A Taiwanese writer of Chinese heritage, Yang has an ambivalent relationship with the language in which she writes: the language of the People’s Republic of China, the “them” against which the “us” of Taiwan is defined. In contemporary Taiwanese television and movies, it is common now to hear Taiwanese (Hokkien) spoken. Yang Shuang-zi seeks to evoke in writing what on the screen is readily projected: an imagined community for Taiwan, with a history and cultural references that belong to it alone. In Taiwan Travelogue this is not a linguistically bound community, but language is effectively deployed to show it struggling to come into existence. Most obviously, Taiwan is a place that has to be translated to be understood. The entire novel is in fact one long translation process.

The novel is imaginatively framed, with an informative introduction at the beginning and a series of afterwords revealing the afterlife of the text that constitutes the main narrative. This introduction should not be skipped: it is part of the novel. The purported writer, Hiyoshi Sagako, Taiwan-born of Japanese ethnicity, is a fictional character, and her account of the novel’s various editions a 1954 Japanese original translated into Chinese (in abridged form) in 1977 and then again, with elisions restored, in 2020  is also fictional. The only translation that a reader has to believe in is the one into English by Lin King, first published in the United States by Graywolf Press in 2024, from a Chinese-language original published in 2020.

From the introduction, we learn that the fictional Japanese original is a first-person narrative by literary celebrity Aoyama Chizukyu, who arrives in Taiwan in 1938 on an official visit organised by the Japanese Government-General. By then, Taiwan had been under Japanese control since 1895. Aoyama encounters a complex society, with Japanese “mainlanders” like herself in the top stratum. A second stratum consists of Japanese locals like Hiyoshai Sagako, who in the introduction discusses the ambiguous status of Taiwanese-born Japanese. Aoyama’s first allocated guide, Mishima, belongs to this stratum.

The third stratum is composed of ethnically Han (Chinese) locals like Aoyama’s main guide and companion, Ông Tshian-hóh, known as O Chizuru in Japanese but referred to in the novel by Aoyama’s affectionate nickname for her, Chi-Chan. The Han population is itself diverse, as Aoyama learns. At one point Chi-Chan introduces Aoyama to a barely explored bottom layer, Taiwan’s First Peoples, impressing Aoyama with her erudition by talking about them as “indigenous” (yuanzhu zhongzu, as opposed to tuzhu, or “natives,” for example).

Aoyama, the reader soon learns, is taller than most Japanese men. Her towering presence in the novel is a metaphor for the overweening presence of a colonial power. Chi-Chan is tiny by comparison — comparable in height to the sparrow-like schoolgirl Tân Thsiok-bi, who like herself is the love object of a robustly built Japanese. Since Taiwanese were on average taller than Japanese in this period, the metaphor is slightly strained but the author, writing for a Taiwanese readership, can probably depend for credibility on historical impressions of Japanese power.

The novel is a love story of sorts, with the developing romance between Aoyama and Chi-Chan tenderly evoked. The two women share a consciousness of the restraints placed on women by a society that doesn’t allow them to casually eat by the roadside or drink in a bar, and in which heterosexual marriage is an expectation that they will have to meet. Physical contact between them is never more than tentative.

As a story about attraction between women and linked issues of living in a patriarchal society where women are fated to be married off to men, this novel is worth comparing with its shortlisted competitor, Bulgarian writer Rene Karabash’s debut novel She Who Remains. Karabash takes up the baton from Ismail Kadare, winner of the inaugural International Prize in 2005, with a story set, like Kadare’s Broken April, among blood-feuding families of Albania’s Accursed Mountains. There is a love story in the novel, again between two women, but it is fleeting. The main protagonist, a “sworn virgin” who has adopted a male persona in accordance with the grim Kanun code, embodies the problem of the socio-sexual regime of which not only she but also her male family members are victims. It is plainly a novel about patriarchy.

Taiwan Travelogue, by contrast, is unmistakably a novel about colonialism. The love story is foregrounded but the main theme could easily have been developed with a heterosexual relationship at its core. Writing the love story is a way of writing, critically, about power extended by the “mainland” (neidi, in this case Japan) over Taiwanese. For Karabash, the national context is immaterial. She is not interested in Albania per se; the Accursed Mountains are merely an opportune setting. Yang Shuang-zi, on the other hand, is undoubtedly writing about Taiwan. Hers is not a story that could easily be transposed.

Aoyama herself is not a conscious agent of Japanese imperialism. She has never been a fan of the Imperial Japan’s Great Southward Expansion and resists being caught up in the propaganda war supporting it. She is critical of an imperial project that threatens to destroy the existing ways of life of the colonised peoples. At the same time, she is an intellectual who assumes the right to know, love and explain the colonised territory, simultaneously seeking to know, love and explain Chi-Chan. She is the Japanese “Orientalist” par excellence.

The journey is a gastronomical one. Aoyama has a gargantuan appetite, voraciously consuming every meal or snack that comes her way, generally because it is provided by Chi-Chan. A metaphor for colonialism is again evident. The book’s chapters are organised by foodstuff or dish, beginning with the simplest of local foods, melon seeds, and working up to the most complex, the twelve-dish full menu and its distillation in a “leftover soup.” Food is a teacher and a mediator.

By the fifth chapter, when Aoyama is introduced to braised minced pork in its different iterations, northern and southern, she has begun to think about cultural erasure as a problem in Japanese colonialism. In the eighth chapter, she accommodates Chi-Chan’s food preferences by making Japanese sukiyaki with pork instead of the customary beef. Cultural accommodation is underway, although it is not evenly balanced. In the same chapter Chi-Chan wears a kimono to please Aoyama, but she wears it under sufferance.

In the course of her travels Aoyama is presented with a dizzying array of dishes and ingredients, which even in a world of fusion cooking will probably be lost on most readers of the translation but must be deeply meaningful to Taiwanese readers. In a place where the difference between being Chinese and being Taiwanese is a work in progress, food has become a touchpoint of difference. Yang Shuang-zi exploits this trope to the full. Not every dish or ingredient she mentions is peculiar to Taiwan, but taken as a whole, the cuisine has its own grammar. A local argot of food terms is one means Yang has found for writing Taiwan into the inflexibly Chinese text.

The narrative proper concludes on poignant note with a single bowl of fruit and jelly ice shared by Aoyoma and Chi-Chan. By this time, Aoyama has been helped to a deeper understanding of her relationship with Taiwan and with Chi-Chan by her original guide, the ethnically Japanese Mishima, in an unexpected and wonderfully timed turn in the novel as it approaches its conclusion.

After the war, Taiwan passed from Japanese to Chinese hands. The Japanese mainland (neidi) was replaced by a Chinese mainland (dalu). By using the term “mainland” in her translation, Lin King keeps the parallel in the reader’s mind. The difference between these two mainlands is the difference between past and present. Taiwan has come to terms with its Japanese colonial past and accepts its Japanese legacy. China, by contrast, is a present threat.

Taiwan Travelogue deals with this time gap by shifting the entire framework back in history. Just as the Japanese legacy is plain in contemporary Taiwan, so too was the Chinese cultural legacy in Japanese Taiwan in the 1930s. Chi-Chan loves classical Chinese literature. She owns to a Chinese ethnicity by wearing a qipao (or cheongsam). It is the Japanese present she finds challenging.

But just in case anyone thinks a Chinese legacy too obviously entitles the People’s Republic of China to some sort of prior ownership of Taiwan, King sedulously avoids the terms China and Chinese in the text. For the name of the country, she employs the Japanese term “Shina,” expressed in characters deployed for their sound, not their meaning. For the word Chinese in a literary sense she uses the term han, a synonym for the English term “Chinese” in many contexts.

In a note at the end of the book, King explains her decisions about translating in a way that sustains the illusion of a Japanese urtext and supports the historical context of the story. The strategies she adopts are true to the tenor of Yang Shuang-zi’s writing. They are consistent, too, with a Taiwanese nationalist historiographical trend towards identifying “China” as the modern state that emerged in the twentieth century as the Republic of China, following an historical trajectory completely separate from Taiwan’s own.

There are costs to clarity for an English-language readership. Decisions about the rendering of names and terms have yielded a cluttered text that is more difficult to read in translation than in the original. The original has footnotes built in as part of the fiction of translation from the Japanese, and many more footnotes again have been added to the English translation. Japanese names with diacritical marks sit alongside Mandarin terms with tones superimposed, with Taiwanese (Hokkien) words in italics. English-language readers are presented with orthographically complex terms they cannot begin to understand unless they are well versed in the histories, languages and romanisation systems of three different East Asian territories.

Historical context apart, persuasive translation into English is rendered challenging by differences in literary conventions and cultural dispositions. It takes a while to get used to a character who “dimples” as much as Chi-Chan does. “Dimples” is not a word easily deployed in serious fiction. Rosamond in Jane Eyre has dimples, but Rosamund is definitely not the woman with whom Rochester falls in love. Yet King had limited translation choices here. Chi-Chan was endowed with dimples by the author. There are no synonyms for dimples.

Particularities of time, place, and language complicate the text but don’t impede enjoyment of it. Aoyama’s journey of discovery never ceases to be interesting. Dialogue between Aoyama and Chi-Chan carries it along lightly. From melon seeds to jelly ice, the story follows a compelling narrative arc. Not unexpectedly, Taiwan Travelogue proves to be a book for its time, a work of historical fiction set on an island with a difficult past and an uncertain future, a country that is recognised by no great power but that is refusing simply to go away. •

Taiwan Travelogue
By Yang Shuang-zi | Translated by Lin King | Scribe | $32.99 | 320 pages

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Ten days ago, news that a Chinese social media influencer is facing expulsion brought mainland spouses into the spotlight yet again. Resident on a family visa and active online as “Yaya in Taiwan,” the woman had her visa revoked after she was revealed to have posted an online video in which she supported China’s use of military force to achieve unification. As of 15 March, she had ten days to leave the island. Among the roughly 380,000 Chinese spouses — mostly wives — of Taiwanese residents, she is reportedly the first to be expelled.

A day after this story broke, it was pushed off the front pages by a major statement on national security from president Lai Ching-te. In it, Lai identified seventeen measures designed by his government to strengthen Taiwan’s defences in response to increasing pressure by China’s military and influence operations by its United Front.

The statement has drawn more than the usual amount of attention internationally because it includes a reference to China as (in the official English translation) a “foreign hostile force.” The phrase outraged the government in Beijing. Drawing deeply on the special reserve of quaint English vocabulary it uses with reference to Lai Ching-te, China’s state-owned media denounced him as a “vile character” harbouring “evil designs,” his words “oozing with clear malice.”

