Despite the occasional suggestion by a handful of US academics that Washington should “abandon” Taiwan to its “inevitable” fate of unification with China, a good number of experts and officials maintain that the nation of 23 million cannot simply be willed out of existence and must therefore be dealt with.
Welcome though this defense of Taiwan may be, a surprisingly large number of such proponents, often in the same breath, add that democratic Taiwan is useful because it serves as an example for China, encouraging the incremental democratization and liberalization of the authoritarian giant next door.
Using terminology like “the first Chinese democracy,” such individuals fail to recognize that Taiwan is a distinct entity unto itself, or that the existence of its 23 million people is more than a means to an end.
Although qualitatively better than the argument that Taiwan should be forsaken by its allies and protectors for the sake of better relations with Beijing, the case that the nation is “useful” because it can foster change in China fails on moral grounds.
By not attesting to its intrinsic value, such proponents are committing the same mistake as those who would like to see the “Taiwan problem” disappear forever: It turns 23 million human beings into mere abstractions or pieces to be moved around on a chessboard toward some ultimate goal.
To a certain extent, it is undeniable that Taiwan serves as an example to China, and one can only hope that the millions of Chinese who now find it possible to make the journey across the Taiwan Strait take back home with them an inkling of how to improve their own lives.
However, the very same memes of justice, freedom and democracy are not unique to Taiwan, and Chinese have for decades traveled to countries where the same fundamental principles apply. Taiwan is special not because it has disproved the largely flawed theory that Confucianism is incompatible with democracy, but rather because it became one of the first small nations to democratize after decades of authoritarian rule.
Emerging as it did from under the heavy hand of authoritarianism about the same time as South Korea, why is it that only Taiwan is touted as an example for China, if not for the acknowledgement, inadvertently perhaps, that it is part of China? One would be hard pressed to tout Taiwan as some special model for China and yet maintain that one supports the view that Taiwan’s people have a right to choose their own destiny.
Those two contentions are incompatible and will remain so until it is recognized that Taiwan is not a means to an end, but an end in itself.
The world is rife with examples of liberal democracies for countries like China and North Korea to follow. There is nothing special about Taiwan, mis a part a shared language and culture, that would make China more willing to embrace and experiment with democracy. In fact, the assumption that Chinese will somehow be more amenable to democracy because it is found in Taiwan is downright insulting to the Chinese, as if they needed a shared language, or ethnicity, to understand it.
After decades of contact, albeit limited, with democracies the world over, the Chinese Communist Party remains a politically rigid, repressive entity. That interactions with Taiwan would unlock a box that has remained shut for so long where similar interactions have failed to do so is pure speculation, if not outright fantasy.
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,
Taiwan is beautiful — no doubt about it. In Taipei, the streets are clean, the skyline is gorgeous and the subway is world-class. The coastline is easily accessible and mountains can be seen in the distance. The people are hardworking, successful and busy. Every luxury known to humankind is available and people live on their smartphones. As an American visiting for the first time, here are some things I learned about the country. First, people from Taiwan and America love freedom and democracy and have for many years. When we defeated Japan in 1945, Taiwan was freed from Japanese rule. In
During a news conference in Vietnam on Sept. 10, a reporter asked US President Joe Biden about the possibility of China invading Taiwan. Biden replied that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is too busy handling major domestic economic problems to launch an invasion of Taiwan. On Wednesday last week, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office published a document outlining 21 measures to make the Chinese-controlled Fujian Province into a demonstration zone for relations with Taiwan. The planned measures would expand favorable treatment for Taiwanese people and companies, and seek to attract people from Taiwan to buy property and seek employment in Fujian.
More than 100 Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) vessels and aircraft were detected making incursions into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone (ADIZ) on Sunday and Monday, the Ministry of National Defense reported on Monday. The ministry responded to the incursions by calling on China to “immediately stop such destructive unilateral actions,” saying that Beijing’s actions could “easily lead to a sharp escalation in tensions and worsen regional security.” Su Tzu-yun (蘇紫雲), a research fellow at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research, said that the unusually high number of incursions over such a short time was likely Beijing’s response to efforts