The Taiwan Crisis: Special Edition, Part 1

Jun 30

The Taiwan Crisis: Special Edition, Part 1

China says it carried out beach landing drills in province opposite Taiwan — Aging fortifications from the 1950s and 60s on the ROC-controlled Kinmen Islands. They were placed there to protect the islands, just 3.2 km from the city of Xiamen in Mainland China, from possible invasion. In recent years, the PRC has conducted military drills close to the Kinmen group, which some experts believe will be the PRC’s first target before invading Taiwan if war breaks out in the future.

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A Recipe for War, Analysis of History, Current Events, Military History, Disinformation, Military History, Parallels to the Cold War, Parallels to World War II, 21st Century Conflicts, Russo-Ukrainian War

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Connections to the Past, Understanding the Past, Repercussions of Events, Current Views, Motives Behind Conflict, Propaganda, Special Edition, #A Recipe for War, #Ukraine, #War

June 30, 2022

In this 2-part series of blog posts, I’ll tackle a topic that’s related to but doesn’t fall into the categories of my usual topics. Before today, I’ve only discussed the Crisis of Historical Education in the United States or the Russo-Ukrainian War in my posts, but today, I’ll make a detour to discuss another ongoing crisis that’s getting more and more volatile by the day: the Taiwan Crisis. It has some important connections to the Russo-Ukrainian War, and could ultimately become one of the biggest crises of the decade. In these posts, I will discuss the history of the crisis, the reasons for it, how it may play out, and the effect that an escalation could have on the world.

Part 1: Origins of the Crisis

The origins of the crisis lie in the 1912 Chinese Xinhai Revolution, in which Republican forces overthrew the more than two-thousand-year-old Chinese Empire. These were led by Dr. Sun Yat Sen, a revolutionary who dreamed of turning China into a fully independent, industrial, and democratic nation. His hopes for a new China were abruptly crushed in 1913 when a coup toppled the Chinese Republican government and Sun’s party, the Kuomintang (Nationalist Party). In the years afterward, warlords took over vast swathes of China, and the government in Beijing became their puppet. Sun Yat-Sen was forced to flee south, where he reorganized the Kuomintang into a powerful government with a modern army and bureaucracy that passed into the hands of Chiang Kai-Shek when Sun died in 1925. Chiang Kai-Shek led a campaign to retake Warlord-controlled areas and succeeded. However, in the same period, a group of Chinese intellectuals inspired by the Russian Revolution created a communist party (the CCP) and attempted to attract more people. Chiang grew suspicious, and despite receiving aid from communists in the battle against the warlords, he cracked down on their organization in 1927. A former schoolteacher named Mao Zedong became an influential CCP leader who led a guerrilla war in China’s south and then led the CCP in a grueling Long March to the north to escape the Kuomintang. Chiang was forced to join forces with the CCP a few years later when Japan invaded China in 1937. The alliance, known as the United Front, collapsed in only a few years, though it did manage to prevent Japan from conquering all of China before this happened. During this war, the CCP gained a strong following among the peasantry of China and received captured Soviet weaponry when Japan was finally defeated in August 1945. The CCP and the Kuomintang started fighting again, but the CCP now had the upper hand. Despite American naval landings on the Chinese coast in support of the Kuomintang, its forces rapidly lost morale as the CCP won victory after victory and captured more territory. The rampant corruption and inflation in Kuomintang-ruled territories and the promise of a communist utopia from Mao led to a decisive shift in support from the Kuomintang to the CCP. The Kuomintang gradually retreated from their capital, Nanjing, and after more than 20 years of war with the CCP, they finally conceded the entirety of Mainland China to them in 1949. Mao proclaimed the People’s Republic of China (PRC) on October 1 of that year, with himself as its leader. The Kuomintang fled to islands off China’s coast, and most Western countries recognized its government, the Republic of China (ROC), as the official government of all of China. Chiang created a military dictatorship in the ROC that ruthlessly suppressed dissent and any suspected communists, with US backing. After PRC troops seized several islands, China’s second-largest island, Hainan, from the ROC, the US sent an entire fleet to the Taiwan strait to protect the ROC’s remaining areas of control. The line of control has remained almost unchanged since then, with the ROC centered on the island of Taiwan and its outlying islands and the PRC controlling the rest of China. At the time, though, the PRC government believed that an invasion was still possible. Its troops started bombarding ROC positions on several outlying islands near the mainland coast (including Kinmen, depicted in the photo above) from 1954–1955 and again in 1958 during the First and Second Taiwan Strait Crises. The US was determined to contain communist influence as this was the height of the Cold War, and it sent more military help to the ROC, ensuring that there could be no invasion from the Mainland. However, Chiang realized that an invasion of the Mainland was impossible and turned his attention toward developing ROC-controlled areas. In what’s known as the Taiwan Miracle, the country became a wealthy, vibrant tech hub and soon joined three other “Asian Tigers” as one of the strongest and fastest-growing economies in Asia. Chiang died in 1975, and the dictatorship collapsed in the 1990s, allowing the ROC to become a democratic country, with its first direct Presidential elections being held in 1996. The Kuomintang was driven out of power soon after by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), and the two parties have been battling for control ever since. Taiwan has since turned into one of the most progressive countries in the world, with a female President, Tsai Ing-Wen, and numerous freedoms not enjoyed in many countries, such as the right to same-sex marriage. However, the liberalization of the ROC caught the Mainland government’s eye for one particular reason, which may very well lead to the escalation of the Taiwan crisis to outright violence.

