Former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull on Monday told a forum in Taipei that Taiwan’s viewpoint is more important for Asia-Pacific democracies than ever before. Giving attention to Taiwan’s perspective amid the turbulent international situation was likely a welcome message to the local audience. Taiwanese would be forgiven for wondering where their voice is among all the to-and-fro between the US, China and their respective allies on the geopolitical stage. War in the Taiwan Strait would, after all, be felt most directly and terribly in this country.
Turnbull also said that people need to “stand up for truth and call out lies for what they are.” That comment, made in the context of social media, is also applicable to international discourse driven by state actors, either explicitly in what Council on Geostrategy cofounder James Rogers has termed “discursive statecraft” — which he defines as “attempts by governments to articulate concepts, ideas and objects into new discourses to degrade existing political and ideological frameworks or generate entirely new ones” — or in the form of state-sponsored cyberattacks.
War in the Taiwan Strait could spiral out of control and become a global conflict. It is understandable that world leaders express concern in terms of the consequences for their own security.
During an interview with The Economist at the end of April, former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger said it is possible to “create a world order on the basis of rules that Europe, China and India could join [with the US], and that’s already a good slice of humanity. So if you look at the practicality of it, it can end well.” Kissinger followed up on that idea during an interview with the Wall Street Journal on Friday last week, in which he said he believed the issue of Taiwan should be left to time.
The Ministry of Foreign Affairs pushed back, saying that Taiwan’s future is to be decided by Taiwanese through democratic means, and that it is the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) causing the tensions. There is not necessarily a contradiction between the ministry’s and Kissinger’s positions.
The CCP is certainly not sitting idly by. It had been employing discursive statecraft successfully for decades due to international compliance until the rise of “wolf warrior diplomacy,” the COVID-19 pandemic and its overreaction to then-US House of Representatives speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit in August last year. Since then, there has been a massive outpouring of international solidarity with Taiwan. Through individual, bilateral and multilateral mechanisms, more than 300 members of parliaments from 50 countries and the European Parliament have spoken out on behalf of Taiwan, the foreign ministry said. The US, too, has rallied allies to speak up for peace in the Strait and the Indo-Pacific region.
Time is changing the dynamics of China’s power, too. In addition to the geopolitical headwinds, it is facing economic and demographic challenges, with an aging society exacerbated by decades of the one-child policy, abandoned only in 2021. There is also the looming fallout from the massively over-leveraged real-estate sector and the internal dynamics of a distinctly innovation-suffocating centralized, communist, moralistic industrial policy, decided by a single individual to whom, so the reports say, few have the desire or the courage to show dissent or even bring bad news to.
Next year’s presidential and legislative elections will reveal much about what Taiwanese want. Opinion polls show that the majority would reject unification, but there is also a sense that many are spooked by the prospect of war, cracking under the weight of Beijing’s intimidation and the accumulated effect of its discursive statecraft.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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