Posted on 02/03/2024 4:09:58 AM PST by FarCenter
TAIPEI, Taiwan – The six-point victory of ruling party candidate Lai Ching-te in Taiwan’s presidential election last month removed a major concern for US policymakers trying to hold together a fragile coalition of Asian nations worried about China’s rising economic and military power.
A victory by the more China-friendly Hou You-yi, the candidate of the opposition Kuomintang, would have raised questions about a potential Taiwanese tilt towards Beijing, increasing the possibility that countries like Japan and South Korea might begin hedging their bets on the durability of the American commitment to countering China’s rise.
But even with the ostensible advantage of Lai’s election victory, the US still has a long way to go in ensuring the open-ended continuation of Taiwan’s de facto separate status from China, and with it, the survival of Washington’s Beijing-wary coalition. And the task became more difficult on Thursday with the election of the 2020 Kuomintang presidential candidate Han Kuo-yu as speaker of the new parliament.
Together with upgrading its own long-neglected military deterrent in the Indo-Pacific region, the US faces the challenge of convincing Taiwan’s government and people to begin taking the question of national resilience much more seriously than before, particularly in the realm of defense planning.
This will not be easy. Not only is Taiwan plagued by serious friction between Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party and the island’s Kuomintang-dominated military establishment, but large portions of its 23.5 million-strong population remain inured to China’s threat to their democratic freedoms, preferring to believe either that Beijing will never attack, or that the US will come to their rescue, obviating the need for urgent defense measures.
This laissez-faire attitude makes Taiwan the odd man out in the trio of American allies whose democratic systems are under serious assault from authoritarian regimes, the other two being Israel and Ukraine. Both Jerusalem and Kyiv have already made considerable sacrifices to protect themselves against their respective antagonists – Iranian-backed proxies in the case of Israel, Russia in the case of Ukraine – but Taiwan in key respects is widely seen in Washington as not pulling its weight, at least not to the extent the U.S. would like to see.
A comprehensive program to help Taiwan meet China’s considerable challenge would almost certainly feature far-reaching changes to the island’s military structure. But it would also have to include concrete measures to foster a civil society fully engaged in confronting the existential threat to the island’s future – not an easy task, particularly in light of the belief among some influential Taiwanese that outright capitulation is the only viable response to the Chinese threat.
This approach was given full-throated voice on January 10 when former Taiwan president and Kuomintang stalwart Ma Ying-jeou told the German state-owned broadcaster Deutsche Welle that Taiwan could never effectively defend itself against a Chinese attack. Ma mocked the idea that the United States would ever intervene.
Rather than building up its own defense capabilities or counting on Washington’s military support, Ma said, it made far better sense for Taiwanese to trust in Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s supposedly benign intentions about their island’s future. Ma’s views reflect a significant body of opinion within the KMT.
Significantly, this China-submissive mindset could well come to dominate Taiwan’s newly elected legislature, where the DPP lost its majority and the prospect of close cooperation between the Kuomintang and an anti-DPP third party threatens any Lai spending measures aimed at deepening the deterrent capability of the Taiwan military.
That prospect received a significant boost on February 1 when Han Kuo-yu was elected parliamentary speaker. Han, who has, like Ma, called for closer ties between Taiwan and China, is a controversial figure. At the time he ran for president in 2020 he was serving as the mayor of the southern city of Kaohsiung. But a few months after his failed presidential bid he lost a recall vote and was ousted from the municipal post.
Unlike the pre-1895 immigrants who came from Fujian and Canton prior to the Japanese conquest, the 1949 immigrants have family ties all over China. And in Chinese culture, family ties matter.
Will those family ties cause them to accept reunification?
Since the KMT dictatorship ran Taiwan for decades, they are very influential in Taiwanese businesses.
They have also been traveling to and investing in China for the last 3 decades.
If the choice is between reunification and war, I think they would choose reunification rather than seeing their Taiwanese businesses and their Chinese investments destroyed.
It’s not abstract political sentiment. They know very well the situation in China through their business and family contacts.
I wouldn’t expect there to be much abstraction, given your location and culture(s). It doesn’t look like Taiwan would put up much of a fight. It would be in vain, anyway.
Thing is, Ma and the fish could all move to China, but they don’t.
Chiang Kai-shek would have had them dead or in prison.
If the KMT had any guts they’d try to be active in China.
They claim they’re a Chinese party.
Also, keep in mind the authors of this article are deepbstate stooges. “ Mike Chinoy is a consulting editor at the Taiwan Strait Risk Report, CNN’s former senior Asia correspondent”
This is a better article about Taiwan.
One excerpt:
Unification or any form of political integration with China is currently not the popular choice in Taiwan, and for obvious reasons. However, the Taiwan side never says that as an option, it cannot be openly discussed and considered. In Taiwan, one is free to advocate unification with China, but in in the PRC one could be locked up for advocating Taiwan independence or even the KMT version of modern Chinese history. Beijing should be pressured to rethink its approach on Taiwan. Its current policy is counterproductive to the CCP’s own self-professed goal of peaceful unification.
Once upon a time, I managed a group that included an engineer from each of the three Taiwanese groups. It was not a good thing, especially the KMT princeling.
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