October 12, 2020 9:10:52 pm
Members of the National Defense Honor Guard march during National Day celebrations in Taipei, Taiwan. (Bloomberg)
Written by Chris Horton
The more China tells the world that Taiwan is not a country, the more adversaries of Beijing begin to treat it as such.
Ahead of the National Taiwan Day celebrations on Saturday, it was reported that the Beijing embassy in New Delhi issued a letter telling the Indian media not to refer to her as a country or to Tsai Ing- wen as its president. The Indians responded by helping the #TaiwanNationalDay hashtag go viral as banners bearing the Taiwanese flag were hung outside the Chinese embassy.
“Hats off to friends around the world this year, #India in particular, for celebrating #TaiwanNationalDay,” Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu wrote in a Twitter post on Saturday.
Rather than marking Taiwan’s independence, a red line that Beijing warned could trigger an invasion, the day commemorates a 1911 uprising in the central Chinese city of Wuhan against China’s last imperial dynasty. That led to the creation of the ROC, which leader Chiang Kai-shek brought to Taiwan seven decades ago when he fled when the Communist Party took power.
To many in Taiwan today, the ROC seems like a historical relic with diminishing relevance to the democracy of 24 million people. Taiwan has long abandoned Chiang’s goal of reconquering what he knew as the mainland, and polls show that more and more Taiwanese do not want any unification with China.
But celebrating the ROC is strategically useful for the Tsai government. It allows you to sidestep the question of formal independence, avoiding a potentially devastating conflict with China, while at the same time providing cover for creating a distinct political and cultural identity for Taiwan, ultimately undermining President Xi Jinping’s goal of subsuming it. under the government of the Communist Party.
“Taiwan has become increasingly adept at finding space behind ‘red lines,'” said Jonathan Sullivan, Director of China Programs at the University of Nottingham Asia Research Institute. “Beyond a formal ‘declaration of independence’, it is difficult to think of a line that is not malleable or that has really worked.”
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Military tensions have risen in recent months, with Chinese warplanes drawing ever closer to Taiwan as the Communist Party intensifies rhetoric, warning Tsai against moves further away from China. He has been particularly angry at the Trump administration, which has increased arms sales to the Tsai government and sent top US officials to Taiwan in decades to discuss the pandemic and economic ties.
In Tsai’s speech at a national day event on Saturday, he called for talks with Beijing and vowed to defend the island.
“We are ready to facilitate meaningful dialogue,” he said, adding that “showing weakness and making concessions will not bring peace.”
Hu Xijin, editor of the Communist Party-run Global Times, said the comments were Tsai’s “softest tone” in years and “obviously less arrogant than his previous comments.” He attributed the change to growing war threats from China, which his newspaper has helped spread.
“The Chinese mainland must maintain strong military pressure, which can be activated at any time, on the island of Taiwan, to ensure that certain forces on the island are contained,” Hu wrote.
China has long used the threat of force to intimidate Taiwan. It fired missiles in waters near the main island of Taiwan in the late 1990s simply because then-leader Lee Teng-hui was allowed to speak at Cornell University. He also expressed anger at his proposal that Taiwan and China have “special state-to-state” relations.
But things have changed as Taiwan has moved further and further away from the Chinese identity that Chiang’s Kuomintang party imposed on it through the ROC. Now Tsai and officials from her ruling Democratic Progressive Party often call Taiwan a country on social media.
“We have no need to declare ourselves an independent state,” Tsai told the BBC shortly after she was re-elected due to a landslide in January. “We are already an independent country, and we call ourselves the ROC, Taiwan.”
For many Taiwanese, the ROC was akin to a foreign occupation when the Kuomintang party arrived after the surrender of Japan in World War II. A violent uprising against the KMT led officials to massacre Japanese-trained officials, lawyers and doctors who could have run an independent Taiwanese state.
Taiwan endured decades of martial law under one-party rule before democratic reforms brought competitive elections and, in 2000, elected the first non-KMT leader. During Tsai’s inauguration speech in 2016, he praised the fact that the Taiwanese people had taken control of the ROC: “Dear fellow Taiwanese,” he said. “We did it.”
The Tsai government has tried to further assert a Taiwanese national identity, even redesigning the passports this year to highlight the word “Taiwan” and minimize “ROC.” At the same time, people who support a Taiwanese identity also take pride in ROC emblems, such as the flag, according to Margaret Lewis, a law professor at Seton Hall University.
“Symbols from the past have taken on a new and complex meaning in the present,” he said.
This broader change does not bode well for Xi’s plan to one day unite China and Taiwan, preferably through coercion rather than war. That has some observers particularly concerned.
“No trend is going in the preferred direction of the People’s Republic of China, except perhaps the military balance,” said Sullivan of the University of Nottingham, referring to the Communist Party government in Beijing. “That’s what makes me nervous.”
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