The so-called “Taiwan question” — regarding Taiwan’s future status in the international community — is often described by China’s communist leaders, and by Western academics, as “the unfinished business of the Chinese Civil War.”
That is why former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger presses Taiwan to accept Beijing’s rule, warning that “China will not wait forever.”
It is also why Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) echoes that the matter “cannot be passed from one generation to another.”
However, inevitably affecting Taiwan’s fate is China’s own future, because the continued rule of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) represents the larger unfinished business of the Cold War.
In the late 1980s, as the Moscow-imposed communist regimes in Eastern Europe were falling and the Soviet Union itself was teetering, Chinese were peacefully calling for major political reform to match then-Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) economic opening up.
However, Deng lost his nerve and the historic opportunity to lead the great Chinese civilization to a brilliant democratic future.
True communist that he was, and with the world watching, he defaulted to former Chinese leader Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) teaching that “political power grows from the barrel of a gun” and unleashed China’s People’s Liberation Army against its own people.
That disastrous decision on June 4, 1989, tragically forfeited for at least the next couple of generations China’s enlightened evolution as a normal country.
Nor did Deng or his successors pay a significant price economically, diplomatically or in world public opinion.
After the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the US administration of presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama all proceeded with engagement policies that had reaped for China the economic and diplomatic benefits of inclusion into former US president Richard Nixon’s“family of nations.”
Only the administration of US President Donald Trump has mustered the will and formulated a strategy to insist that, in return, China play by the same international rules as all other countries.
The Trump White House has confronted, and refused to accept, China’s ingrained inclination to “nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates and threaten its neighbors,” as Nixon aptly put it.
Ironically for some, it has demanded normal behavior from China.
The Trump team has challenged Beijing not only on its trade cheating — which the president took on as a personal challenge — but also on its maritime aggression in the South and East China Seas and its economic, diplomatic and military pressures on Taiwan.
The incoming administration of US president-elect Joe Biden cannot afford to backslide in any of those areas without opening the door to increased militant Chinese opportunism.
Already during the transition period, there are hints of a softening position as Biden appointees signal an overriding desire to return to smoother relations with China — that is, to be the anti-Trump administration.
Trump, for example, calmly defied Beijing by accepting a congratulatory telephone call from Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) within 24 days of being declared the winner in the 2016 presidential election.
Biden, after a longer comparable period, so far has declined to extend that courtesy to the US’ democratic friend and security partner, even as he accepts calls from other national leaders, both democratic and authoritarian.
Clearly, the motivation is to avoid provoking or confronting Xi, with whom Biden touted his years of warm personal relationship as US vice president, but, as a presidential candidate, he called “a thug” to demonstrate his “toughness” on China.
However, Xi knows well that actions, and inaction, can speak louder than name-calling — at which Trump excelled and for which he was roundly criticized by his political opponents and media critics.
Biden’s moderate approach, like those of Obama, George W. Bush and Clinton, will be seen by the Chinese communist leaders not as self-confident steadiness, but as timidity and weakness — and they will continue their adventuristic probing.
Accepting the Chinese government’s self-serving definitions of what constitutes Western “provocations” and “containment” is a fool’s errand and a prescription for policy paralysis.
From China’s perspective, Taiwan as a democratic governing alternative and de facto independent state is a continuing provocation justifying the use of force to rectify.
The most significant legacy Trump is leaving his successor is a commitment to work with the Chinese people and the international community for peaceful political reform in China. US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, in a July speech at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum, declared: “Changing the CCP’s behavior cannot be the mission of the Chinese people alone. Free nations have to work to defend freedom.”
Given the Biden team’s proclaimed intentions to emphasize human rights and collaboration with friends and democratic allies to differentiate the new administration from the incumbents’ alleged shortcomings, the Pompeo declaration provides a solid rhetorical starting point.
The West’s success in supporting the earth-shaking, yet largely peaceful, political revolutions in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union offer, if not a road map, at least a model for effective strategic communications.
Information warfare — which China has long waged incessantly against the West — is far preferable to the kinetic alternative that will become inevitable if Washington reverts to earlier accommodationist policies.
Taiwan is a normal — indeed a model — democratic country, but it is treated as a diplomatic pariah.
Communist China, by definition, is an aberration in the modern civilized world, but is dealt with as a normal state. The international community needs to get its priorities straight.
For decades, the conventional resolution of that paradox called for pressing Taiwan, which had painfully thrown off its anti-communist tyranny, to submit instead to a communist dictatorship.
However, more recently, as Beijing expanded its assault on international norms and triggered a global pandemic, and as the Trump administration drew a strategic and values-based line in the sand, more governments in Asia, Europe, Africa and elsewhere followed the US lead, consciously or implicitly.
The Biden administration can take the passing baton and show Xi a collaborative glide path to a democratic future and peaceful coexistence with Taiwan.
The first step would be for Beijing to stop inciting artificial nationalism on “reunification” (Taiwan has never been part of the People’s Republic of China) and then using that “patriotic” fervor as the pretext for its aggression.
A democratically elected government in China would not need that dangerous tactic to establish its popular legitimacy — which it had and squandered at Tiananmen Square.
Xi needs to start over.
Joseph Bosco served as China country director in the office of the US secretary of defense. He is a fellow at the Institute for Taiwan-American Studies and a member of the advisory committee of the Global Taiwan Institute.
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