Chris Horton: “All the Taiwanese seek is to maintain the status quo”

Ideally, I would hope that readers’ main takeaway would be that we should all welcome the 23.4 million Taiwanese people and their free, democratic society into the international community, rather than erase them. They don’t deserve special treatment, but they also certainly don’t deserve the treatment they’ve received: being shut out of the international community and treated as radioactive because of fears of upsetting China. Hopefully, understanding the stories of the people who helped transform Taiwan from a colonial military dictatorship to Asia’s freest country will inspire people to appreciate and speak up for Taiwan more than they do at present.

More pragmatically, however, I hope that readers who don’t care about Taiwanese people or their plight realise that Taiwan’s future will directly affect theirs in very material ways. Keep in mind that Taiwan is a near-G20 economy, the world’s top supplier of semiconductors, and is located near crucial shipping lanes between China, Japan, and Southeast Asia. If China were to launch a war of invasion, it would likely send the world into a depression. Bloomberg News has estimated that a Chinese invasion attempt would see 10% of global GDP evaporate. This would devastate the economies of every country, including China, much more than the recent pandemic did. This is not a problem only for democracies, but for authoritarian regimes as well, which could be toppled due to economic instability.

All the Taiwanese seek is to maintain the status quo. That means keeping their existing democracy and sovereignty. They are not taking anything from China by continuing to be a sovereign state – the government in Beijing has never ruled Taiwan.

No one in Taiwan is calling for war with China. Deterrence is not war; it is what prevents war. And by standing with Taiwan, not just with words but through meaningful actions, the international community will be able to help Taiwan with deterrence, thereby lowering the risk of war. But this requires a level of courage and resolve beyond just issuing statements of concern for peace in the Taiwan Strait. The recent increase in coordination between Taiwan, Japan, and the Philippines is a good start, however, and will hopefully create a more secure region. Both Tokyo and Manila know very well that their security would be dramatically affected by a successful Chinese annexation of Taiwan.

I also think the international media needs to reflect on the language it uses when discussing Taiwan. Taiwan satisfies all the criteria for statehood agreed upon at the Montevideo Convention: a permanent population, a defined territory, a government, and the capacity to enter into relations with other states – even if those relations are not official. Yet few outlets call Taiwan a country, choosing to evade reality by calling it “the island”, “the self-ruled democracy”, or similar language. For readers not familiar with Taiwan, it creates the image that it is not actually a country but part of a polity that includes China, Hong Kong, and Macau. But it is not. Additionally, the term “mainland China”, when used while discussing Taiwan, is far from neutral – “mainland” implies that Taiwan completes China.

You’ve lived in Taiwan for more than a decade now. How has that shaped your perspective on the country?

After growing up in the US and then spending 13 years in China, I had bought into the inaccurate description of Taiwanese as essentially Chinese. Yes, most Taiwanese have some degree of Chinese heritage, but their ancestors may have moved here a dozen generations or more ago. My ancestors moved to the US from Europe three or four generations ago, and I feel no European identity, even if I do have a cultural connection to Europe through language, food, music and literature.

The massive influence that Japan has had on Taiwan’s identity also became clearer the longer I’ve lived here. Japan colonized Taiwan from 1895 to 1945, and was the first to control all of it. Previously, the Dutch, Spanish, and Manchus had only controlled one-third or less of Taiwan’s main island, all of it along the western coastal plain. It wasn’t until Japan completed a bloody two-decade campaign to subdue the different indigenous tribes in Taiwan’s mountainous eastern two-thirds that any government had controlled all of Taiwan. Almost all of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who lived here during the colonial occupation left after the Republic of China arrived in 1945, and the local administrative language changed from Japanese to Mandarin. Chiang Kai-shek ordered a campaign to Sinify Taiwan, but the impact of Japan bringing Taiwan into the modern era could not simply be erased.

The wars in Ukraine and Palestine have revealed how uneven conflicts can unfold while the world largely watches from the sidelines. In that context, do you think a Chinese annexation of Taiwan feels less like an “if” and more like a “when”? If so, what does that suggest about the so-called liberal order championed by the West and the UN?

Beijing is definitely building up its capacity to invade Taiwan, but it is worth keeping in mind that the last military victory by the People’s Liberation Army occurred when it crushed protests in Beijing and other Chinese cities in 1989. The Chinese military has expanded more than any military during peacetime, but it is untested, and amphibious invasion is incredibly tricky. The invasion of Normandy eight decades ago was the biggest amphibious invasion in human history, and was conducted by Allied militaries with plenty of recent fighting experience.

The Taiwan Strait is thrice the width of the English Channel, and its waters are much choppier. While Beijing tries to project a feeling of inevitability regarding its plans to annex Taiwan, the future is not written. Recent moves by Japan and the Philippines to improve security cooperation both with Taiwan and each other offer hope for improving deterrence. For both of these countries, with around 120 million people who administer territory that Beijing claims, if Taiwan were to fall to China, the People’s Liberation Army would suddenly be on their doorsteps. Taiwan is not just an issue for the US – if it were seized by China, the PLA could decide who gets access to some of the world’s most crucial shipping lanes.