Locally, Lai’s proposed revival of military courts, abolished in 2013, has attracted the most attention. Although the plan is designed to deal with disloyalty within the military, critics fear it might open the way for a possible return to martial law, which would threaten the independent judiciary, freedom of speech and of the press, and democratic political system that make Taiwan distinctive.

But the statement also bears on Yaya’s case. Noting the timing of the national security meeting from which it emanated, the “pan-blue” (unification-leaning) newspaper United Daily News sardonically enquired whether it was not just a reaction to the “mainland spouse” revelation, and accused Lai Ching-te of policy on the run in response to online pressure. Regardless of timing, the defence statement reflects the government’s concern with United Front work in Taiwan. Yaya’s online promotion of unification with China is generally deemed to fall into that category.

Who exactly is Yaya? Her face under the trademark baseball cap has become well known. Her full name is Liu Zhenya, she is a native of Hunan province resident in Taipei, and she is apparently married to a Taiwanese. She has three children — a resource valued by a small country that is racing South Korea to the bottom of the fertility league table. She describes herself as an ambassador for cross-straits exchange with Heilongjiang, a province very far from Hunan where she once filmed her daughter on a cross-straits visit, bringing lollies from semi-tropical Taiwan all the way to China’s snowy north. Despite a strong online presence evident in her 400,000-plus followers on the Chinese platform Douyin, little else has emerged about her circumstances.

After news of her cancelled visa went viral, rumours about her migration to Taiwan began to circulate. According to these rumours, Yaya had in the first instance divorced her husband in China to marry a Taiwanese. Then she waited till she could secure a residence permit, divorced the Taiwanese husband, remarried her original Chinese husband and came back to Taiwan with him, her parents, and two children. In this way, it was said, one Chinese woman with a residence permit was able to introduce six Chinese into Taiwan, all of them desiring to take advantage of Taiwan’s excellent medical insurance.

This rumour might simply reflect Taiwanese anxieties over infiltration from China if not for the fact that the story of Yaya’s serial marriages has circulated in China, too, and more probably reflects the simple attractions of fake news. Responding on video, Yaya declared she had been married only once. All her children were born in Taiwan and her parents were back in Hunan. They had just visited Taiwan just twice, she said, each time to help their daughter after childbirth. She had used her healthcare card only for those births. Her account has been verified by Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council.

Although Yaya’s online life includes few other details about her real life, it does show that she was seriously engaged in propaganda for the unification of China and Taiwan. In this respect, the offending video was not a one-off. A remarkable feature of her videos is the use she makes of her small daughter, Xiaodanggui (Little-Must-Return), a rather scary child with an awesome capacity for churning out slogans along the lines of “we must never, ever forget we are Chinese!” and “in the whole world there is only one China!”

In one post, Yaya shows her visiting Mao Zedong’s birthplace Shaoshan to pay her respects to “beloved Chairman Mao.” In another, she interviews her about whether she would like to go to school in China. The child replies stoutly: “I’d really like to go back to the mainland for school, but if every person who loved Taiwan chooses to leave, then who would there be to protect our Taiwan [women de Taiwan]?”

It is unclear whether Little-Must-Return will return to China with her mother, or whether she will be left behind in Taiwan to carry on the struggle.

Taiwan is not like China. Freedom of speech is not only a law but a practice. The Taiwan People’s Communist Party has come under investigation on suspicion of accepting funds from China, but it is nonetheless free to raise the Chinese flag in Taiwan and call for unification with China, as it did on Chinese New Year this year.

Discussion of Yaya’s pending expulsion has focused on this issue. What does freedom of speech mean if someone like Yaya, legally resident in Taiwan, isn’t free to voice her political opinions? In a widely reported response to this question, interior affairs minister Liu Shyh-fang said that “freedom does not fall from the sky” and could not be used to advocate the military unification of China and Taiwan.

In terms of political impact, Yaya pales into insignificance alongside another “mainland spouse,” He Jianhua, formerly prominent in the Women’s Federation in China and extremely active as an organiser of Chinese women in Taiwan. He Jianhua did end up in court in 2017, but the case against her failed, with the judge ruling that there was no evidence of her “pulling knives or drawing guns,” or encouraging anyone else to do so, and hence no criminal activity.

Yaya, however, went a step too far. Asserting that Taiwan is China’s sovereign territory was one thing. When she added that this was sufficient reason “for the mainland to reunify Taiwan by force” she created grounds for revocation of her visa. Yet she appears shocked by the cancellation of her visa. In the video she made to correct the rumours about her marriage, she also protested her love of Taiwan and her appreciation of Taiwanese society. Having for so long conducted propaganda with impunity, she probably didn’t realise there were legal limits to what could be said.

Since the Yaya case surfaced, attention has turned to other Chinese spouses with online accounts. Enqi in Taiwan, originally from Anhui, is one. Her mission has been to introduce Taiwan’s people and customs to her family back home, via video, and to introduce all the wonders of the vast mainland to her Taiwanese “compatriots.” Another is Xiaowei, from Guizhou, who runs a Douyin account called Husband, Wife and Three Kids in Taiwan Province. Like Yaya, she has done her bit for Taiwan’s population, and again like Yaya she is raising her children as Chinese nationalists. After Yaya’s visa was cancelled, Xiaowei appeared online to pay tribute to her as a wonderful mother. Both Enqi and Xiaowei have been summoned for interviews by the Bureau of Immigration.

All of this is creating difficulties for what is a singular minority in Taiwanese society. Even before the Yaya case, this group of immigrants was often in the news. Early last year a debate about reducing from six to four the number of years a Chinese immigrant needs to wait before applying for Taiwanese citizenship was opposed by noisy demonstrators crying out against “population cleansing.”

For cross-strait families, the process of gaining legal residence is burdensome, with repeated applications for extension of residence necessary over the course of the six years and a minimum period of six months per year residence in Taiwan to advance to the next stage. A reduction in the number of years would mean less paperwork and greater freedom of movement for the applicant. (The bill proposing the reduction to four years was reintroduced in January this year. The Yaya case makes the change unlikely.)

Many nevertheless choose to remain long-term residents. Like Chinese permanent residents in Australia, Taiwan’s mainland spouses confront a dilemma: their Chinese passports and household registration cards enable them to move easily back and forth between Taiwan and China, managing a mix of family and economic matters. With a Chinese passport and a renewable Taiwan residence permit, they can have the best of both worlds. This appears to have been Yaya’s calculation. Had she progressed through the naturalisation system to secure Taiwan citizenship, she would not have been deported.

Others again, a large minority, are now citizens with voting rights and Taiwanese children. But evidence of integration into Taiwanese society is not necessarily a protection. Although their everyday interactions with the host society seem harmonious, they feel under attack from the media because of their supposed pro-China sympathies.

Xu Chunying, chair of the Cross-Straits Marriage and Family Alliance and a Taiwan People’s Party candidate in the 2024 election, resigned her candidacy because of the smear campaign against her. And yet — as an older woman who feels Chinese with a daughter who feels Taiwanese — she is fairly typical of pan-blue voters in Taiwan. The stereotype of mainland spouses like her is that they all want Taiwan to “return” to the Chinese fold, but even among those of them who do favour “one China,” few believe that this means unification under a single central government in Beijing.

For China, however, these women are all potential agents for United Front ideological and social work. Under its current czar Wang Huning, the United Front emphasises people-to-people, Fujian-to-Taiwan relationships in its Taiwan operations. Attention to cross-straits marriages has intensified, with officials sponsoring, attending and addressing group weddings and congratulating the couples on their embodiment of the ideal of national unification.

This activity shows the route by which brides can be recruited for United Front work. Whether China actually needs them is a moot point. On 18 March Taiwan reported fifty-nine Chinese planes, six ships and two balloons within its defence zone in the twenty-four hours to 6 am that day. Huge amphibious barges capable of disgorging troops and tanks deep into the island are rolling off the docks in Guangzhou Shipyard, less than four hundred nautical miles from the Taiwan coast. If war does happen, Little-Must-Return’s piping voice will be lost in the thunder of artillery. •

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“A graveyard of incumbents” is chief data reporter John Burn-Murdoch’s summing up in the Financial Times. “The incumbents in every single one of the ten major countries that have been tracked by the ParlGov global research project and held national elections in 2024 were given a kicking by voters. This is the first time this has happened in almost 120 years of records.”

The trend also held in many countries outside ParlGov’s (mainly European) group, though the graveyard analogy slightly overstates the damage. India’s BHP government avoided being relegated to the opposition benches but Narendra Modi must now coax small, allied parties into supporting his legislation. Taiwan’s Democratic Progressive Party somehow attracted an extra 2.2 percentage points in the legislature — and 17.1 points fewer for the presidency. Ireland’s triparty coalition, meanwhile, lost just 1.9 points.

Elsewhere, though, Burns-Murdoch is spot on: governing parties fell like nine-pins. Britain’s Conservatives shed almost 20 percentage points and handed government to Labour; France’s Ensemble lost just over 14 points and created a constitutional bind that soon undid an appointed prime minister; Portugal’s Socialists were down by 13.4 points and relinquished government in favour of a rickety alliance pulled together by the Social Democrats.

Voters in other countries were almost as emphatic. The centre-right Austrian People’s Party shed 11.2 points, Japan’s conservative and traditionally dominant Liberal Democrats 7.9 points and Belgium’s eclectic Vivaldi coalition 7 points. In South Korea the president failed to convince voters to give his party control of parliament and this month made a disastrous attempt to impose martial law.

More electoral tests are looming. The parties that made up Germany’s recently collapsed government will undoubtedly be treated roughly by voters in February, though the largest, the Social Democrats, could possibly cling to the government in a “grand coalition” with the Christian Democrats.

Canada’s prime minister Justin Trudeau, whose party now attracts just half the support of the rival Conservatives, will be weighing the benefits of delaying his reckoning with voters until October (though it’s not entirely his decision); as the Economist observes, “An easing of interest rates, a steady drop in inflation to just over 2 per cent and a breather in the dizzying ascent of house prices have done little to arrest the decline in Mr Trudeau’s support.”

Stretching the year back into late 2023 — an equally hostile environment for governments but with far fewer national elections — Poland’s authoritarian Law and Justice party was shown the door after nearly a decade in power with an 8.2 point loss of support.

