying principles emphasised by the PRC by changing the narrative to base their identity around their values. Thus far they have been successful in developing an independent identity as this method works in their favour, focusing on the deep real differences between peoples, as opposed to the more abstract racial connection.
Internal Pressures
Demographic Transition
As previously mentioned, as the PRC see it, the key to Taiwan lies in its historical ethnic links to the mainland, without this they lose any legitimacy to their claim on the island nation. However, in the decades since the KMT’s exodus from China, the generation of Han Chinese people actually born in China has begun to die off and their political clout has waned. As we saw from the image above, China’s demographic change over time has been mirrored a change in identity of Taiwanese citizens. In 1992, more people identified as solely Chinese than Taiwanese, however by 2020 only 2.6% of those surveyed identified as solely Chinese, with over 64% identifying as solely Taiwanese.
Whilst this level of disparity is clearly a concern for the PRC, there still exists a large portion of the population who identify as both Taiwanese and Chinese. What is more concerning for the PRC then is the trajectory of this demographic transition; as the charts show, Taiwan is clearly moving at a rather accelerated pace towards an identity build around solely being Taiwanese, removing China-friendly elements from its population and politics. This will of course cause significant problems for the PRC in any attempt to reunify with Taiwan, with Taiwanese citizens seeing it far more as an annexation of a sovereign nation, than reunifying a breakaway region.
Economic Prosperity
This paper has briefly touched on Taiwan’s success as a democratically developed state, but Taiwan is also extremely well economically developed. Despite being barred from international economic organisations such as The World Bank, the IMF and G20, Taiwan is the 21st largest economy in the world, on par with countries such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia (8). Its smaller population however means that its GDP per capita and development levels are far higher, with it ranking 12 places above Saudi Arabia and even above some European countries such as Spain (9). As another point of reference, its GDP per capita is over three times that of Turkey, a comparably sized economy. Taiwan’s economic miracle of the 1970’s/80’s left it as one of the most advanced economies in the region and one of the Four Asian Tigers, whose development model has gone on to inspire the other economies of South-East Asia.
Its economic development did not just serve to improve quality of life, today Taiwan is the world’s leading developer of semiconductors, technological material that is essential in the vast majority of the world’s vehicles and advanced technology. It is not just that Taiwan produces the most advanced semiconductors, it is the fact that only a handful of countries in the world possess the capacity to produce them. In fact, Taiwan produces over 40% of all of the world’s semiconductors, making up 1/3 of its overall export industry (10), a Bloomberg article in early 2021 even went so far to call the world’s reliance on them ‘dangerous’.
Taiwan’s prestigious domestic industries and developed economy have allowed it to retain international importance enough to stave off Chinese aggression for the past decade. More than just that though, they have given Taiwan a sense of national pride and confidence in their ability to stand alone from China and have aided in the development of an independent Taiwanese identity.
Conclusion
In the mid 20th century, one may have been able to offer a valid argument for China and Taiwan being a single entity, however, for the past 72 years Taiwan has acted with complete autonomy from mainland China, being a sovereign state in all but name. It has developed a culture markedly different from that of their cousins on the mainland and to suggest that the two could seamlessly blend into one nation is a notion completely detached from reality. The death of the One Country, Two Systems model, combined with Xi Jinping’s implacability and ever-increasing boldness on the international stage means that there are very few options left open to the people of Taiwan. But the Taiwanese people are aware of what is at stake and will not surrender their sovereignty so meekly.
One potential system that has been broached by some is an EU system of integration. In this system, the two nations would work slowly to find common ground to integrate on, whilst Taiwan would be able to retain its autonomy and its military, which in turn would allow it to defend its sovereignty. However, there are no easy solutions here and unfortunately as the situation progresses, the question is becoming centered less around what form unification will take, and far more around what form annexation will take. Despite this fact, I reject The Economist’s assertion that Taiwan is ‘The most dangerous place on Earth’ and this argument is expanded by Shih Yueh Yang, whose article can be found here.
I have no doubt that in the coming months, President Biden’s nerve will be tested and he must prove to the world that America truly is “back”.
If you are interested in this topic, I wrote an in-depth paper on it in the summer of 2021. I would be happy to share, just drop me a message.
References
(1) BBC (2021) What’s beind the China-Taiwan divide?
(2) Green, Michael; Medeiros, Evan (2020) Is Taiwan the Next Hong Kong? China Tests the Limits of Impunity. Foreign Affairs.
(3) Li, Yitan; Zhang, Enyu (2017) Changing Taiwanese Identity and Cross-Strait Relations: a Post 2016 Taiwan Presidential Election Analysis. Chinese journal of political science, Vol.22 (1), pp.17–35. P25.
(4) Schreer, Benjamin (2017) “The Double‐Edged Sword of Coercion: Cross‐Strait Relations After the 2016 Taiwan Elections.” Asian Politics & Policy, Vol.9 (1), pp.50–65. P51–52.
(5) BBC (2021) China warns Taiwan independence ‘means war’ as US pledges support.
(6) The Economist (2020) Democracy Index 2020.
(7) Perlez, Jane (2020) “One Country, Two Systems, No Future: The End of Hong Kong as We Know It.” Foreign Affairs, pp.204–208. P208.
(8) Wiki (2021) List of countries by nominal GDP — IMF Estimates.
(9) Wiki (2021) List of countries by nominal GDP per capita — IMF Estimates
(10) Kingler-Vidra, Robyn (2018) Taiwan and the EU’s connection to innovation. Conference. Europe and East Asia Brexit: New opportunities or more of the same?
