With China’s economy in the doldrums, people have been asking whether a slowing economy might make Chinese less supportive of a hypothetical invasion of Taiwan. With more pressing issues, such as healthcare, housing and cost of living, Chinese might be more concerned with developments inside their country, rather than “reunifying the motherland,” using the parlance of the Chinese Communist Party.
“Ordinary Chinese people are not pushing the government to get unification,” one Chinese told al-Jazeera last week, adding: “It is the government that pushes people to believe that there must be unification.”
University of Manchester China Institute research fellow Wang Tao, writing for Foreign Policy last week, said that going by recent comments on Chinese social media, Chinese are souring on the idea of a Taiwan invasion. He said this is a marked change from online sentiment in the past few years, which has been characterized by bellicose nationalism and anti-Taiwan warmongering.
“Who is going to fight the war? If I die, who is going to pay my mortgage or my car loan?” wrote one user regarding a post from Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) about “reunification” with Taiwan.
However, these comments and interviews should be taken with a pinch of salt, as they might not be representative of wider public opinion. Polling on this matter suggests Chinese would be more than willing to support an invasion.
In an article titled “Assessing Public Support for (Non-)Peaceful Unification with Taiwan: Evidence from a Nationwide Survey in China” published in the Journal of Contemporary China, academics Adam Liu (劉遙) and Li Xiaojun (李曉雋) asked Chinese whether they would find “armed unification” acceptable. Fifty-five percent of respondents said they would, while 33 percent said they would not.
Public opinion data in authoritarian countries tend to be unreliable given that respondents are incentivized to self-censor for fear of the repercussions for speaking against the party line. Yet 55 percent, even for an authoritarian country, is high. On the eve of Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, 43 percent of Russians said the use of military force against Ukraine to force it to join Russia would be wrong, while 36 percent said it would be right.
A few comments online and in interviews with journalists expressing skepticism about supporting an invasion should not encourage Taiwanese. Many in the West hoped that Russians would not support their government’s invasion of Ukraine. Especially once the impact of sanctions hit, the hope was that a political movement would rise up and force the regime of Russian President Vladimir Putin to withdraw. The democratic world has been disappointed.
Like Russia’s, the Chinese political system is based on depoliticization and demobilization. People are encouraged to not get involved in politics, and for a variety of reasons, they duly oblige.
Fundamentally, authoritarian political rulers are not answerable to their public, and often make decisions themselves. While there might be some grumbling online and chuntering with journalists, if China were to invade Taiwan, do not expect the Chinese people to take a stand and stop the carnage.
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