Judged against this litany of  setbacks you’d be forgiven for thinking a drover’s dog could have wrested the White House away from the Democrats. Indeed it might have done better than Donald Trump, whose opponent managed to restrict the difference between her result this year and Joe Biden’s in 2020 to a relatively modest 2.9 points (and ensure Trump’s margin was the second-smallest since 1968).

What explains the electoral reversals across much of the West? The big problem those countries share, says Burn-Murdoch, is voters’ intense worries about the “cost of living,” shorthand for the collective post-Covid impact of inflation, interest rates and a feeling that your household’s income isn’t keeping up. And the impact of inflation, in particular, on voter sentiment seems to linger long after prices stop rising unduly.

Burn-Murdoch also mentions immigration as a live issue in most of the countries that voted this year, but here the influence is harder to establish, partly because voters might be especially attuned to the issue by feelings of economic insecurity, and partly because worries about migrants are customarily fanned at a time like this by parties of the right — indeed, this is one of the essential features of right-wing populism — and are thus more likely to be reported to pollsters regardless of whether they influence voting behaviour.

Nor did the results uniformly favour parties of the right. Some of the most closely watched parties seeking re-election happened to sit on the left of the political spectrum, but where they didn’t — in Britain and Poland, for example — right-wing governing parties suffered their own reversals.

All of this raises the question of why the swing against the Democrats in the United States fell at the lower end of the scale. Did a whole series of supposedly weighty factors — the allure of Trump’s “disinhibited” style; Joe Biden’s faltering performance as president and delayed withdrawal from the race; the Democrats’ much-criticised “wokeness” and capture by the “professional managerial class”; the inevitable misjudgements of the Harris campaign; the lingering economic fears — really add up to a mere 2.9-point fall in support for the Democratic candidate?

Like all successful contenders, Trump managed to bring together several overlapping segments of the voting public. Far and away the most important was the big group of people who could never bring themselves to vote Democrat and supported Trump with varying degrees of enthusiasm. A much smaller group was made up of “swing” voters who opted for Joe Biden in 2020 but felt betrayed by what they perceived as a continuing cost-of-living crisis. (This group alone might have been big enough to play the decisive role.) Others — not necessarily a big percentage, and some of them probably only occasional or first-ever voters — opted for Trump because they were unconditionally attracted to his style and/or message.

But it’s likely that other groups of voters stopped him from doing as well as a more mainstream Republican candidate might have. Some of them would have been swinging voters who could never bring themselves to support a candidate like Trump. Others might have voted for him in 2020 but had since decided he was too dangerous or wrong-headed and switched to Harris. Still others were starting to experience the improvement in America’s economic performance and sharply lower inflation rates and believed that more of the same was less likely under Trump. And of course there was the biggest group of all, never-Republican Democratic supporters.

Given Trump’s fragile coalition of voter groups, and adjusting for this year’s peculiar circumstances, perhaps the Democrats’ future prospects are less dismal than the agonised debate about wokeness, elites and shifting class allegiances might suggest. That’s even leaving aside the likelihood that Trump’s second administration will be preoccupied with vengeance and riven with conflict, or that its tariffs will reignite inflation, none of which is likely to endear it to swinging voters.

A final source of encouragement is an apparent narrowing of the “electoral college edge” — the pattern of support that has repeatedly allowed the Republicans to turn a popular defeat into an electoral-college victory. A smaller gap increases the chances that any resurgence will translate into victories in the congressional and presidential races.

But four years is an awfully long time in politics, and Republican legislators across America will be doing all they can to tip the playing field in favour of Republican candidates at all levels of government, as will the plutocrats around Trump. What the global landscape does suggest is that the anti-incumbent mood could begin to recede now that the high post-Covid inflation is well behind us. A lot will depend on how governments respond to the underlying concerns about growing inequality that seem to have supercharged the inflation effect.

Unfortunately there’s not much comfort in this year’s election results for Anthony Albanese — especially given that the Reserve Bank seems almost certain to hold off cutting interest rates for a few more months. With Australia’s economy trailing America’s on most measures, it will be a while before we need to worry about any lag in perceptions once inflation is convincingly stabilised. Increasingly, all that seems to stand in the way of a return to Coalition government in the first half of next year is the federal crossbench. •

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This quadrennial humiliation, a legacy of the unfinished civil war between China’s ruling Communist Party and its predecessor, the Nationalist Party, or KMT, brings home to Taiwan’s twenty-three million people the grim reality of their status as citizens of a country whose name cannot be uttered. Young Taiwanese in Paris were understandably delighted when the French television commentator explained that “Chinese Taipei” would be more familiar to viewers as Taiwan. It was a Lacanian moment: they felt seen.

How Taiwan should be seen, what image it should present to the world, is a question that preoccupies the government in Taipei as it manoeuvres for advantage in the fraught strategic environment of the north Pacific. Jonathan Clement’s Rebel Island, a new short history of Taiwan from antiquity to the present, introduces an English-language readership to how things have come to this pass and what is now at stake.

Clements writes accessible narrative histories of East Asia designed for a general readership. In this book, his informative accounts of time and place are interleaved with human interest stories written in a no-nonsense style to provide a bird’s-eye view of the challenging terrain that is Taiwan’s past. China is visible on the horizon, but the “tides of history,” to quote the title of the book’s closing chapter, have been taking Taiwan further and further away from it. Following these tides, Clements has produced a book that is more about a Northeast Asian nation-in-the-making than about a province of China.

In the war of words over Taiwan, history is one of the most significant battlegrounds. Much as Australian history was once given a starting point of 1788, the history of Taiwan has often been written as if it started in 1624, the year the Dutch colonised Taiwan (or part of it, as Clements shows). From the perspective of its indigenous peoples — Austronesian speakers with a history of settlement dating back more than four millennia — this looks like the beginning of a complex but relatively recent colonial history: the Dutch in southern Taiwan (1624); the Spanish in the north (1626); Koxinga’s anti-Manchus loyalists (1661); the Manchus themselves (1683) presiding for two centuries over the expansion of Taiwan’s Chinese population and the attrition of indigenous lands; the Japanese (1895), who incorporated Taiwan into their growing empire; and then the Chinese again (1945), under the Nationalist government of the Republic of China.

From a Chinese point of view, the shortlived Dutch period looks like a harbinger of the “century of humiliations” they suffered at the hands of the British and other imperialist powers. In Taiwan it has come to have quite a different meaning. During this year, the quadricentennial of the Dutch arrival, the National Museum of Taiwan History is running an exhibition called “Beyond 1624: Taiwan, World Island,” an upbeat presentation tracing the Age of Discovery’s impact on Taiwan and the island’s place in the trading networks that helped make the modern world. Contemporary Taiwan aspires to visibility in the world.

Historians in China push back at accounts that grant primacy to the West, pointing to documentation of contact between China and Taiwan in earlier centuries as evidence of China’s long-established sovereignty. Clements is clearly sceptical of this argument. Contacts over many centuries there no doubt were, but they are more likely to have involved pirates than officials. Research by Tonio Andrade, cited in Rebel Island, shows that substantial Chinese agrarian settlements on the island began only under the Dutch.

Taiwanese historians, their number steadily growing over the past quarter of a century, are pushing back in another direction altogether. Rejecting the “four hundred years” version of their history, they have turned to historical archaeology, anthropology and ethnography to develop a deep history grounded in the land and its First Peoples, who link Taiwan to an ancient and definitively non-Sinic past. Clements not only recognises but is in sympathy with this approach. Distinctively, he foregrounds the indigenous experience of, and agency in, the island’s history.

Rebel Island begins on exactly this note, relating the story of a violent encounter between the Koalut of southern Taiwan and a party of shipwrecked Americans. When reports of the deaths of Americans at the hands of the Koalut reached the American consul in Fujian, he launched a punitive expedition. This pattern of events is both reminiscent of and different from clashes between indigenous and intruders in colonial Australia.  One difference is that the Koalut (a sub-group of Taiwan’s second-largest indigenous group, the Paiwan) had muskets and were better able than their Australian counterparts to defend themselves against the intruders. Another is that the punitive expedition culminated in a treaty of sorts.

As Clements points out, a “treaty” between the American consul and the Paiwan implies that the territory concerned was not under Chinese jurisdiction. What then was this claimed Chinese sovereignty over the island, exactly? And even granted such sovereignty, should Taiwan be considered part of “China” — a cultural entity in search of an autochthonous polity — or was it rather  a colony of the Manchus, who in 1683 had seized it from an earlier colonial power, the anti-Manchu loyalist regime of Koxinga?

Whatever the case, those same Manchus, or their descendants, gave the island away to Japan in 1895 as part of the settlement of the 1894 Sino-Japanese war. The result was a rebellion on the island and the founding, on paper at least, of the Republic of Formosa. Although it died almost before it was born, the republic created “a thorny legal precedent,” according to Clements, because “when Taiwan was ‘returned’ to its rightful owners after World War II, who were those owners — the political inheritors of the Manchus who had given it away, or the Taiwanese who had fought for it?”

The 1895 rebellion was not the first popular uprising on the island and it would not, of course, be the last. Those uprisings give Clements the title of his book and also provide it with one of its major themes. The parties to these disputes were not constant: a 1721 revolt pitched Chinese settlers against the Qing dynasty, briefly promising the re-emergence of a Ming loyalist regime on the island; the 1895 rebellion was directed against the incoming Japanese; the Musha Incident of 1930 involved the indigenous Seediq against the Japanese; and the 1947 uprising pitched the now-Japanised Taiwanese against the newly arrived mainlanders.

Under the Nationalist government — in fact, a Chinese government in exile — Taiwanese found themselves enduring a martial law regime that inspired nostalgia for Japanese rule. The years 1949–87 are remembered as a period of White Terror, with covert and finally overt political resistance leading to detentions, executions and extra-judicial killings. Clements mentions the murders in 1980 of the mother-in-law and twin daughters of dissident Lin Yi-hsiung and, in 1984, of Henry Liu, an outspoken critic of the KMT, who was killed in the garage of his San Francisco home.

By the 1980s, a new generation of rebels was emerging. Student movements, an increasingly potent force, helped to usher in multiparty democracy (the Wild Lilies movement of 1990), to expand freedom of political expression (the Wild Strawberries of 2008) and to defeat compromising trade agreements with China (the Sunflowers of 2014).

“It’s right to rebel,” Mao Zedong assured students during the Cultural Revolution. His successors didn’t agree, and in 1989 moved decisively to crush the protests in Tiananmen Square. The rebel island proved more difficult to rein in. Elections in Taiwan that very year presaged the end of the KMT’s political hegemony and the beginning of a slow drift away from mainland moorings. The independence-leaning Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, would in the end provide a powerful and appealing alternative to the KMT, provoking China to issue increasingly explicit warnings against crossing the line. Clements quotes Xi Jinping at the nineteenth party congress in 2017: “We have firm will, full confidence and sufficient capability to defeat any form of Taiwan independence succession plot.”

