Facing China’s nakedly invasive hegemonism and imperialist colonialism, Taiwan is now once again a geostrategic focal point for the peace and stability of the western Asia-Pacific.
At this point, Taiwan appears to stand firm against the challenge. Amid the continuing pandemic of Wuhan pneumonia, President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) external public relations efforts have successfully strengthened informal relations with the sole US security guarantor by capitalizing on US President Donald Trump’s reinforced hardline policy against China.
Also, the move in tandem with the maneuvering of the Taiwan lobby in Japan has enhanced pro-Taiwan Japanese public sentiment, reinforcing the basis on which to cement informal relations with Japan, a major US ally.
This offers a seemingly good prospect for Taiwan to maintain its de facto independence, while tactfully surfing on growing uncertainties of the intensified US-China hegemonic rivalry.
However, looking closely, Tsai’s popular mandate as renewed in January is not as substantial as is seen. In 2016, she was first elected as president with a solid majority of the votes cast, which was about 10 percent higher than the ruling Democratic Progress Party (DPP) as a whole obtained in the concurrent general election of the Legislative Yuan, but in the local elections of 2018, the de facto mid-term election, the DPP suffered a crushing defeat, with far less than a majority of the total votes cast.
This year, Tsai won a landslide victory in her second-term presidential election, while the DPP secured a sufficient majority in the concurrent general election. These pendulum shifts signify that the voters, who behave according to transitory public sentiment, are key to changes of government.
Unsurprisingly, these voters are in thrall to two irreconcilable demands: Taiwan’s de facto independence and economic prosperity. The country heavily relies on trade with China for prosperity, which, however, hollows out its de facto independence. They prioritized independence in 2016 when then-President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) pushed his policy of economic integration with China, prosperity in 2018 when Tsai failed in economic policy, and again independence this year when China unmercifully deprived Hong Kong of autonomy guaranteed under “one country, two systems.”
This internally conflicted pattern of popular demand and support dies hard, because the Republic of China (ROC) in Taiwan is trapped in a trilemma of orthodoxy, and internal and external legitimacy.
Certainly, the country retains historic orthodoxy as the revolutionary successor state of the Qing Dynasty and legal orthodoxy based on the ROC Constitution.
Today, it is a fully functioning democracy with high internal legitimacy, but its effective control does not cover an overwhelming portion of the de jure territory on the mainland. Due to this fiction, the ROC is largely derecognized by the international community, including the US, Japan and all other major democracies.
Of course, the ROC could solve this serious dearth of external legitimacy by reducing the de jure territory to match its effective control area. Yet, once such a move is taken, the People’s Republic of China will most likely unify Taiwan by force, while Taiwan alone is unable to repel the enemy.
Thus, Taiwan is necessitated to rely solely on adjusting the state of internal legitimacy through regular elections in coping with the trilemma that varies according to its dynamic external security environment. Such adjustment is necessarily transitory, undurable and suboptional in nature.
Accordingly, Tsai’s landslide victory this year does not foreshow the advent of a long-term, stable DPP government, despite the decline of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) as a consequence of the substantial rise of Taiwanese identity among the electorate.
Swing voters are expected to shift their support away from the DPP when they face strong Chinese economic and/or military pressure and anticipate their significant impoverishment. Even in the case that the KMT should fall apart, the opposition political forces might organize an unprincipled political coalition to take on the task of government.
This is a more plausible scenario now than ever, especially because, in general, the Chinese communist regime under President Xi Jinping (習近平) has switched the long-time low-
profile external policy to the recent outright aggressive one, and because, in particular, the regime has failed to incite Taiwanese to an about-face toward unification through economic inducement, propaganda maneuvering and other indirect measures.
Due to the huge cross-strait disparity in military and economic power, the Tsai administration will most likely deepen Taiwan’s heavy reliance on the US and, as its imaginary supplement and/or complement, on Japan.
To appeal to the electorate, especially swing voters, the administration will loudly trumpet the firmness of US commitment to the defense of Taiwan rather than beef up its self-defense capability, that is, put precedence on political rationality over policy rationality.
Regrettably, however, the US power and commitment are now less reliable than before, given that its hegemonic power is undergoing a significant relative decline. Neither can Japan alone fill the gap without adequate power projection capability and under heavy constitutional constraints to employ its military instruments.
Taiwan needs to beef up its self-defense capability to survive against a possible Chinese aggression until the US military intervenes with the support of the Japan-US alliance. Even with the current level of defense outlays, Taiwan can be a porcupine power with cost-effective low and medium-tech weapons, while overcoming the long-time obsession with high-tech platforms.
It is high time that Japan’s and Taiwan’s defense establishments engage in informal, unnoticeable defense policy coordination at the operational and tactical levels, given that formal, open inter-state cooperation is excluded.
Masahiro Matsumura is a professor of international politics at St Andrew’s University in Osaka, Japan.
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