Despite most Taiwanese being firmly against “reunification” with the PRC, the KMT — the party linked both to the White Terror and to pro-China positions — has won several elections in Taiwan’s democratic era. Why is that so?

Roughly one quarter of Taiwanese voters are staunch supporters of the DPP, while another quarter are diehard KMT supporters. As a result, around half of Taiwanese voters are swing voters. The KMT has lost the last three presidential elections, largely because of its strong Chinese identity and concerns that it is too close to the Chinese Communist Party. So, at the presidential level, the party struggles. When voters choose local legislators, magistrates, and mayors, however, the candidates’ views on China are less relevant, and they are evaluated in terms of their ability to address domestic issues.

The KMT has deep experience in governing Taiwan in both the martial law and democratic eras, and it also has extensive patronage networks that are valuable in mobilizing voters. It is also worth noting that identity politics is not the sole driver of voter decision-making. Many Taiwanese voters who might be more aligned with the DPP will vote for a KMT candidate if they think the DPP has not done enough for their particular constituency. Many Taiwanese voters don’t like being taken for granted, nor do they want single-party rule again, under the DPP or KMT.

This reminds me of your statement: “Because the UN is blocking Taiwan’s participation in numerous organizations at the behest of the CCP, the world is denied the benefits of a modern, highly open and accountable democracy that has much to contribute. Please elaborate.

One excellent example is Taiwan’s exclusion from the World Health Organization. Taiwan had the world’s best response to Covid-19, not suffering a major outbreak until the arrival of the Omicron variant two years in. Had Taiwan been able to cooperate with the rest of the world in 2020, there is little doubt that many deaths and much economic damage could have been prevented.

You write that many Chinese nationalists use the hashtag #keep the island but not the people”, when discussing Taiwan online. What explains this deeply antagonistic sentiment among ordinary citizens?

The Chinese Communist Party has been stoking anger about the non-existent ‘theft’ of Taiwan from China by the US, Japan and Taiwanese race-traitors for decades. It is only natural that ultra-nationalists would be allowed to further stoke these feelings of being wronged, which, of course, seeps into the consciousness of more reasonable Chinese.

During my 13 years in China, I found that even the more reasonable people I met there would become very upset when discussing Taiwan. Even if they had never visited Taiwan and knew little about it, they were certain that it was theirs. That was before Xi Jinping rose to power, and it seems that things have gotten even worse since then.

Taiwan’s political framing has shifted dramatically over the decades: once an anti-communist bulwark during the Cold War, now increasingly cast by outsiders as inseparable from the PRC. How much does language itself shape the world’s perception of Taiwan, and why do you think so many global publications continue to flatten the story?

There are many reasons I see. Some media organizations are owned by parent companies with massive investments in China, one example being the billion-dollar theme parks that Disney and Universal have built in joint ventures with the Chinese government. Other outlets may simply be concerned about maintaining access to China – one of the biggest stories on the planet – or at least keeping their reporters there safe. Additionally, the foreign press corps in Taiwan has grown substantially since 2020, when China increased its ejections of foreign reporters and made it harder for new ones to gain access.

But the foreign media here is almost exclusively reporters, with no editors based here. Editors are the gatekeepers of journalism, and tend to be conservative by nature. If they don’t experience Taiwan’s very real sovereignty on the ground in their daily life, I think it’s easier for them to use the outdated boilerplate that was used prior to Taiwan’s democratization when the government was a military dictatorship from China that sought to retake the motherland.

How much does the looming presence of the People’s Republic of China influence Taiwanese identity culture today? And, how does the average person in Taiwan perceive these security and territorial threats?

There are a lot of different views of the threat from China. Many Taiwanese are very concerned and enter politics, the military, or civil society for that reason. There are also many who think the threat is overblown. This may be because China has been threatening to take Taiwan for decades without ever trying to do so, or because they think China has too much to lose economically.

A smaller number of Taiwanese I’ve encountered simply don’t want to think about it. The one common denominator among all three groups is that they most certainly do not want to be attacked by China.

Barring a dramatic shift of goodwill from Beijing, what is a realistic path forward for Taiwan?

Taiwan needs to be resilient and united in order to make an invasion more difficult for Beijing. That means being prepared. First and foremost, its military needs to accelerate its modernization, including in terms of morale-building, training, and the addition of asymmetrical warfare capabilities such as drones. But Taiwanese society also needs to prepare itself for the worst.

Of the two major parties, the DPP has signaled its willingness to defend Taiwan, while many members of the Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, which relocated to Taiwan after losing China to the Communists 75 years ago, often push a line similar to that of Beijing: resistance is futile. Several senior Kuomintang members have even gone on the record in support of unification. Beijing knows that in a conflict, a divided Taiwan would be easier to annex, and it is using its increasingly close ties with the Kuomintang as well as robust propaganda and disinformation campaigns in both traditional media and social media to sow and amplify divisions in Taiwanese society.

Amritesh Mukherjee is a journalist, writer, and editor fascinated by the stories that shape our world. Instagram/X: aroomofwords