When Taiwan’s geopolitical significance is emphasized in media and books, the focus is usually on its indispensability to the global supply of semiconductors.
Many recent books also stress the importance of supporting a democracy that shares values with the so-called international community, but this acknowledgment generally takes a back seat to the analysis of economy, trade and technology.
This makes some sense: As with other pressing issues, such as climate change and development, appeals to conscience are often ineffective in persuading the unaware or undecided. Give people quantifiable evidence of how something will affect them, and they’ll likely be more receptive.
Thus, in a chapter titled “What if a Cross-strait War Started,” Kerry Brown, a professor of Chinese studies at King’s College London and former diplomat in Beijing, cites a figure of US$2 trillion in potential damage to global GDP. This estimate, taken from a 2022 report by the Rhodium Group, a China-focused research provider, has been quoted widely. Arguments over its accuracy aside, any cross-strait conflict would have catastrophic economic consequences.
Reinforcing this, Brown quotes Miin Wu (吳敏求), founder and chairman of flash memory chip giant Macronix, as predicting a setback of “at least 20 years” for the world economy.
But the face-off between the US (and, more broadly, the West) and China over Taiwan, writes Brown, is “not just over the question of raw power, but over whose ideas and values have the most potency in the twenty-first century.”
Accordingly, an attack on Taiwan is an assault on these values, from “the terrifying question of just how much the outside world would do to defend its principles — or whether it no longer has the capacity, the self-belief or the willpower to do so.”
With cross-strait communication virtually nonexistent, China under President Xi Jinping (習近平) aggressive and unpredictable and the successive administrations of US presidents Donald Trump (during his first term) and Joe Biden viewing the Indo-Pacific as the key security sphere and taking an increasingly confrontational approach toward China, the chances of a misstep into turmoil are higher than ever, Brown believes.
At present, the “Taiwan-US-China nexus,” which Brown calls “the world’s most consequential triangular relationship,” is stuck. “We need to recognize,” writes Brown, “that the differences between China, Taiwan and the US and its allies over how to achieve security are currently insurmountable.”
Yet, rather than an “endpoint,” the stalemate, writes Brown, is “a holding pattern, something to be preserved until the overall situation changes.”
EMBRACING AMBIGUITY
While hardly revelatory, the simplicity of this point is lost amid the hostile rhetoric and grandstanding from Beijing and Washington.
Rather than a groundbreaking approach, a return to the tried-and-trusted formula of “strategic ambiguity” is recommended. In a powerful expression of this, Brown presents in his introduction “a passionate defence [sic] of why the outside world needs to recommit to ambiguity and hedging with clarity and focus as never before.”
But getting back on track won’t be easy, in Brown’s view. Although the book’s writing and publication precluded analysis of Trump’s second tenure, Brown forecasts the direction things were going in a section on the way former government officials from the US and the UK hopped on the Taiwan bandwagon.
Individuals such as former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, who regards China “as a bastion of anti-Christian evil,” and Liz Truss whose “49 memorable days in office” are highlighted as the shortest tenure of any British prime minister, are depicted by Brown as clueless, self-serving or both.
The “new prominence” that their visits to Taiwan — Pompeo in 2022 and Truss in 2023 —brought the country is “a very mixed blessing,” writes Brown. Both, he asserts, revealed “a similar lack of interest in the minutiae of the ‘one China policy’ — Pompeo calling for official recognition of Taiwan and Truss proposing an ‘economic NATO’ to protect it.”
DECOUPLING DANGERS?
For Truss, the criticism is scathing, as Brown cites the disapproval of the former prime minister’s own Conservative Party colleague and former head of the UK Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee, Alicia Kearns, who branded Truss’ visit “Instagram diplomacy,” that was “about keeping herself relevant.”
Yet, as I argued in a column in this newspaper (“Taipei should be wary of Liz Truss,” Feb. 4, 2024, page 8), while she was spot on about Truss — as subsequently demonstrated by the latter’s under-the-table lobbying to have landmine disposal equipment sold to China, which Kearns also condemned — Kearns herself has been mealy-mouthed about the “golden era” of Sino-British relations under former prime minister David Cameron.
This period included the approval of a deal for state-backed Chinese companies to build and maintain a stake in nuclear power plants in the UK, an insane decision, which I discussed in another Taipei Times op-ed (“Cameron’s Beijing connections,” Dec. 3, 2023, page 8). During her Taipei visit, Kearns said the UK’s closeness to China “made sense at the time.” She also suggested that decoupling was impracticable.
Based on passages in the book where he cautions against the unfeasibility and danger of isolating China, perhaps Brown would agree, arguing that engagement is a political and economic necessity.
A HYPOTHETICAL FIREBRAND
Extending his concerns into a thought experiment, Brown imagines a new US president called Brownlow elected “on a platform of being more like Trump than Trump himself.”
Accusing previous leaders of spinelessness, Brownlow demonstrates breathtaking ignorance and recklessness in his China policy, fulfilling a pledge to open a US embassy in Taipei and vowing to make Taiwan his first official state visit. Quickly, “the conflict everyone has feared, and no one has wanted has come into view.”
Based on increasingly bold statements and actions of (mainly) Republican officials, the hypothetical firebrand Brownlow, Brown suggests, no longer resides in “the far reaches of fantasy.”
In order to step back from the brink, we need to understand that China, for all its own bluster and, regardless of the legitimacy of its claims on Taiwan, shares with the US “a common desire for security.” At the heart of Beijing’s “emotional and nationalistic” desire for “reunification,” writes Brown, “sits a strong desire for protection.”
This is debatable, but Brown’s argument that, right now, “a stalemate is the only option which will not precipitate an outright crisis” is not. It might not be groundbreaking, but it needs repeating.
INCONSISTENCIES
Alas, for all its qualities, this is another book that — at the risk of sounding like a broken record — contains far too many basic mistakes. George Kerr, author of Formosa Betrayed, the seminal English-language account of the February 28 Incident, is twice referred to as “Gordon Kerr.” China’s distrust of President William Lai (賴清德) is traced to his calling Taiwan “de facto independent,” — uncontroversial as his predecessors Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) also did so — rather than his branding of himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence.” Dutch colonial rule is depicted as anticipating Taiwan’s pivotal role in global supply chains through the “shifting goods from Asia back to markets in Europe,” instead of mainly serving as a base for the export of deer hides to Japan.
There are also several eyebrow-raisers concerning Taiwanese society, such as the claim that mask-wearing and social distancing were not mandated during the pandemic and that the success of Taiwan’s National Health Insurance system was down to an all-for-one “Confucian” ethic.
Inconsistent, confusing, and inaccurate Romanization also grates — Taichung as “Taizhong,” Kinmen as “Jinmin,” and Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) as “Sun Yatsen,” just a few lines after a reference to the (correctly) hyphenated Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石).
Overall, though, Brown deserves praise for introducing Taiwan and the Taiwanese on their own terms in an accessible, cogent manner.
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