On relations with China, Taiwan remains divided. The political legacy of the KMT era is a “blue” camp that excoriates the “green” DPP for endangering the country and hurting it economically with its independence sympathies. Yet not even rusted-on blues are anxious for Taiwan to be swallowed up by China. The KMT has been trying hard to dispel its prevailing image as a pro-China party, aware that it is not paying dividends politically.  Clements completed this book just before the 2024 elections, when many voters felt that it was time for a change but nonetheless ended up voting for the DPP presidential candidate. Lai Ching-te, a man known as “a pragmatic worker for independence.”

There is, of course, more to Taiwan than a history of rebellion. One of its remarkable achievements in the democratic era is its dominance of the manufacture of the computer chips. So vital is this industry to the functioning of the modern world that it is widely regarded as a deterrent to war between China and Taiwan. By 2020, as Clements notes, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company’s factory in Taichung alone was supplying 37 per cent of the world’s annual computing power — this in a country with a population smaller than Australia’s.

Other signal achievements can be found in the democratic-era laws that have made Taiwan the very model of an open, progressive Asian society. The features became a hallmark of Taiwan under the presidency of Tsai Ing-wen, winner of successive elections in 2016 and 2020. Tsai’s leadership provided, to quote Clements, “a safe space for numerous progressive opportunities” (emphasis in the original). These included a national apology to indigenous Taiwanese, the promotion of indigenous languages, and same-sex marriage legislation.

The image of a diverse, liberal, tech-savvy society that emerges from the final chapter of this book is probably one that most Taiwanese would be happy with. It is consistent with the themes on show at the Taiwan Culture Pavilion in Paris this year, where visitors have been offered a riotous celebration of democracy, technology and music served up with bubble tea.

A history of Taiwan written at this point in time can hardly avoid being about cross-strait relations. Rebel Island is a Taiwan-centred history that is nonetheless, at its heart, about this problem. In the conclusion, Clements turns explicitly to the much-debated question of whether war is likely in the Taiwan Strait. He seems to think not, pointing to China–Taiwan trade’s “topping $110 billion” as something that “neither can really afford to jeopardise.”

The value of this trade, however, has been falling year on year as Taiwan pivots elsewhere, following not only the money but also the “southbound” policy adopted under Tsai Ing-wen. Declining trade is more than matched by falling investment in China, which was 40 per cent lower in 2023 than in 2022. Taiwanese businesses are turning elsewhere. Countries in Southeast Asia, especially Vietnam, are reaping the benefits, complicating regional security considerations for China. In trade and industry, as in politics, it seems that a peaceful rebellion is underway in Taiwan. •

Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan
By Jonathan Clements | Scribe | $49.99 | 320 pages

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China has long sought diplomatic relations with Tuvalu. Individual officials at various levels in Tuvalu have reported frequent offers of aid if their island state makes the break with Taiwan, and international media raised the potential of a switch after Tuvalu’s 2019 election.

Why might Tuvalu decide to switch to China? And does it matter?

Personal connections, leverage and ongoing aid projects all provide insight into the first question. In a political system without parties or clear pro- and anti-China factions, personal connections matter. Two members of Tuvalu’s parliament are elected from each of its eight islands to make up the country’s sixteen-member parliament, and the prime minister is then elected by MPs from among their number. Some parliamentarians are friendly towards China (and others supportive of Taiwan), and if a pro-China MP were to gain the prime ministership they would certainly have the influence to push for a switch. This alone may have prompted Paeniu’s warning that Tuvalu could switch relations after the upcoming election, but this has potentially been true after any of Tuvalu’s elections.

Leverage is also important. Taiwan is heavily aligned with the United States and Australia, and Washington has pushed Tuvalu to maintain relations with the government in Taipei. Ironically, Tuvalu’s acquiescence has put it at a disadvantage, for the United States tends to focus its attention and aid on Pacific nations that have relations with China.

Tuvalu has recent experience of how leverage can work. In 2021, when Tuvalu was in full Covid lockdown, the state-owned China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation, or CCECC, helped transport Tuvaluan ministers via Guangzhou to COP26 and other meetings. The result — a sudden renewal of aid promises by the United States — showed that China could not only provide substantial aid to Tuvalu itself but also prompt the United States to increase its assistance. The fact that Taiwan, with its close ties to the United States and Australia, could never enable such leverage was suggested just this week by Tuvalu’s finance minister, Seve Paeniu, who is guaranteed a seat in the new parliament.

How was CCECC able to transport Tuvaluan ministers out of Tuvalu during Covid? The tendering methods used by the Asian Development Bank, or ADB, and the World Bank to award development projects, especially cost-based tendering, often favour Chinese companies and contractors. Although Tuvalu is allied with Taiwan, CCECC workers and supervisors were stationed on some of Tuvalu’s outer islands until 2022 as part of a major ADB-funded project to improve harbours. CCECC’s state ownership demonstrated firsthand for Tuvalu what cooperating with China on aid or development might look like.

For companies like CCECC, there is literally no political or financial downside to lobbying on behalf of China. If Tuvalu switches, they win political capital in Beijing and contracts for work on the ground. While many Chinese company managers resist the embrace of China’s party-state because it’s a bad look or it’s simply not their main priority, CCECC is a pure state-owned enterprise, unfettered by complex ownership structures or the need to please foreign stock exchanges.

When the Solomon Islands government was considering its diplomatic switch in 2019, CCECC’s regional manager visited Honiara to lay out US$500 million worth of development assistance on offer if Solomons leaders showed the wisdom to change their allegiance.

If Tuvalu’s new parliament chooses Beijing over Taipei, CCECC’s fingerprints will undoubtedly be visible. Yet research also indicates that the decision to choose one or the other allegiance often comes down to highly local and pragmatic choices. Tuvalu’s original decision to go with Taiwan had nothing to do with democracy or freedom: at the time, Taiwan was still enduring the longest period of martial law the world has ever seen. Tuvalu chose Taiwan because it had a problem with illegal Taiwanese fishing vessels and reasoned it would have more leverage if it recognised the Republic of China.

The same logic of better futures — the prospect of future investment, aid and diplomatic attention — will doubtless be used by Tuvalu’s next leader, regardless of whether the choice is to stay or to go.

The second question — whether Tuvalu’s decision matters — produces a different answer depending on where you’re sitting. Along with Taiwan, Australia is the only country with a diplomatic mission in Funafuti, and our diplomats would clearly prefer the status quo to continue. The Solomon Islands’ switch — facilitated by a leader with a longstanding history of bad blood with Canberra — represents the extreme end of possible outcomes, but Australia can also do without clumsy attempts by Chinese diplomats to influence local media or provide inducements to politicians to keep Tuvalu in Beijing’s column. It could also do without any impact a switch might have on finalisation of the Australia–Tuvalu Falepili Union.

In Beijing, another diplomatic switch so soon after Taiwan’s presidential elections would be welcomed, although you’d have to spare a thought for whomever they send to Funafuti. China’s Pacific diplomats look a harried bunch at the best of times; being under so much scrutiny in such a small town is not an enviable assignment. Taiwan’s new government, meanwhile, would find the question of why they continue to invest limited resources in a losing hand hard to avoid. For Tuvalu, the choice is theirs to make, and we should all respect their decision. •

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The DPP’s main opponent is the Kuomintang, or KMT, a party with roots deep in pre-revolutionary China and members that are far more inclined than their DPP counterparts to claim Chinese heritage. The KMT’s presidential candidate, New Taipei mayor Hou Yu-ih, is a centrist pragmatist from a local Taiwanese family, but both his running mate and the first-placed candidate on the party’s list are “deep blue” — strongly pro-Chinese figures from families that fled to Taiwan after the communist victory in 1949. Intra-party tensions reflecting these different views could complicate legislative processes after the election.

The third party fielding a presidential candidate, the Taiwan People’s Party, is predicted to retain its present strength in the legislature. It has feistily courted younger voters during the campaign.

On current predictions the next president of the legislature will be the KMT’s Han Kuo-yu, whose position on the party ticket assures him of a win despite his having made history in 2020 as the only mayor ever recalled from office by popular petition.

Outside Taiwan, the election is attracting interest more for its international than its domestic repercussions. The war in Ukraine alerted the world to the possibility of a matching war on the opposite side of Eurasia. The dramatic increase in incursions by Chinese fighter jets into Taiwanese airspace over the past two to three years resonates with the build-up of Russian forces on the Ukrainian border in the months ahead of its February 2022 invasion. From London to Tokyo, commentators have been speculating on the potential for a bellicose response to the election in Beijing.

Not surprisingly, the prospect of war has been a theme in the election campaign. KMT posters show Hou Yu-ih declaring “Peace on each shore; we don’t want war.” The fact that all candidates agree with this sentiment doesn’t stop it being invoked as a point of difference between the DPP on the one hand and the Kuomintang and the Taiwan People’s Party on the other. A widely read article by influential American commentators advocating greater restraint in Washington’s approach to Taiwan has been weaponised by the opposition parties to attack the DPP for a China policy they portray as flirting with war. China’s defence ministry has weighed in, criticising the DPP for “deliberately hyping up the so-called ‘military threat from the mainland’” for electoral purposes.

In fact, says the DPP’s Lai Ching-te, “In the eyes of Beijing, the three of us [running for president] are all supporters of Taiwan’s independence.” In this sense, Taiwan seems to have passed a point of no return in its journey towards resolving its political status. China’s claim to Taiwan is grounded largely in the historical struggle between the Communist Party and the Kuomintang, a struggle that culminated in the flight of the Kuomintang to Taiwan and its reconstitution there of the shattered government of the Republic of China. The government in Taipei has now long since ceased to be a government-in-exile, waiting for the Communist Party of China to collapse.

People in Taiwan have also stopped thinking of themselves as Chinese. Mostly, they don’t know very much about China. Research by Chinese social scientists suggests that the more they know the less they like it. Taiwanese businesses are withdrawing from China, taking their money and nous elsewhere.

All this has had a profound effect on electoral politics in Taiwan, where there is next to no interest in becoming part of the People’s Republic of China and no advantage for politicians in pro-China policies. At best, critics of the DPP can claim they will manage relations with China better than has Tsai Ing-wen, who has presided over extremely frosty cross-strait relations.

