Policymakers might have to face the possibility of a “disruption of stability” in the Taiwan Strait, a US academic told a conference in Washington on Monday.
Shelley Rigger, a professor of East Asian politics at Davidson College in North Carolina, said there were at least two developments that could change the equilibrium and “well-established pattern” that support peace.
One is that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) might come to believe that time is no longer on its side in its drive for unification. The other is that the PRC could encounter problems so severe that the leadership sees a need for a diversion to distract the public and refocus their attention on the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) as the defender of Chinese nationalism.
Rigger made her points as the keynote speaker at a conference on “Taiwan’s 2016 Elections and the United States” organized by the Center for Strategic and International Studies and the Brookings Center for East Asia Policy Studies.
“Do we see those circumstances begin to come together now?” she asked the crowded conference.
Rigger said Beijing believes that time is on its side because its economic power is growing, as is Taiwan’s economic dependence on China, but Beijing’s view could change as it might think time is no longer on its side and waiting would put it in a weaker position.
Rigger said that Beijing is becoming increasingly powerful economically, politically and militarily relative to Taiwan.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to imagine how Taiwan could resist in the long term China’s determination to achieve unification, she said.
“In order to achieve peaceful unification, you have to be able to make the case for it and sell it in Taiwan, and that is getting harder and harder and harder, and not easier,” she said. “Unification has no support at all in Taiwan right now, but support for independence is also low. The bad news is that if you dig a little deeper, support for independence starts to look less weak and support for unification looks even weaker than the surface level trends would suggest.”
Rigger said this is not a good trend for the PRC.
She added that Beijing’s strategy of waiting for economic integration to win support for political integration is also losing momentum.
At the same time, she said, Beijing is facing economic and political headwinds that could “sharpen a perception” that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) needs to do something to consolidate his support and to show that even if he cannot control everything, he can control something and that something might be Taiwan.
“And that’s not good,” she said.
In a cautious address during which she said that she did not necessarily agree with the arguments she was presenting, Rigger said the risks involved in Chinese military action against Taiwan are still very high.
She said that strong action or risk-taking could activate or intensify rather than alleviate splits in the PRC leadership and that “knowledge of that possibility may be a deterrent to taking stronger action on the Taiwan issue.”
She quoted two arguments from other panelists at the conference.
One panelist said that a Taiwan-related crisis would reflect poorly on Xi and therefore is unlikely.
However, the other panelist suggested that Xi would actually do more damage to himself if he were seen to be “looking the other way and tolerating Taiwan going in a bad direction.”
Rigger concluded that both arguments made sense.
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