Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull on Monday told a forum in Taipei that Taiwan’s viewpoint is more important for Asia-Pacific democracies than ever before. Giving attention to Taiwan’s perspective amid the turbulent international situation was likely a welcome message to the local audience. Taiwanese would be forgiven for wondering where their voice is among all the to-and-fro between the US, China and their respective allies on the geopolitical stage. War in the Taiwan Strait would, after all, be felt most directly and terribly in this country.
Turnbull also said that people need to “stand up for truth and call out lies for what they are.” That comment, made in the context of social media, is also applicable to international discourse driven by state actors, either explicitly in what Council on Geostrategy cofounder James Rogers has termed “discursive statecraft” — which he defines as “attempts by governments to articulate concepts, ideas and objects into new discourses to degrade existing political and ideological frameworks or generate entirely new ones” — or in the form of state-sponsored cyberattacks.
War in the Taiwan Strait could spiral out of control and become a global conflict. It is understandable that world leaders express concern in terms of the consequences for their own security.
During an interview with The Economist at the end of April, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said it is possible to “create a world order on the basis of rules that Europe, China and India could join [with the US], and that’s already a good slice of humanity. So if you look at the practicality of it, it can end well.” Kissinger followed up on that idea during an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Friday last week, in which he said he believed the issue of Taiwan should be left to time.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs pushed back, saying that Taiwan’s future is to be decided by Taiwanese through democratic means, and that it is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) causing the tensions. There is not necessarily a contradiction between the ministry’s and Kissinger’s positions.
The CCP is certainly not sitting idly by. It had been employing discursive statecraft successfully for decades due to international compliance until the rise of “wolf warrior diplomacy,” the COVID-19 pandemic and its overreaction to then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit in August last year. Since then, there has been a massive outpouring of international solidarity with Taiwan. Through individual, bilateral and multilateral mechanisms, more than 300 members of parliaments from 50 countries and the European Parliament have spoken out on behalf of Taiwan, the foreign ministry said. The US, too, has rallied allies to speak up for peace in the Strait and the Indo-Pacific region.
Time is changing the dynamics of China’s power, too. In addition to the geopolitical headwinds, it is facing economic and demographic challenges, with an aging society exacerbated by decades of the one-child policy, abandoned only in 2021. There is also the looming fallout from the massively over-leveraged real-estate sector and the internal dynamics of a distinctly innovation-suffocating centralized, communist, moralistic industrial policy, decided by a single individual to whom, so the reports say, few have the desire or the courage to show dissent or even bring bad news to.
Next year’s presidential and legislative elections will reveal much about what Taiwanese want. Opinion polls show that the majority would reject unification, but there is also a sense that many are spooked by the prospect of war, cracking under the weight of Beijing’s intimidation and the accumulated effect of its discursive statecraft.
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
When a recall campaign targeting the opposition Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators was launched, something rather disturbing happened. According to reports, Hualien County Government officials visited several people to verify their signatures. Local authorities allegedly used routine or harmless reasons as an excuse to enter people’s house for investigation. The KMT launched its own recall campaigns, targeting Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers, and began to collect signatures. It has been found that some of the KMT-headed counties and cities have allegedly been mobilizing municipal machinery. In Keelung, the director of the Department of Civil Affairs used the household registration system
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