But when Hou Yu-ih’s “deep blue” running mate Jaw Shau-kong declared himself and Hou at one in their rejection of Beijing’s “one China, two systems” policy, the legacy of Tsai Ing-wen was apparent. “Regarding the ‘one country, two systems,’” said Tsai, ahead of the 2020 election, “our answer is: that is not possible.” Tsai won that election in a landslide. Now, all three current presidential candidates have put defence as their top priority.

Neither US restraint nor Taiwanese domestic politics necessarily have much bearing on the prospects of war or peace in the Taiwan Strait. If the Kuomintang were to be victorious in the presidential election, Beijing would be gratified but might not greatly alter its present course. On the 130th anniversary of the birth of Mao Zedong on 26 December, and again five days later, on New Year’s Eve, Xi Jinping declared yet again what he has often stated before, that the reunification of Taiwan with China is a historical necessity.

On this point Xi is in no danger of outraging China’s netizens, who naturally share his conviction that Taiwan belongs to China. A majority, though not an overwhelming one, supports “recovery” of the island by force. Xi has reassured Taiwanese that “Chinese people will not strike Chinese people” but left himself with a way out: “if [Taiwanese] don’t want to be Chinese, we just can’t look on and do nothing.”

Voters in Taiwan display a remarkable insouciance in face of such threats. While jets scramble overhead they go about their daily lives with barely an upward glance. They are nonetheless alert to the need for skilful management of Taiwan’s international relations. If the DPP retains the presidency despite the electorate’s favouring a rotation of power, it will be partly because Tsai Ing-wen’s assertion of the sovereignty of Taiwan and its separateness from China satisfies the views that most Taiwanese hold of themselves and their country.

Opinion polls also suggest that voters have confidence that Lai Ching-te, at heart a strong supporter of independence, will adhere to the status quo in cross-strait relations. And they have a high opinion of Lai’s running mate, Hsiao Bi-khim, who performed spectacularly well as Taiwan representative in Washington during 2020–23. With Lai focusing on domestic issues on the campaign trail and Hsiao responding on international issues, the electorate has been presented with an image of complementarity and compatibility that distinguishes the DPP’s candidates from their rivals.

Yet, in the final analysis, maintaining the status quo in Taiwan — by far the preferred option among Taiwanese voters — is likely to depend more on Xi Jinping than on the election. Xi’s dream of national rejuvenation, articulated at the beginning of his time in power, has a territorial aspect that is manifest in tensions on many of China’s borders. The conflict over Taiwan is significant partly because China’s entire diplomatic relations framework is premised on the accommodation of the politically powerful claim of “one China.”

War games conducted in the South China Sea by China and by a US–Philippines alliance just a week ahead of the Taiwan election are a reminder, however, that Taiwan forms part of the “First Island Chain,” which includes islands of Japan in the north and of the Philippines in the south. Control of the chain would give China a commanding position in the Pacific. More than Taiwan is at stake in any change in the status quo.

There are many reasons why Xi might hesitate to start a war in the Taiwan Strait. These include the dispiriting example of Russia in the Ukraine; the People’s Liberation Army’s lack of combat experience, flawed missiles and corrupt generals; the potential loss through wartime casualties of tens of thousands of “only children,” the products of China’s former one-child policy; and the parlous state of the Chinese economy in combination with the impact of the inevitable trade sanctions.

Weighed against Xi’s personal ambitions, however, all these might count for nought. Last year, Xi turned seventy. In Chinese lore, this is the age for “pursuing the heart’s desire,” but by anyone’s calculation the window of opportunity for doing so is shrinking. He has time to play with: his father lived till eighty-nine and his mother is still alive. But Mao Zedong, born an auspicious sixty years before him, died at eighty-two. Xi will want to achieve his heart’s desire before he reaches a comparable age.

A shrinking population, a slowing economy, and an underperforming global infrastructure project — the Belt and Road Initiative — mean that much on which Xi has staked his prestige is beginning to slip away. It is not impossible that he will see the election in Taiwan as offering an opportunity to respond to the call of history, reunify the nation, and establish an enduring legacy for himself. •

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In an election noted for the number of male candidates promising to take on a female running mate, Hsiao was not the first woman to make an appearance. In September, independent presidential candidate Terry Gou, billionaire founder of Foxconn, made headlines with his choice of running mate: actress and motivational speaker Tammy Lai, familiar to Taiwanese Netflix subscibers as the fictional presidential candidate in the series Wave Makers. Gou has withdrawn from the race but Terry and Tammy posters can still be seen on buses all over Taipei.

In contrast to Tammy Lai, Hsiao Bi-khim’s political experience is firmly grounded in Taiwanese party politics. She first came to prominence in 1999, when at the age of twenty-seven she was invited to serve as international affairs director for the DPP. Appearing on television for the first of many such interviews, she explained who she was: born in Japan in 1971 to a Taiwanese father and American mother, educated in the United States, Taiwanese in her heart. In transliterating her personal name into English, she uses the Taiwanese pronunciation, Bi-khim, not the Mandarin.

Her career unfolded within the occasionally uncomfortable embrace of the DDP. She grew up under martial law in Taiwan, before multi-party elections were a possibility, and left for the United States in 1986, the very year the DPP was founded. By the time she returned as an adult, Taiwan was in transition to democracy and the DPP was beginning to challenge the ascendancy of the ruling Kuomintang, or KMT.

Hsiao was working for DPP leader Chen Shui-bian in 2000 when he inflicted on the KMT its first crushing defeat in a general election. She surrendered her American citizenship that same year in order to qualify for public office. The following year, aged thirty, she was herself elected to the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s parliament. She has now spent close to quarter of a century working in political or para-political roles in or for Taiwan.

This second homecoming comes at a crucial time in the political cycle. The 2024 election is less than two months away. President Tsai Ing-wen, who brought the DPP back to power in 2016, has completed two terms of office and by the terms of the constitution is ineligible to stand again. Next May she will hand over to whoever wins the 13 January election. The DPP will be hoping that it is Lai Ching-te, and so far opinion polls have him in the lead.

Although the lead is steady, it is slim, and popular sentiment favours a change of government. If Taiwan had a two-party preferred system of voting, Lai would be staring at defeat. Last week that possibility seemed closer to realisation when the dynamic new Taiwan People’s Party, or TPP, signed an agreement with the KMT to run a unity ticket. In the lead-up to the agreement, support for Lai dropped to well below the 35 per cent “safety bar.” This marriage of convenience quickly collapsed, but with Lai’s approval ratings so low, even a victory in the presidential election would mean political chaos if a correspondingly low number of DPP legislators were to be returned.

Under these circumstances, Hsiao Bi-khim’s appearance at Lai’s side on Monday could not have been better timed. For the preceding five days, the media had been in a frenzy first over the deal between the KMT and the TPP and then over its spectacular collapse. For longer still, the potential deal and its brokers had dominated the local political news. The DPP’s loss of visibility over this period contributed to its decline in opinion polls. With the deal in shambles, the sight of the high-achieving and well-regarded Hsiao standing alongside the current vice-president should have been reassuring to more than simply DPP supporters. That has yet to show in the polls.

Disaffection with the DPP government in the electorate is attributable to Taiwan’s economic slowdown. Projected growth this year is the lowest in eight years — since Tsai Ing-wen took office, that is. Outside an enviable high-tech industry, manufacturing on the island is disappearing. Salaries are stagnant and prices are rising. The workforce is ageing. Youth unemployment is high and job security low. A young male “precariat” is flocking to alternative parties.

Adding to the malaise are sanctions by China, including bans on tourism to the island and imports of Taiwanese produce, which are slated home by critics government to the deterioration of relations with China under Tsai Ing-wen. Markets responded positively to news of the opposition unity ticket — while it persisted — last week.

If the economy were booming, other things would matter less. As it is, opposition parties have found plenty of other targets for attack: the government’s handling of Covid; corruption on the part of legislators; incidents of sexual harassment and their cover-up (not limited to the DPP but particularly damaging to it as the party in office); food safety; energy security; sleeping with the enemy; and even the shelf life of eggs.

Hsiao, who is close to the current president as well as the wannabe future one, can’t avoid being associated with the DPP’s failures, such as they are. But she has a strong record as a legislator and political campaigner, and strong ties to the south and east, important factors in a country where the capital and much of the population are in the north. She grew up in Tainan, where her father served as pastor in the Presbyterian church. Between 2012 and 2020 she was the DPP representative in Hualien, on the east coast, once a “deep blue” KMT stronghold. Hsiao is credited with weakening the KMT’s grip there in 2012 and breaking it in 2016, when she won the seat.

In the Chinese press she stands accused of serving American rather than Taiwanese interests: the expression “running dog of the Americans,” so often used in Mao’s time, has been used of her. But in a country with a favourable view of the United States, her native-level English, American heritage and strong performance as Taiwan’s representative in Washington all count in her favour. Her commitment to Taiwan is unassailable. She speaks Taiwanese as well as English and Mandarin.

True to her Presbyterian upbringing (Presbyterian being synonymous with progressivism in Taiwan), she stands for progressive politics. Taiwanese society is socially conservative and in a referendum in 2018 a majority voted against marriage reform. When the legislature nonetheless passed the reform bill, Hsiao didn’t brush over the contradiction but pointed to the responsibility of a government to all its citizens. “We need to take responsibility for the referendum last year,” she declared, “and we need to take responsibility for people who have suffered from incomplete laws or faced discrimination.”

If she is more progressive than the majority of her compatriots on social issues, Hsiao is at one with them on the issue of Taiwanese sovereignty. A majority of people in Taiwan now identify as Taiwanese rather than as hybrid Chinese–Taiwanese and hostility to China is deep-seated among DPP supporters.

It follows that China regards the DPP in general as anathema. As de facto ambassador in the United States, Hsiao was subject to vitriolic attacks in the Chinese media. News of her pending appointment as presidential running mate was criticised as portending a phenomenon of “independence on top of independence” in Taiwanese politics. Ever responsive to signals from China, the KMT called the announcement a recipe for disaster, bringing “troubles at home, perils abroad.”

It is difficult to tell how greatly China features as a factor in the minds of electors. Taiwanese have virtually no appetite for unification under the Chinese Communist Party but they have lived for a long time with the threat of forced unification hanging over their heads. It is impossible not to be struck by a certain sangfroid in the attitudes of people on the street. As they will point out, they have no means of preventing a war. While they wait for the threat either to eventuate or to evaporate, they want to be able to buy fresh eggs, see a doctor when they need to, and house their families if they have them. The birth rate in Taiwan has itself become a political issue, with rival candidates offering rival policies to get women to have more babies (KMT) or get more women to have babies (TPP).

