During the Cold War, Finland, a small country in the shadow of a powerful neighbor, was obliged to enter an agreement with the Soviet Union to guarantee her own preservation. In addition to military understandings, the agreement covered foreign relations and domestic issues.
With the former, it entailed avoiding dealings with countries the Soviets considered their enemies; at home, it entailed censorship of anything that might be considered anti-Soviet in nature. The Finns felt forced to make concessions in order to survive.
Lately their past predicament has been mentioned repeatedly in the media, which have likened it to the situation in which Taiwan finds itself. Are we, the discussion goes, in the process of “Finlandization”?
Finlandization, as a concept, has been discussed in Taiwan in the past, although it has never before been accepted by the mainstream as relevant to our own situation. Of course, the similarity between Taiwan and Cold War Finland is the factor of intimidation by a powerful neighbor. Both the pan-blue and pan-green camps, however, reject the comparison. If we want to look at why this is, we need to consider certain differences between the respective predicaments of Taiwan today and Finland back then.
The first involves the question of Taiwan’s sovereignty. In Finland’s case, the Soviet Union never actually laid claim to its territory or prevented the Finns from participating in international bodies.
Finland’s neutral, or even pro-Soviet, stance in foreign relations was entirely a result of their strategy of appeasing the Soviet Union: It didn’t have the risk of losing national sovereignty poised like an ax over their necks.
By comparison, China claims that Taiwan is a part of its territory and has consistently prevented Taiwan from taking part in international bodies, denying our very status as a nation. The difference here, then, is that Finland had its very survival at stake, while Taiwan stands to lose its sovereignty.
The second point concerns the degree of public opposition to the idea. With Finland, there was no danger of losing its sovereignty. When the Finnish government was formulating its policy toward the Soviet Union, it had several options and was open to debate.
With Taiwan, the idea of “Finlandization” with China is much more than just a simple public policy: It entails national identity and as such is sure to be highly contentious.
The rise of a Taiwanese identity since the advent of democratization has meant that any suggestion of Finlandization would be met with firm public opposition.
The third and final point involves the question of international allies. For a long time now, Taiwan has been a de facto ally of the US and Japan and, as part of the regional security network, has basically been a member of the US’ East Asia power system.
As soon as Taiwan strikes out along the road of Finlandization, choosing China over the US, it is going to change the regional power structure in East Asia. As far as Taiwan is concerned, that means throwing away the national security and diplomatic foundations it has developed over a long period of time. Once we have thrown in our lot with China, there will be no turning back.
It is for these reasons that the idea of Finlandization has never been taken further than discussion. No leader has actually attempted to adopt it as a model, nor proffered it as a challenge to Beijing’s “one China” principle. China wouldn’t even give tacit consent to such an idea, much less outright approval.
The US academic Bruce Gilley, writing in Foreign Affairs, has likened the current administration’s cross-strait policy in the past year and a half to a kind of Finlandization. In the article, he underestimates Beijing’s designs on Taiwanese sovereignty, just as he overestimates Taipei’s ability to resist.
That notwithstanding, Gilley’s article does serve as a stark warning and clearly demonstrates how the government’s overly China-friendly cross-strait policy has already reached a critical point. We are now seeing internal rifts appearing in society, with people seriously divided on the issue. We are also witnessing the erosion of the foundations of trust on which our old alliances are based.
If the government continues on this path and fails to find a balance, Washington may well take on Gilley’s ideas. If this happens, the US will freeze weapons sales to Taiwan and expel it from its group of Asian allies. It will give up on the idea of a neutral Taiwan. We shall have to say goodbye to a Taiwan supported by international powers. In the future it will no longer be a case of Finlandization, it will be more like “Hong Kongization.”
Huang Chih-ta is deputy director of the Democratic Progressive Party’s Department of International Affairs.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
Speaking at the Asia-Pacific Forward Forum in Taipei, former Singaporean minister for foreign affairs George Yeo (楊榮文) proposed a “Chinese commonwealth” as a potential framework for political integration between Taiwan and China. Yeo said the “status quo” in the Taiwan Strait is unsustainable and that Taiwan should not be “a piece on the chessboard” in a geopolitical game between China and the US. Yeo’s remark is nothing but an ill-intentioned political maneuver that is made by all pro-China politicians in Singapore. Since when does a Southeast Asian nation have the right to stick its nose in where it is not wanted
As China’s economy was meant to drive global economic growth this year, its dramatic slowdown is sounding alarm bells across the world, with economists and experts criticizing Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) for his unwillingness or inability to respond to the nation’s myriad mounting crises. The Wall Street Journal reported that investors have been calling on Beijing to take bolder steps to boost output — especially by promoting consumer spending — but Xi has deep-rooted philosophical objections to Western-style consumption-driven growth, seeing it as wasteful and at odds with his goal of making China a world-leading industrial and technological powerhouse, and
For Xi Jinping (習近平) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the military conquest of Taiwan is an absolute requirement for the CCP’s much more fantastic ambition: control over our solar system. Controlling Taiwan will allow the CCP to dominate the First Island Chain and to better neutralize the Philippines, decreasing the threat to the most important People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Strategic Support Force (SSF) space base, the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island. Satellite and manned space launches from the Jiuquan and Xichang Satellite Launch Centers regularly pass close to Taiwan, which is also a very serious threat to the PLA,
More Taiwanese semiconductor companies, from chip designers to suppliers of equipment and raw materials, are feeling the pinch due to increasing competition from their Chinese peers, who are betting all their resources on developing mature chipmaking technologies in a push for self-sufficiency, as their access to advanced nodes has been affected by US tech curbs. A lack of chip manufacturing technology such as extreme ultraviolet lithography (EUV) would ensure that Chinese companies — Huawei Technology Co in particular — lag behind Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) and South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co by five to six years, some analysts have said.
RSS