Fiché:PRCFounding.jpg — Wikipédja — Mao Zedong proclaiming the establishment of the People’s Republic of China on October 1, 1949. Since the founding of the people’s republic, two governments have concurrently claimed all of China for themselves, while controlling different parts of it. The People’s Republic of China controls the Mainland, and the Republic of China controls Taiwan and other outlying islands.

Since the 1950s, the communist government there has ingrained the “fact” that the ROC-controlled areas are part of “China” into their people’s national conscience. While PRC leaders since Mao Zedong have been open to negotiating with the ROC government, they have consistently reaffirmed what’s being called the “One China Policy,” which states that China and Taiwan are one country. The PRC has undergone significant transformation since the 1950s, going through Mao Zedong’s disastrous attempts to create a communist utopia, followed by an economic liberalization program in the 1980s and 90s concurrent with the violent suppression of anti-communist dissenters, culminating in the Tiananmen Square Incident of 1989. Since then, it’s become one of the largest economies and most powerful countries in world history, in many ways rivaling the US as the world’s most powerful nation. Its authoritarian regime became more relaxed in some ways in the years since Mao, though that may be changing under President Xi Jinping. Yet throughout all this time, one thing hasn’t changed (if it did change, it’s only because it gained wider acceptance among the people). That is the belief held by most people in Mainland China that Taiwan is an integral part of their country, even if their government doesn’t control it. As New York Times reporter Amy Qin described the stance of most Mainland Chinese:

“I cannot emphasize enough how baked into the Chinese psyche it is that Taiwan is part of China. Even the most anti-Xi Jinping, anti-Chinese Communist Party, flaming liberal Chinese intellectuals will tell you that Taiwan is part of China. It’s very rare to meet someone who doesn’t believe that. It would be as if you told me that Maryland or Florida wasn’t a part of the U.S. If you look at Chinese foreign policy through the decades, Taiwan has always been its top issue.”

However, fewer people in Taiwan, which is what many call the officially-titled ROC, agree with this viewpoint. More and more Taiwanese are calling for independence for the “Taiwanese nation.” This sentiment is becoming increasingly popular among those who want to end all connections to the Mainland authoritarian regime, with whom they feel less and less connected. Taiwan is now recognized as an independent country by only 13 UN members. The rest, including the UN itself, instead recognize the PRC as the legitimate government of “all of China.” Many countries, including the US, do have informal relations with Taiwan. However, these are not normal country-to-country relations, and often they aren’t even de jure relations. For example, the US “embassy” to Taiwan is actually the American Taiwan Institute, and its “ambassador” is merely the Institute’s director. Many people in Taiwan want this to change and want their country to declare its complete independence from China so that it will be recognized as an independent country by the international community. The ruling DPP party labels itself as a “Taiwanese nationalist” party, contrary to the Kuomintang’s official support for the One China policy. The widespread support for Taiwanese independence is an important reason why it won recent elections. Yet China’s communist government has been diametrically opposed to the idea of an independent Taiwan since the moment such a possibility even emerged. In 1995, due to fears that popular ROC Presidential candidate Lee Teng-Hui would move Taiwan away from the One China policy if he won the next election, China began the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis by conducting exercises and testing missiles near ROC territory. A US fleet intervened, and Lee won the election, but Taiwan’s government got the message. Now, the official stance of the government is that Taiwan is an independent country called the “Republic of China,” which is supposed to satisfy those calling for the independence of Taiwan as well as the PRC government. It’s worked so far, as there haven’t been any major violent conflicts between Taiwan and China since 1996, when the Third Crisis ended. However, this peace may soon be broken.

China’s current President, Xi Jinping, has worked hard to make his country powerful, and he is certainly trying to make his people remember him for something. Xi, like his predecessors, is against Taiwanese independence and supports the One China policy. And he’s in a unique position to settle Taiwan’s status permanently. That’s because China is suffering the effects of years of Covid-19 lockdowns and crackdowns on dissent that have been happening for even longer than that. Xi desperately wants something to make his people ignore the hardships and rally to his side. Taiwan seems to be the solution to all his problems. Conquering it would “reunify” China, and his people would remember him for doing something that not even Mao Zedong could do. Furthermore, with the West being heavily dependent on Taiwan for certain tech products, notably semiconductors, Xi understands that the conquest of Taiwan would also be a severe blow to the West. In the coming years, Xi could one day declare that pro-independence forces in Taiwan have gained too much power and should be defeated. This would surely be a pretext for at least escalating tensions for Taiwan, if not for an actual invasion. Also, Xi is definitely paying attention to developments in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War, and if Russia finds success despite Ukrainian resistance and isolation and sanctions by the West, Xi may be emboldened to embark on a quest to “reunify” his own nation. We have yet to see what he will do, but the crisis in Taiwan is simply too great for us to ignore. In my next post in this series, I will examine how the PRC could potentially confront and even invade Taiwan, and what the fallout of such an action would be.