The dangers of provocation posed by the DPP’s leaning towards independence nonetheless make cross-strait relations an obvious issue for opposition parties. Accordingly, KMT campaign posters are running the slogan “We don’t want war; peace on two shores.” Both the KMT and the TPP have promised to resurrect the Cross Straits Services Agreement in the interests both of boosting the economy and easing political tensions. This very agreement inspired a massive protest in 2014 and helped to bring down the KMT government in 2016. During the 2014 student occupation of the Legislative Yuan, Hsiao Bi-khim was one of the legislators who supported the protestors by keeping watch at the premises. But times have changed since then, as everyone knows. One of the leaders of the 2014 protest is now himself running for the TPP.

Hsiao won’t be able to avoid talking about cross-strait relations in the lead-up up to the election. At an international media conference on Thursday she had to field a barrage of questions on exactly this issue. Contrary to statements from China, however, she is not one of the independence diehards of the DPP. To the extent that Lai is regarded as leaning just a bit too far in that direction, Hsiao may help give balance to his campaign and claw back some middle ground. This would be true to her established image as a “cat warrior” who — in contrast to China’s “wolf diplomacy” — treads a delicate line between self-determination and confrontation.

Election campaigns in Taiwan are restricted by law to a period of twenty-eight days counting backwards from the eve of the election day. The pre-campaign has been rumbling on for most of this year, pending the formal registration of candidates on or before Friday 24 November. Lai Ching-te and Hsiao Bi-khim registered on Tuesday.

On Wednesday and Thursday this week it still seemed possible that the KMT and TPP would patch things up, but the chance was faint. TPP presidential candidate Ko Wen-je had said publicly that he hates three things: “mosquitoes, cockroaches, and the KMT.” Granted that he was in a bad temper, it was a difficult statement to unsay. A poll taken in the middle of the week showed, moreover, that the gap between the DPP and KMT had narrowed to less than one percentage point, reducing the KMT’s incentive to seek an alliance.

On Friday morning, all speculation ended when separate TPP and KMT tickets were announced.  Ko Wen-je would team with TPP legislator Wu Hsin-yeh — a woman, as he had promised. The KMT candidate Hou Yu-ih had also said he provisionally favoured a woman as running mate, but in the end he came up with senior party figure, Jaw Shaw-kong. If the mid-week poll is right, the contest will boil down, again, to a two-party race between the DPP’s Lai-Hsiao team and the KMT’s Hou-Jaw.

Seventy-two years old, the son of a KMT soldier and an advocate of unification, Jaw could hardly provide a starker contrast to Hsiao Bi-khim. More clearly than the presidential candidates themselves, the two symbolise the different choices facing the electorate in January. •

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In our times Indigenous people live in nation-states in which sovereignty, territory and laws are defined and maintained by the descendants of the settlers who invaded and conquered the original inhabitants. Although the terminology used to describe them has shifted from “Natives” to “Aborigines” to “Aboriginals” to “Indigenous” and “First Nations People,” the colonisers have consistently disregarded their primal relationship to land. In many countries, indigeneity is increasingly defined in terms that constrain membership of specific social groups and limit the territory Indigenous people can claim.

Taiwan has experienced successive waves of colonisation over several centuries. The original inhabitants were Austronesians, who were themselves the original colonisers of the Pacific region. They now constitute about 3 per cent of Taiwan’s total population. Like their counterparts in Canada and Australia, they feel the dispossession of their land deeply.

As in other nations where settlers imposed state control over land, indigeneity is highly politicised. Indigenous Taiwanese are entitled to six representatives in parliament but remain disadvantaged socially and economically. They have higher unemployment, they are poorer and their life expectancy is lower. They are culturally marginalised by the dominant Han Taiwanese population and experience discrimination in education and employment.

Using standard human development statistics, Simon notes that the Taiwanese Indigenous population is much better off than Canadian First Nations people. (Had he used Australian statistics, the gap would be much greater.) Simon documents the current resurgence of indigeneity as a political and cultural issue in the context of the Taiwanese government developing policies of recognition.

Simon’s ethnography focuses on two of Taiwan’s Indigenous groups, the Sediq and the Truku, mountain people who were once subsistence farmers and hunters. They grew millet and reared pigs, the latter to be used mainly in marriage, propitiation, the celebration of significant events and other rituals. Simons outlines the history in some detail and discusses the effects of successive colonists (Chinese and Japanese) on Indigenous lives.

The Sediq and Truku cosmologies and ways of life drew no basic distinction between “culture” and “nature.” Gaya, the concept that dominates their lives, encompasses ideas of the sacred, ancestral law, moral relations between people and their environment, and cultural values. It can also simply mean a “mode of life.”

Simon explores Gaya in five “ethnographic reflections,” each one devoted to a specific cultural concept or practice. He begins with Samat, the forest animals hunted by Sediq and Truku men, exploring the relationships between humans and their prey as well as the accumulated effects of colonial exploitation of forest resources. Hunting is a masculine activity and accomplishment, making it a contentious issue for contemporary Sediq and Truku men who resent and resist government restrictions on this activity. But for centuries hunting prowess also involved headhunting and, as Simon explains, this too was inspired by Gaya.

Although headhunting was outlawed by the Japanese in the late nineteenth century, the practice continued for decades, rendered easier by the introduction of guns. Simon depends on early Japanese sources for his descriptions, noting similarities to other Austronesian cultures. As in Borneo and some parts of the Solomon Islands, the taking of heads was a means of attaining masculine adulthood and increasing the strength or power of one’s group. Heads were trophies taken in vengeance, but once displayed they were incorporated as ancestors, welcomed into the village and offered food and drink. Women danced before them and sang songs to them.

In the chapter on “Heart,” Simon explores the moral and political domains of Indigenous life. As in many cultures, the heart is the metaphorical locus of interpersonal relationships and emotional states. Personal trust is a major factor in political allegiance. Prior to colonial governments’ insistence on appointing leaders for bureaucratic purposes, Truku and Sediq were egalitarian, with leadership status earned rather than inherited. Men became leaders because of their generosity, courage and capacity to influence people.

These “Big Man”–based forms of political organisation have been described for other Pacific Austronesian societies. Given the prevalence of local feuding and the taking of heads, it is unlikely that these societies are, or were ever, more democratic or peaceful than other political systems where conflicts often escalated into violence.

As evidence of the persistence of Gaya, Simon stresses the ethical and moral principles that people appeal to in contemporary life. In many respects, though, these virtues — generosity, goodness and loyalty­ — are consonant with those in most cultures. Given that Truku and Sediq people are now almost all practising Presbyterians or Roman Catholics, and have been for decades, they themselves appear to have recognised similarities between Gaya and Christianity. But they have abandoned almost all the rituals associated with their old religion: while they still kill pigs on special occasions, now the religious dimensions of the practice “vary greatly according to community, household, and even individual preferences,” says Simon, adding: “Some families invite the Presbyterian pastor to pray before the pigs are slaughtered.”

Simon doesn’t explore such a radical transformation of practices once linked to ancestor worship, instead glossing it as part of the “flow and ebb of religious practices.” Sometimes he dismisses an Indigenous explanation, presumably because it is in some way at odds with his own understanding. Analysing the meaning of headhunting, for instance, he reports that “people told [him] that their ancestors believed that the heads held energy,” but premises that observation by saying “Perhaps because they have read it in ethnographies.”

This is a complicated book. In many respects it is a conventional ethnography, documenting and describing the lifeworld of Indigenous Taiwanese mountain people. Simon has lived and studied the people of whom he writes for almost two decades and has a clear command of the languages they speak.

It is also an exercise in anthropological reflexivity, with Simon describing his relationships with Sediq and Truku individuals, his data collection methods, his experiences as part of their communities and the knowledge he has gained during more than a decade of fieldwork. As a Canadian, he compares and contrasts Indigenous knowledge and politics in Taiwan with those of his home country.

Simon is also concerned to “decolonise the way in which we do ethnography, putting local, Indigenous ontologies at the heart of the reflection and writing.” This entails embracing Sediq and Truku ways of experiencing and understanding the world by eschewing distinctions between nature and culture. It means accepting other, alien forms of knowledge as true — or at least as true as Western, scientific understanding of the material world. Ideas and concepts that appear “irrational,” or simply fanciful to a Western observer must be accepted as ontological truths: thus, ghosts, spirits and omens are manifestly real because Indigenous people experience them as such.

This analytical move — “the ontological turn” — has been a subject of debate within anthropology for decades. In many respects it is simply an extreme form of relativism; but it is also an attempt at intellectual restitution, refusing to relegate indigenous knowledge to “belief systems.” It also demands a rather different interpretation of the meaning of the word “ontology” from that used in philosophy, where it refers to the philosophical discourse about “being” and “existence.”

Within anthropology it has taken on the meanings Simon gives it when he refers to “a mode of living” or “the concepts that people use to understand their existence.” Although he distances himself from the term “culture,” he uses the term “ontology” in ways that make it synonymous with “culture” or “cosmology,” at least as these terms are commonly understood. His insistence on Gaya’s continuing grip on Indigenous ontology invokes a sort of ethnic essentialism at odds with the evidence of historical, social and cultural changes that challenge or repudiate the concepts or practices that inform it. As in the majority of societies where they have been subjected to colonial appropriation and mass settlement, the lives of Indigenous people have been transformed and so has the world they inhabit.

Truku and Sediq people, like other Indigenous people, are engaged in a politicised cultural resurgence that aims to reclaim their identity and culture. As Simon’s ethnography reveals, this resurgence is constrained and articulated in terms of an indigeneity defined by the state.

Swathes of land have become the Taroko National Park, where hunting is banned. People work in the local Asia Cement factory and as day labourers. They perform aspects of their cultural identity for a thriving tourist trade. Much of their social life revolves around their churches. They attend schools and learn Chinese. Some go to universities and even become anthropologists. The majority vote for the conservative Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party, rejecting the Democratic Progressive Party — which would appear to have policies more protective of Indigenous rights — on the grounds that the KMT manages the economy more effectively.

