When Chinese Premier Li Qiang (李強) omitted the term “peaceful unification” in his report to the Chinese National People’s Congress on Tuesday last week, some wondered whether this signified a change of strategy toward Taiwan.
Beijing has not abandoned peaceful unification, but said that it is pursuing “peaceful unification by coercion,” National Security Bureau Director-General Tsai Ming-yen (蔡明彥) said on Monday at a meeting of the legislature’s Foreign and National Defense Committee. Beijing aims to achieve this using measures such as information warfare, military coercion, “united front” operations, intimidatory rhetoric and the strangulation of Taiwan’s international space.
Foreign Policy Research Institute Asia Program senior fellow June Teufel Dreyer described this as an “anaconda strategy” — forcing “unification without firing a shot” by constricting Taiwan until it can no longer resist. One of Beijing’s methods — part of its sustained information warfare operations — is to convince Taiwanese and the international community that unification is inevitable and resistance is futile. Authoritative statements frequently frame “reunification” as unstoppable and a “trend of the times.”
As the Chinese State Council white paper The Taiwan Question and China’s Reunification in the New Era said in August 2022: “The wheel of history rolls on towards national reunification, and it will not be stopped by any individual or any force.”
This evocation of an inevitable Chinese future for Taiwan is no accident, University of Nottingham China Policy Institute director Jonathan Sullivan says, adding that it is part of a “communication strategy that seeks to erode Taiwanese people’s perceptions of their agency to determine their future.”
It is important that China is not successful in this endeavor, as “the capacity to imagine the future, and perceiving agency to affect future outcomes, is crucial for national resilience,” he says.
President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) speeches on China’s discursive efforts to limit Taiwan’s future is the subject of Sullivan’s “Time Matters in Cross-Strait Relations: Tsai Ing-wen and Taiwan’s Future,” published last month in The China Quarterly. He says Tsai’s speeches are “mindful of threats to Taiwanese people’s confidence in the future, with numerous themes designed to galvanize and promote resilience.”
For example, in her Double Ten National Day address in 2020, she talked of the imperative to “seize the future” lest “[Taiwan’s] fate be decided by others.” At her inauguration address in 2016, she said that the nation’s future rests on collective responsibility, which requires every citizen to “carry the future of this nation.”
“Taiwan’s future belongs to everybody,” she said, adding that remaining “united under the banner of freedom and democracy” is imperative for Taiwan’s future.
She frames the nation’s commitment to democracy as a powerful resource for generating international support, Sullivan says.
China says that Taiwan is an “internal affair” and of no interest to the international community. Tsai resists this future and depicts Taiwan as being “democracy’s first line of defense” against a vanguard of authoritarianism, a narrative that has won support locally and across democracies.
Tsai’s resilient, outward-facing, liberal democratic Taiwan with agency, is the antithesis of Beijing’s hopeless Taiwan and “inevitable unification.”
Taiwan shows that smaller, democratic powers have agency and, through careful diplomacy, unity, resilience and a positive narrative about the nation’s future, can stand up to a larger power’s coercion. In the face of China’s information warfare, Taiwanese could have confidence in their agency to resist and shape their future, as they have done for decades, and should continue to do so.
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