A floor has ostensibly been placed under the deteriorating situation in the Taiwan Strait. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has invited Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) politicians to China to project a more positive narrative of cross-strait relations.
Lauding the so-called “great unity of the Chinese nation,” there has been an apparent change in tone in China’s approach to ties with Taiwan.
However, is this as much of a victory for the KMT’s “nuanced diplomacy” as it says it is?
For more than a decade, Beijing’s overtures to Taiwanese have been thoroughly rejected, and its coercion has been a strategic dead end because winning hearts and minds is essential for “peaceful unification.” Endless coercion only damages that.
Beijing wants to change tack and the KMT is providing a path.
Moreover, serious problems in China’s domestic economy, rising tensions in the South China Sea, US export controls, Western “de-risking” and EU-China trade disputes mean Beijing has a lot on its plate.
With president-elect William Lai (賴清德) to be inaugurated later this month, Beijing wants to pre-empt a narrative that Taiwan is getting away by projecting the “Taiwan issue” as being under its control.
As Tamkang University Graduate Institute of China Studies associate professor Chang Wu-ueh (張五岳) has said, KMT-CCP rapprochement provides Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) with a “face-saving exit” so he does not have to continue to take such a tough approach. The KMT touts this as a victory.
However, questions remain over how nuanced its approach is. When Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) was president from 2008 to 2016, he presented the so-called “1992 consensus” as a concession the KMT extracted from the CCP. The KMT said that it was a tacit agreement between the the two parties that while they both agreed that Taiwan was part of “one China,” they would shelve the dispute over which entity — the Republic of China or the People’s Republic of China (PRC) — was sovereign over China.
It was a formation that the KMT described as “one China, respective interpretations,” a red line that enabled it to protect its dignity while facilitating stability and exchanges.
Although the CCP never explicitly acknowledged the “respective interpretation” component, it left the area sufficiently ambiguous to create the conditions for dialogue and stability.
However, Xi has since removed any ambiguity regarding the “1992 consensus.” Starting with the 19th CCP conference in 2017 and culminating in his “message to Taiwanese compatriots” in 2019, he has explicitly linked the “1992 consensus” to PRC sovereignty over Taiwan. The CCP crossed a KMT red line.
Defending a red line is necessary to deter an aggressor, otherwise they would continue to push for more concessions. Xi changed the “status quo” and the KMT simply accepted it. Is this nuanced diplomacy? It looks more like capitulation.
When Ma brokered a so-called “diplomatic truce” with the CCP during his presidency, Beijing temporarily desisted in poaching Taiwan’s allies among other symbolic concessions. Meanwhile, it continued to ramp up its military capabilities, and Taiwan’s military spending remained stagnant. By the time the KMT was voted out, China was in a stronger position to militarily threaten Taiwan than it had ever been.
It was fitting that at the same time that a delegation of KMT lawmakers led by caucus whip Fu Kun-chi was in China, more than 30 Chinese military aircraft were detected near Taiwan, with some flying as close as 37 nautical miles (69km) from Keelung.
Like Ma’s presidency, Fu’s visit encapsulated the KMT’s China diplomacy: symbolic easing of hostilities while the CCP continues to alter the “status quo.”
Taiwanese should ask whether this brand of diplomacy is the best means to secure Taiwan’s prosperity and security.
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