Given the abundant evidence of dramatic social change over centuries of successive colonisation, Simon’s insistence on continuity and the persistence of radical ontological difference is ultimately distracting and unconvincing. Certainly Sediq and Truku people emerge from this study as “truly human,” but not quite in the way its author proclaims. •

Truly Human: Indigeneity and Indigenous Resurgence on Formosa
By Scott E. Simon | University of Toronto Press | C$38.95 | 388 pages

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Billionaire Foxconn founder and independent presidential candidate Terry Gou quickly came out in support of Ma, criticising the country’s leaders for their position on national identity. Ko Wen-je, presidential candidate for the Taiwan People’s Party, demurred, arguing that National Day should be above party politics; but on the day itself he left the ceremony early to attend a demonstration.

In a country that has yet to declare its own independence — a country, moreover, claimed by another country — a “national day” is inherently problematic. Taiwan’s National Day is the anniversary of the 1911 uprising that led to the founding of the Republic of China, or ROC, the following year, at a time when Taiwan was a Japanese colony. After the People’s Republic was created by the Communist Party in 1949, the ROC survived in rump form in Taiwan. The island itself, governed by the Kuomintang under martial law until 1987, was technically nothing more than a province.

All this was a long time ago. The participants in the original conflict are mostly dead; martial law has given way to multi-party democracy. With every new generation, Taiwan’s connection to the Chinese past has become increasingly attenuated and “Republic of China” less meaningful to them as a name for their country. Identification with the People’s Republic is much weaker again.

Around two-thirds of people in Taiwan now think of themselves as Taiwanese without qualification — in other words, they don’t even describe themselves as Taiwanese-Chinese. Judging by the level of electoral support for President Tsai Ing-wen’s independence-oriented Democratic Progressive Party, they would have opted by now for independence if it were not for fears of triggering war with China.

In these circumstances, the question “Whose National Day is it, after all?” has become progressively sharper. At Taipei’s monumental East Gate, not far from the site of the annual ceremony, the tensions underpinning the day are openly expressed each year. Separated by a thin blue line of police, a unification-with-China group and an independence-for-Taiwan group hurl abuse at each other in what has become a National Day ritual.

Under President Tsai, in office since 2016, the response to this question has been to allow greater leeway for expressions of Taiwanese nationalism, which in turn has reduced the visibility of the name “Republic of China.” Passport covers have been one scene of action. Within a few months of Tsai’s election, increasing numbers of Taiwanese travellers were covering up the words “Republic of China” on passport covers with a sticker carrying the inflammatory words “Republic of Taiwan.” The current passport design, issued early in Tsai’s second term, altogether omits the English words Republic of China from the cover.

Another site for subversion of the island’s ROC status is the National Day logo. This is generally designed around the Double Tenth symbol “++” (the Chinese character for ten, repeated), which evokes the date of the 1911 uprising, 10 October. Since 2017, this symbol has by degrees become more abstract and the accompanying references to the Republic of China less clear, if they’re retained at all. “Better Taiwan,” “Taiwan Together” and “Taiwan Forward” are among the slogans used in logos issued during Tsai’s first term of office.

Since 2020 the designs have become more assertive again. The Kuomintang criticised the 2021 logo because it carried no mention of the Republic of China. The logo for 2022, the year Russia invaded Ukraine, for the first time carried no reference to the Double Tenth. It instead featured a stylised sun — its blue and yellow rays read by some as a salute to Ukraine — accompanied by the words “Protect the Land, Guard the Country.”

The Double Tenth sign was resurrected for this year’s design. But the slogan of “democratic Taiwan,” resonating with the name of the Democratic Progressive Party, was provocative. In combination with the absence of any reference to the ROC, it was enough to prompt the Kuomintang’s boycott of the last National Day ceremony to be presided over by Tsai Ing-wen. In May next year, Tsai will hand over to whoever wins the presidential election in January.

The trend towards erasing references to the ROC can of course be reversed if the Kuomintang is returned to office, but at present that seems unlikely. The Democratic Progressive Party’s presidential candidate, vice-president Lai Ching-te, has been leading the polls since the race began. As long as none of his opponents join forces, Taiwan’s first-past-the-post voting system means he is likely to succeed Tsai Ing-wen next year.

Lai’s forward position on independence for Taiwan is well known but as vice-president and now presidential candidate he has had to juggle the fact of Taiwanese self-determination with the realities of cross-strait relations. In a recent interview he summed up the complexities of talking about a country that not everyone agrees is even a country in saying: “Taiwan is already a sovereign, independent country called the Republic of China.”

And there’s the rub. As “Republic of China” under Kuomintang rule, Taiwan was a recognised enemy of the People’s Republic during the Mao Years, 1949–76. The 1992 consensus — entailing both sides recognising the core principle of “One China” — ushered in a period of neutrality. Hostility was replaced by pragmatism, trade and migration between the two places. As the Republic of China, Taiwan remained formally “Chinese” and paradoxically compliant with the One China principle.

Had the Chinese Communist Party been prepared at any stage to put One China ahead of One Party, Taiwan might have joined with China to form a reconfigured republic — neither the Kuomintang nor the Communist Party version, but something attuned to the briefly hopeful, democratising world of the late twentieth century.

This chance appears to have evaporated, and the very term “Republic of China” is again becoming anathema in China. In Hong Kong this year, commemoration of the Double Tenth was prohibited because of its association with Taiwan independence. Current affairs commentator Sang Pu, born and raised in Hong Kong, recalls that in his boyhood the largest number of Chinese flags displayed there each October were the Republic of China’s, in commemoration of the Double Tenth. This year, Hong Kong was a sea of mainland China’s “five-star red flags” — 70,000 of them, around sixty-three per square kilometre.

It was the prospect of a sea of five-star red flags on Taiwanese soil that brought voters out to return Tsai Ing-wen to office in 2020. In her final National Day address on Tuesday, Tsai mentioned Taiwan over fifty times and the Republic of China just seven. Occasionally the two terms were coupled, most notably in her reference to national defence and the “resolve to defend the Republic of China (Taiwan).”

Needless to say, this is a rather different ROC from the one that China’s leaders have imagined might voluntarily return to the ancestral fold. From a Taiwanese point of view, it is an open question whether it ever belonged to that fold at all. •

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The visual contrasts with Australia mask many similarities. Taiwan is a young democracy, but its robust institutions underpin a remarkably progressive society. Democratisation has fostered a degree of civic consciousness unknown in the decades of martial law between 1949 and 1987. Multicultural policy has allowed local cultures to flourish after decades of repression, fostering a strong sense of Taiwanese identity.  A substantial body of law, still growing, protects and advances Indigenous rights to land, language maintenance and participation in government. A  marriage equality bill was passed on constitutional grounds in 2019.

Among these measures, Indigenous rights must resonate keenly for the visiting parliamentarians, themselves about to vote in a referendum on constitutional recognition of First Nations in Australia. On their way down Ketagalan Boulevard to the presidential office building on Tuesday, they may have been told that the road had been renamed in honour of the Aboriginal people who first lived in the Taipei area. They may also have seen the small “tent embassy” that has stood in adjacent parkland since 2017, the year that marked the beginning of a protest movement aimed at achieving something like a Wik determination (or better) in land rights.

It won’t be news to the visitors that Taiwan has a substantial Indigenous population. Indigenous studies and arts have been an increasingly important area of interaction and cultural exchange between Taiwan and Australia. In 2018, the Northern Territory government and the Taiwan Indigenous Peoples Cultural Development Centre launched a six-week artist-in-residence exchange program. In 2019, the first combined Yirramboi–Pulima festival brought together dance performers from Australian and Taiwanese First Nations in Melbourne. This year, the Narrm Oration at Melbourne University will be delivered by Akawyan Pakawyan of Taiwan’s Pinuyumayan people.

Beyond their First Nation status, little obviously connects the Aboriginal peoples in the two places. The First Nations people of Taiwan are Austronesian. Their languages (and there are many) link them to populations scattered across the Indo-Pacific, from Madagascar in the west to Hawaií in the east and New Zealand in the south.  But Austronesians never settled in Australia.

As colonial subjects, moreover, Taiwanese Aboriginals have a rather “tangled history” that seems not to fit neatly into the model provided by the European settler-colonial states. Since the Dutch occupation of the early seventeenth century, the island has been taken over by a series of competing powers in Northeast Asia. An independent settler-colonial state has emerged, populated largely by descendants of Chinese immigrants, but it is overshadowed and to some extent forestalled by the threat of war from its large neighbour, the People’s Republic of China.

Nonetheless, there are striking points of correspondence in the histories of First Nations in Taiwan and Australia. In both places, immigration, albeit from largely different sources, led to massive population growth during the nineteenth century. In both cases, the influx of newcomers was accompanied by a severe diminution of the Aboriginal population. Forced relocation of whole tribes sundered links with ancestral lands. In both cases, the process of dispossession continued into the second half of the twentieth century, leaving a legacy of trauma and social disadvantage reflected most poignantly in shorter life expectancy for Taiwanese and Australian Aboriginals alike.

Momentous developments meant a fundamental shift in relations between First Nations and the majority society in both places in the last two decades of the twentieth century. In Australia, the Mabo and Wik High Court cases quashed forever the doctrine of terra nullius, altering perceptions of land ownership in Australia and returning a considerable degree of authority over Country to Aboriginals and Torres Strait Islanders. In Taiwan, Aboriginal activism gathered momentum as the whole society shifted into democratic mode; the development of opposition political parties in non-Indigenous society was matched by the formation of Indigenous associations that were soon asserting their rights to self-determination.

Since then, First Nations’ issues have rarely been absent from the political landscape in either place. In 2007, prime minister Kevin Rudd, having brought Labor to power after a period of eleven years of conservative government, apologised to members of the stolen generations. In 2016, newly elected president Tsai Ing-wen, bringing the Democratic Progressive Party to power after eight years of conservative government under the Kuomintang, apologised to Taiwan’s First Nations for crimes committed against them after the island was handed over to China at the end of the second world war. Even the sharp division between political parties on Aboriginal issues shows parallels.

Constitutional changes, however, present different problems in the two places. In Australia, the Constitution can be changed by the people, who may or may not prove willing to support the changes about to be presented to them in the referendum. In Taiwan, the constitution is an historical relic, a document drawn in another time for another place — the Republic of China in 1947. Constitutional amendments are impeded by China’s tendency to view any such moves as “a path that seeks independence.” It was in the face of strident criticism from Beijing that Taiwan’s constitution was amended in 2005 to reserve six seats in the national assembly for Aboriginal representatives. With this and one other “additional article” the then president, Chen Shui-pien, made good on his promise that Indigenous Taiwanese would receive constitutional recognition.

