Sun, Oct 29, 2023 page3

• Election a chance for China dialogue: report

  • Staff writer, with CNA
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  Next year’s presidential election raises the risk of increased Chinese coercive pressure on Taiwan, but could also offer a “window of opportunity” for both sides to resume dialogue to reduce tensions, a think tank said.

  The path to resuming dialogue with China will be clearer if the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) wins the election, as the party already “has an understanding in place with Beijing,” the Brussels-based International Crisis Group said in a report released on Friday.

  If a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) candidate is elected again, Taipei and Beijing should in the months between election day and DPP presidential candidate Vice President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration seek to identify “a mutually acceptable political formulation of the cross-strait relationship” to resume dialogue, the Preventing War in the Taiwan Strait report said.

  For cross-strait dialogue to resume under a new DPP president, the president should again offer the formulation articulated by President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) in 2016, including that cross-strait affairs should be conducted in accordance with the Constitution of the Republic of China, which contains a notion of “one China,” the report said.

  Beijing should accept this formulation, given its long-term interest in arriving at an understanding with the DPP, especially since a third consecutive DPP term would be a sign of the party’s staying power, it said.

  However, the resumption of cross-strait dialogue “fundamentally depends on Beijing’s willingness to return to a more flexible, pragmatic approach,” it said.

  Although cross-strait relations deteriorated after Tsai’s election in 2016, a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is unlikely any time soon, it said.

  However, the risk of conflict is rising as the “one China” concept begins to unravel, it added.

  That concept has previously served as the “fabric of understandings” among Taiwan, China and the US, and allowed for different interpretations of the term without the parties clashing, it said.

  “As major-power rivalry intensifies, both sides are attaching higher stakes to the Taiwan issue, and taking firmer postures, raising questions about whether they remain committed to the understandings that for years have helped keep the peace in and around the Taiwan Strait,” the report said.

  Washington is worried that China might invade Taiwan, given Beijing’s growing military power and increasingly aggressive maneuvers, while the Chinese Communist Party, concerned with what it sees as “Washington’s attempt to create the conditions for Taiwan’s permanent separation from” China, has stepped up its military activities around Taiwan, including holding unprecedented large-scale military exercises, which further deepen Washington’s suspicions, it said.

  To de-escalate tensions and prevent war, Beijing should reduce its military activities in the Strait — signaling that an invasion would not occur in the near term, the report said.

  However, due to the expected domestic blowback from such a move, China would “need to have gestures from Washington and Taipei to point to,” it said.

  “At the same time, the US should make a series of political gestures clarifying its fealty to its ‘one China’ policy. It should quietly dial down its public shows of support for Taiwan and clarify that even as it strengthens Taiwan’s self-defense capabilities, there are limits to how far US-Taiwan security cooperation will go,” it said.

  As for Taiwan, deterring a military attack requires a restoration of mutual assurances, but it also requires a “credible threat that China will be biting off more than it wishes to chew if it pursues invasion,” the report said.

  To this end, Taiwan will need to adapt its defenses so that it becomes clear that it would have the capacity to fend off an assault long enough for help to arrive from the US, even though Washington has remained deliberately ambiguous over this scenario, it said.
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