Taiwan was briefly thrust back in the news recently, but global coverage and analysis largely overlooked an essential voice — that of Taiwan’s people — and focused primarily on the US-China conflict, leaving many Taiwanese to wonder if their interests were even a consideration in the debate.
Great power conflict tends to relegate all other actors to pieces to be moved around a chessboard, but this perspective is dangerous. As the US pursues its Indo-Pacific policies to ensure regional peace, stability and prosperity — such as the proposed Taiwan policy act — it should not forget that when great powers neglect the interests of a strategically significant small actor, they do so to their own detriment.
When they do think about Taiwan’s interests, they find regular opinion polls asking Taiwanese whether they prefer “unification,” the “status quo,” or independence for their country, and it is often reported that nearly 90 percent of the population supports maintaining the “status quo.”
Let us be clear: the “status quo” means a tenuous geopolitical existence for a stable liberal democracy constantly threatened with forcible annexation by its much larger — but much poorer (per capita) — and arguably corrupt and dictatorial neighbor. This nearly 90 percent result is often mistaken for indicating that Taiwanese either do not feel overly threatened, or do not want or need others to help it stave off Chinese aggression.
However, such reporting misleadingly aggregates important distinctions found in surveys by National Chengchi University. In fact, only 25 percent support maintaining the “status quo indefinitely.” Meanwhile, 28 percent chose the option of maintaining the “status quo, decide at a later date” and 28 percent support “status quo, move toward independence,” while a mere 6 percent chose “status quo, move toward unification.”
When given a high-pressure scenario in which the “status quo” is no longer an option, the Taiwan Public Opinion Foundation, using different survey questions, found an overall 59 percent support for eventual independence, 16.5 percent for eventual “unification” and 8.5 percent for indefinite “status quo,” while the remaining 16 percent do not know.
Both polls show a stronger desire for independence than is often recognized outside of Taiwan, but these results point to a deeper problem: the environment itself prevents these polls from accurately capturing Taiwanese sentiment because Taiwanese answer these questions with more than 1,500 Chinese ballistic and cruise missiles targeting them, increasing maritime and military aircraft incursions of Taiwan’s air defense identification zone, live-fire military exercises encircling Taiwan, punitive trade embargoes and other forms of coercion upon even minor attempts to break Taiwan’s thorough diplomatic isolation.
These continuous and increasing threats hold Taiwan hostage, so people consider the ramifications of a bloody and devastating invasion of their country, and answer accordingly.
Taking these survey results at face value uses an extreme conception of free will or voluntarism that most people would question — it would say that someone ordered into a car at gunpoint had gone willingly, for example.
Diplomatic isolation and compromised sovereignty at China’s hands have persistently harmed Taiwan, so we can only make sense of the large percentage of Taiwan’s population who choose various “status quo” and especially “status quo indefinitely” responses if we understand that the alternative will bring “grave disaster,” as China repeatedly threatens.
Four generations have lived in Taiwan with the looming specter of Chinese invasion. They are always aware of the danger, as seen in China’s aggression over US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s recent visit, for example, with many Taiwanese largely supporting her visit despite the risks.
Taiwanese are already pricing into their survey answers the deadly cost of any movement toward official independence in defiance of the Chinese Communist Party’s wishes.
How would their answers change if they were faced with an improbable hypothetical, for example: “If China were a liberal democracy that wanted, but no longer demanded, that Taiwan join it, what would you prefer?”
Even as geopolitics often continues to thwart self-determination, the international system now places significant value on it, and people’s preferences are potentially knowable in free and open societies such as Taiwan.
At this point, however, it cannot be adequately discerned what Taiwanese really want — only what they want under duress. Perhaps the most important question under these circumstances is not “What do Taiwanese want?” but “How can any free society accurately answer this existential question looking down the barrel of a gun?”
Yvonne Chiu is a professor of strategy and policy at the US Naval War College. The views are the author’s own and do not represent those of the US government.
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