Over the past few months, various media outlets, think tanks and lobby groups have published numerous opinion columns and reports about the implications for Taiwan given Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
About a week ago, the Taiwan Policy Centre, a non-partisan research and advocacy group, complemented this coverage with the publication of its launch report, “Ukraine today, Taiwan tomorrow?”
As the center’s director of communications, I have worked with colleagues across party lines to produce a paper that refocuses the conversation around the unique circumstances of the nation’s current security context.
The war has briefly made Taiwan relevant and visible again, but too often the substance of this visibility evokes a rabbit breaking cover across a field as it escapes.
There is a depressing predictability to these breathless, macabre reports on news stations where they war-game potential invasion scenarios without any reference to the opinion of a single Taiwanese person.
Taiwanese have cause to feel aggrieved that most of any attention they have received from international media has until now been through a limited range of framings: How upset is China? How likely is the prospect of war? If we means-test the strategic role and worth of Taiwan to competing imperial hegemonies, is it worth saving?
This discussion is invariably conducted with the amount of empathy for the lives and futures of 23.9 million people that you would expect from commentators who appear to regard Taiwan as a critical pawn in an exciting geopolitical struggle, yet in and of itself rather inconsequential.
Taiwanese have spent the past 50 years outside of the UN effectively rendered invisible on the world stage. Where they have endeavored to become institutionally seen, they have suffered a similar fate as other “unrecognized” nations trapped in a geopolitical legacy of war and colonialism.
They have been arrested, evicted, written out, renamed, redacted, told that their mere presence or voice is a provocation, and asked to censor themselves to a humiliating degree, all to mollify a coordinated pressure campaign that acts as the engine of a state-sponsored policy to globally enforce adherence to that state’s preferred nomenclature.
Taiwan’s diplomatic isolation owes itself not just to the absurd degree China will go to suppress the image of Taiwan as a country — just ask Birdlife International — but how a rigid, self-imposed adherence to a position of “strategic ambiguity,” maintaining the “status quo” and respecting the “one China” policy has effectively turned Taiwan into Schrodinger’s country territory.
There is a growing realization in corridors of power that continuing to suppress Taiwan to please the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is a serious and now unaffordable strategic error. Taiwan and China have changed a lot in the past 30 years.
Where China has become more authoritarian, displaying this with dogmatic pride in a beaten and cowed Hong Kong, Taiwan has consolidated its robust sovereign democracy. That hard-won and just right to self-determination is under greater threat than ever before.
It was a sense of urgency that prompted the establishment of the Taiwan Policy Centre. Its goal is to boost political, cultural and trading relations specifically between the UK and Taiwan, and to build the case and pressure for the UK to recognize and establish full diplomatic relations with Taiwan.
It is the center’s contention that the defense of Taiwan’s sovereignty, independence and democracy is a moral and economic good for Taiwan and the world in its own right.
The current British government has been outspoken about supporting democracies around the world, yet on the future of Taiwan it has remained nervously quiet. It is long overdue for that to change.
The UK has the capacity to push back against Beijing’s bullying of Taiwan, but thus far when it has criticized the PRC, it has been mostly in reference to human rights abuses in East Turkestan (Xinjiang), and the collapse of democracy and freedom of speech in Hong Kong.
The center’s concern is that this approach has limited capacity to explain or legitimize a change in policy on Taiwan, and it invites an easily proven accusation of hypocrisy, paternalism and arrogance. It keeps the conversation focused on China.
It is time to build a case for Taiwan on its own merits, and that means recognizing it exists, that it deserves to exist, and that it is a valuable ally and key contributor to the global economy.
The UK needs to engage with the issue of Taiwan as a core interest in much the same way the PRC does, with the same obstinate consistency, and concurrently across multiple platforms and organizations. There are tentative signs this is starting to happen.
This is what the center is focusing on in its next report, namely that deterrence does not and should not depend entirely on military denial of access, but can preferably be manifested through a process of normalizing Taiwan as a nation.
Lithuania and the Czech Republic have demonstrated foresight and courage in slowly rebalancing their relations with the PRC and Taiwan away from the “one China” policy, receiving not insignificant retaliatory threats as a result.
The UK and the rest of Europe should follow suit. It is not about China, it is about defending an important ally from a threatened annexation.
China must be made to perceive a new calculation: It can choose to attack Taiwan, or it can continue enjoying peaceful relations and trade with its biggest export markets, but it cannot be allowed to do both.
Ben Goren is director of communications for the Taiwan Policy Centre, and a long-term resident of Taiwan.
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