The passage of any law by China's rubber-stamp National People's Congress is always a mere formality. But the controversial legislation to outlaw Taiwan's secession has proved anything but routine. It raised the stakes for Taiwan's pro-independence camp and increased the risk of a cross-strait military conflict.
The "Anti-Secession" Law's vague language and attempt at softened wording -- perhaps geared toward mollifying foreign critics -- paradoxically increases rather than decreases the likelihood that China and the US could be unwittingly and unwillingly drawn into an avoidable military conflict. By failing to clearly delineate presumed or potential "red lines" for Taiwan, the law leaves open the possibility of substantial miscalculation or misinterpretation.
Despite several weeks of intense US pressure to soften -- or even retract -- the law, China's leaders did little more than attempt to reinforce their position that "non-peaceful" (ie, military) measures would serve strictly as a last resort -- which had already been assumed anyway.
Last December's legislative elections delivered an unexpected defeat for President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and the Democratic Progressive Party, but was also seen as a positive development for relations with China. Indeed, the start of this year saw some movement on improved ties, with the introduction of a successful Lunar New Year cross-strait direct charter flights program. This gave rise to serious discussion about instituting permanent direct air links. Now, in the aftermath of the Anti-Secession Law, the future of the charter-flights scheme looks bleak.
Opinion polls in Taiwan reflect public dismay over the Chinese legislation, and this negative sentiment will raise the pressure on Chen. There are now serious concerns that the hard-line faction in the pan-green camp will seize this issue as a stick with which to beat Chen.
One of the more frustrating elements of the Anti-Secession Law is the fact that it is an entirely unnecessary provocation. The absence of laws mandating force to block separatist activity has never stopped Chinese authorities from brutally persecuting individuals and groups who have called for an independent Tibet or Xinjiang. There is thus little reason to believe that a more explicitly assertive stance is necessary for dealing with the "splittist" government in Taipei. Missile tests, People's Liberation Army military exercises and threatening rhetoric have been sufficient deterrents until now.
China justifies the law in terms of clarifying policy and establishing a legal premise for invading Taiwan. In practice, however, the construction of legal foundations could weaken China's operational flexibility when responding to a Taiwanese move toward independence. The law of unintended consequences dictates that this effort to deny ambiguity to Taiwanese activists could backfire, and instead leave China's leaders without room to maneuver if Taiwan does attempt to revise the status quo.
While outright military conflict is still considered unlikely, the combination of China's vague "red lines" and non-specific threats will certainly raise the likelihood of miscalculation and misinterpretation on both sides.
More broadly, the fact that the Anti-Secession Law was introduced at all comes as a major disappointment to those who had been impressed by the apparent sophistication and skillfulness of recent Chinese diplomacy. Coming in the same week as China's poorly handled removal of Hong Kong chief executive Tung Chee-hwa (董建華), the Anti-Secession Law episode illustrates that Beijing's PR savvy has its limits and that Taiwan will remain an emotional and divisive thorn in the side of Sino-US relations.
Amit Chanda is Asia research analyst for the Country Intelligence Group at Global Insight.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS