The growth of China’s military strength has been so fast and so explosive, that many have blinked and missed it. Into the early 2000s, Taiwan still had a stronger military than China, but lately the tables have dramatically turned.
Last year, China spent US$230 billion on its military, the second largest defense budget on earth behind the US, and around 10 times what it was spending two decades ago. The amount dwarfs Taiwan’s defense budget this year of around US$20 billion. In the Western Pacific, China now even theoretically outguns the US.
For Taiwan, US$20 billion on defense is already a lot of money, representing 2.45 percent of the nation’s GDP. Sensing urgency, President William Lai (賴清德) has promised to raise the ratio to 3 or even 5 percent, while a KMT-led legislature vows to oppose him. It’s worth noting here that at 5 percent of GDP, Taiwan’s defense budget would still be only one-fifth of China’s.
According to the Taipei-based, Canadian defense analyst J. Michael Cole, who dissects the current cross-strait strategic balance in his new book, The Taiwan Tinderbox, it’s not so much that China’s policy towards Taiwan has changed in recent years — what’s changed is the PRC’s military capabilities.
It was only around five years ago, that China’s military buildup allowed it to ramp up warplane incursions into Taiwan’s buffer of airspace known as its air defense identification zone (ADIZ), sending 380 aircraft into the contested space. Last year, Chinese warplane incursions increased to over 3,000, including 153 in a single day. China’s navy has also simulated blockades of Taiwan on multiple occasions.
ADIZ incursions do not constitute acts of war and are considered “gray zone” tactics — Beijing’s new favorite means of applying pressure — which have also included the cutting of two of Taiwan’s undersea Internet cables, numerous cyber attacks and contesting waters around Taiwan’s outlying islands.
This led to a potential flashpoint in February last year, when a Taiwanese Coast Guard vessel collided with a Chinese motorboat, capsizing it and killing two aboard. Based on inside information, Cole asserts that “the Chinese involved...were not fishermen” — as claimed by the Chinese government — “and their boat did not carry fishing equipment.”
Beijing also wages info wars, which Cole discusses under the headings of “sharp power” (as opposed to “soft power”) and “cognitive warfare.” Globally and within Taiwan, China aggressively works to manipulate and insert narratives in media, academia, think tanks and even culture and sports (fans at the Paris Olympics were not allowed to wear “Taiwan” t-shirts, for example).
China’s stated goal behind all these efforts is “peaceful reunification” with Taiwan, but given the Taiwan public’s extreme resistance to the idea, Cole asserts, “’reunification’ would in reality be annexation.”
Cole argues that China’s broader goal is to expel the US from what it regards as its rightful sphere of influence, namely the South China Sea and Western Pacific Ocean. He further believes that Taiwan’s fate “will have direct repercussions for the future of democracy, the global economy, the future of technology and the ambitions of authoritarian regimes.”
Should Taiwan fall to China, Cole imagines an “axis of authoritarianism” expanding through a global patchwork of regional wars: Russia nibbling at Eastern Europe, Serbia moving on Balkan neighbors, Iran-Israel, Venezuela-Guyana and aggression by North Korea against South Korea and Japan. These, according to Cole, are the stakes involved in defending Taiwan.
Cole, who has worked as a Canadian intelligence officer, deputy news chief at the Taipei Times and chief editor of a think tank run by former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), does not however believe a Chinese invasion or blockade is on the near horizon.
One factor in Taiwan’s favor is the strength of its civil society, a backbone of public will that has so far been able to safeguard the nation’s sovereignty and democracy. In 2014, civic protest groups led the way when the KMT held both the presidency and a legislative majority and attempted to pass a trade agreement that many believed would’ve eroded national sovereignty — the deal would’ve allowed Chinese ownership of Taiwan’s media, banks and other core economic institutions.
When the KMT attempted to force the legislation through, students occupied the legislature, and up to half a million protestors surged into the streets of the nation’s capitol. Now known as the Sunflower movement, the protests successfully blocked the trade deal.
Though civic movements have a long tradition in Taiwan, Cole makes the interesting argument that it was during Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) presidency, from 2008 to 2016, that they coalesced with new strength and began to blur traditional political divides. By rallying around emerging local concerns like environmentalism, land rights and public welfare, civic groups bridged divisions between “mainlanders” (descendants of KMT immigrants of 1949, or waishengren) and “native Taiwanese” (or benshengren), who increasingly found common ground in a shared “Taiwanese” identity.
The implication here is that Taiwan’s current political polarization is not a simple matter of a person’s bloodlines or who their parents voted for, as it mostly was in the 1990s.
Not only did many “mainlander” youth support the Sunflower movement, but benshengren businessmen who’d made fortunes in China, like rice cracker magnate Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), went the other way, taking pro-China positions that aligned with the KMT. (In 2008, Tsai purchased one of Taiwan’s most influential newspapers, the China Times, and imposed a pro-Beijing slant.)
But how then to explain Taiwan’s divisive politics of today? Cole argues that both the KMT and DPP still find common ground in “the essentials — freedom, democracy and way of life,” and “with few exceptions… are opposed to the idea of Taiwan being governed by the PRC.”
This may be true of some KMT factions, but core policy platforms shared by the KMT and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have begun to overlap to an uncomfortable degree.
Both the KMT and CCP now assert that the US is an unreliable ally, is using Taiwan as a pawn and overcharging Taiwan for arms. Both claim that supporting Taiwanese independence is the opposite of “supporting peace,” and both level charges of “lawfare” and “green terror” against President Lai. This is all noted by Cole.
Whether Chinese officials are adapting KMT talking points or feeding them to the KMT is perhaps unknowable — their frequent meetings in China are opaque — but it is hard to fully believe Cole when he writes, without supporting evidence, that the KMT’s behavior “is not the result of ideological alignment with the CPP… but rather from a desire to defeat one’s principal enemy [the DPP] at any cost.” According to Cole’s own definition of cognitive warfare, it seems the increasingly close alignment between the KMT and CCP should be setting off alarm bells.
If The Taiwan Tinder Box suffers other faults, the analysis is a bit vanilla and lacking in on-the-ground observations, which is odd, as Cole lives in Taipei. In the main, the book is an aggregation of recent Western discourse — if you’ve been reading the Taipei Times op-ed page, Foreign Affairs and similar sources, you won’t find much new. Also, as 200 pages of dry-as-toast think-tank-ese, this is hardly a pleasure read.
But Cole should be credited for presenting a solid outline of the major security concerns surrounding Taiwan. In doing so, he makes a strong case, both strategically and morally, for defending Taiwan as a matter of vital interest to a world we’d want to live in.
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