Needless to say, all this is bound up with the development of democracy in Taiwan. The formation of political parties and the introduction of open elections in the late twentieth century meant shaking off the Chinese yoke. Politically, acknowledgement of and alignment with Aboriginal rights, especially land rights and cultural rights, has stamped Taiwan as different from China and established Aboriginal people as prior owners of a land that China regards as its own.

Incorporation into China would be damaging to Taiwan’s First Nations.  The very terms Aboriginal/Indigenous — in Chinese, literally “the peoples who originally lived here” — are frowned on in China for their suggestion of prior claim on the land and a history that might privilege them over the Han majority. China has effectively defined its own Indigenous peoples out of existence; all that is left are ethnic minorities (xiaoshu minzu).

Whether this complex of issues has been discussed by the visitors during their time in Taiwan has not been reported. Prime minister Anthony Albanese’s pending trip to China has anyway meant that their visit has been low key. But if some future parliamentary delegation to Taiwan includes a First Nations MP, we can expect indigenous issues here to feature in political debates about Australia’s relations with both China and Taiwan. •

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With its focus on domestic politics, Netflix’s new hit series Wave Makers is a reminder that Taiwan is something more than a flashpoint. It’s a lively democracy dealing with a familiar range of modern problems. The series is a mini West Wing, Taiwan-style, with a #MeToo story at its heart — and, in a remarkable case of art informing life, it has made #MeToo an actual domestic political issue. At a moment of high tensions in the Taiwan Strait, this is the issue making news.

Wave Makers is one of several Taiwanese productions from the Netflix stable available in Australia. Internationally, Taiwanese television drama is less popular than Korean, but this series is rating well. Strong performances from a star-studded cast do credit to a script written by two women (Chien Li-ying and Yen Shih-chi) who have real-life experience of party politics.

The series follows media staffers of an out-of-office political party as they deal with political graft, the status of migrants, marriage equality, the death penalty and other politically sensitive issues through ten months of an election campaign. But the political becomes personal when a #MeToo story emerges, slowly becomes the dominant thread, and changes the course of the election.

Reviewers have remarked on the absence from the series of any mention of cross-strait relations, the elephant in the room of East Asian politics. In fact, this elephant is not easily bypassed. Banned in the People’s Republic of China, “harmonised” (censored, that is) on Douban, the main Chinese website for entertainment and culture, the series has inevitably ended up in the cross-strait space.

As an exercise in soft power, Wave Makers functions like Taiwan’s planned porcupine defence, covering “a large number of small things” instead of one big one. Chat on the mainland microblog site Weibo shows that viewers in China, breaching the great firewall to watch the series, are fascinated by the multifaceted portrayal of a thriving Chinese-speaking democracy.

In Taiwan itself, the series has gone to air at a sensitive time in the political cycle. Campaigning is under way for the presidential election on 13 January next year, and so far it’s a men’s race. The redoubtable President Tsai Ing-wen is coming to the end of her second term of office and (unlike her counterpart in China) is stepping down in accordance with the constitution. Her successor may be vice-president Lai Ching-te, whose election would extend the tenure of the Democratic Progressive Party, or DPP, into a third term. With Hou Yu-ih, the candidate for the old establishment KMT party, performing poorly in the polls, Lai’s main competitor looks like being a former mayor of Taipei, Ko Wen-je, who founded the Taiwan People’s Party in 2019.

As if they didn’t have enough to worry about (opinion polls, economic contraction, Chinese fighter jets, Russian frigates), these men are now likely to be reviewing their personal histories.

The #MeToo story in Wave Makers is firmly located in the political world. As early as episode two, rookie staffer Chang Ya-ching is having to deal with the office sleaze. An internal hearing leads nowhere: sexual harassment within the party is too delicate an issue to handle in the course of an election campaign.

As it happens, Ya-ching is also suffering at the hands of her former lover, who is running for election as vice-president on the other party ticket. Handsome, sophisticated and predatory, the aspirational VP has in his possession intimate photos of Ya-ching that he is refusing either to return or to destroy. A sensitive performance by twenty-five-year-old Gingle Wang shows a younger, happier Ya-ching in flashback, falling in love and embarking on a disastrous relationship that blights her job prospects and destroys her peace of mind.

The series reaches its climax with her revelation of the abuse on public television, the inevitable impact on her former lover’s family, and the eventual reverberations for the presidential campaign. Australians who watched Rachelle Miller’s exposé on Four Corners of her treatment at the hands of MP Alan Tudge will be struck by the parallel.

In Taiwan, the series was triggering. Among those who watched it was a former staffer for the DPP. “The first thing that happened,” she later related, was that she had “a good, big cry.” The next was that she went on Facebook to report on her own experience of sexual harassment at work.

Soon afterwards, a second female party worker came forward with an allegation of harassment by a fellow staffer. DPP youth affairs department head Tsai Mu-lin was criticised in both cases; according to the second complainant, he had not only failed to take her accusation seriously but had forced her to apologise.

The DPP moved swiftly to repair its reputation, holding a press conference on the afternoon of 2 June, issuing apologies and forcing resignations, including Tsai Mu-lin’s. But the damage had been done. One website began keeping a running tally of complaints after the style of Covid statistics. In the space of two weeks more than thirty women from various spheres had come forward with complaints. In China, where the DPP is synonymous with abandonment of One China policy, the official media greeted the party’s discomfit with schadenfreude.

What initially looked like a DPP problem quickly turned out to be a general one. A sexual harassment case was already running against a KMT legislator, and incidents involving other party members quickly came to light. Outside the political arena, the entertainment industry has been hit the hardest, with allegations of sexual abuse on the part of actors and television personalities continuing to surface at the time of writing.

Among the accused are Wave Makers star Huang Chien-wei, whose performance as the amiable head of the party’s media department and muddle-headed husband of a long-suffering wife won him hearts all over Taiwan. Prominent political dissidents of the 1989 generation have also been named, including by Wave Makers scriptwriter Chien Li-ying, who alleges that dissident poet Bei Ling groped her during a meeting about a play production.

For political parties, allegations concerning their own party members are hugely embarrassing. On 6 June, President Tsai herself went on Facebook with a strong statement on the duty of society to protect victims. The DPP is currently moving to improve legislation on sexual harassment. In both politics and the entertainment industry, resignations and apologies, and in some cases strong denials, have become frequent.

The impact on the election is hard to predict. On 30 June, at the end of a month’s wall-to-wall coverage of #MeToo, China intensified military exercises in the Taiwan Strait. The following day, Singaporean journalist Woon Wei Jong spoke with seven young Taiwanese about their voting intentions. The conversations were dominated by the cross-strait relationship and the different parties’ stance in relation to the mainland. Is #MeToo at all relevant in this context?

According to mainland emigrant Shangguan Luan, the answer is yes, although the effects are more likely to be seen in an impact on voting patterns than in #MeToo’s becoming an openly debated election issue. Among younger voters, she writes, a sensitivity to gender issues overlaps with the “naturally independent” sensibility characteristic of people born since the 1980s. This generation has grown up in an era when democracy has fostered a sense of self-determination while time has attenuated ancestral links with the mainland. The effect of #MeToo should be to hasten the drift away from the older, more conservative, and essentially more Chinese, attitudes that form the bedrock of the One China policy.

Among mainland viewers, as the same commentator remarks, responses to Wave Makers have varied from sneers about Taiwanese democracy to frank envy. The series’ themes necessarily highlight Taiwan’s political differences from the People’s Republic: the participation of women in political life at the highest levels, a multiparty system, political accountability, freedom of association, freedom of expression, and same-sex marriage (legalised in Taiwan in 2019). The #MeToo movement itself, now surging in Taiwan, has been met in China with arrests of activists instead of perpetrators. A pallid civil rights code introduced in 2022 passes responsibility for infractions ever further down the line of management.

These differences have yielded Taiwan a human rights dividend that is complicating international relations, especially vis-à-vis China. A highly self-conscious Taiwanese series like Wave Makers can hardly avoid being entangled in the resulting complex of issues. The opening scene of the series, a rally on election night, amounts to a call for recognition. The wave makers are warming up the party faithful: “You have voted for hope for Taiwan’s future!” “Let’s change Taiwan’s future together!” The crowd cheers. The name of the candidate flashes up on the screen: “Lin Yueh-chen!” The crowd roars: “Frozen garlic!”

“Frozen garlic” is a pun on the Mandarin word for “elect.” Cheeky and assertive, it captures something about Taiwan at this moment in history. If it joins the lexicon of terms banned by the Chinese government, no one will be surprised. •

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As Dan Slater and Joseph Wong remind us in their new book, Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia, authoritarianism also tends to die not with a bang but with a whimper. They set out to understand the political effects of economic transformations in Asian countries where state-building and rapid economic modernisation have been the mutually reinforcing goals of government.

This “developmental Asia,” as the authors call it, has borders that are stark but porous: no South Asian government has driven capitalist industrialisation seriously enough to be considered part of it, but former laggards like China, Vietnam and Myanmar have been able to enter after socialist economics proved a dead end.

The starting point of Development to Democracy is the observation that democratisation in developmental Asia has not been prompted by a perception among authoritarian elites that their regime faces a revolutionary threat or a looming collapse. Rather, these elites have developed a “well-founded expectation of continued stability and even continued outright victory after democratisation takes place.”

The epitome of “democratisation through strength,” as Slater and Wong call this process, was Taiwan’s transition from one-party rule in the 1980s and 1990s. Facing rising demands for reform from civil society, a growing Taiwanese-nationalist opposition and the end of the cold war, the ruling Kuomintang lifted martial law and introduced contested elections. The gamble paid off not just for Taiwan’s people — who today enjoy the highest-quality democracy in Asia — but also for the Kuomintang itself, which now forms half of a stable two-party system alongside the Democratic Progressive Party, which has its roots in the opposition movement of the 1980s.

What we should want, Slater and Wong imply, is for authoritarian regimes to act like the Kuomintang or its contemporaries in South Korea: concede from a position of strength, just past the apex of their power and popularity, giving the regime’s legatees the opportunity to compete in free and fair elections by boasting they not only made the country rich but also made it free.

Democratisation through strength is Asia’s signal contribution to the global political landscape, having given birth to robust liberal democracies in Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, and to a flawed but stable electoral democracy in Indonesia. Yet it also produced failed experiments with democracy in Thailand and Myanmar, and has been resisted in Singapore, China, Indochina and — until only recently — Malaysia.

Despite the book’s concern with the relationship between economic development and democratisation, Slater and Wong aren’t offering warmed-over modernisation theory: the puzzle they seek to explain is why “levels of economic development are not clearly correlated with levels of democracy in developmental Asia.”

In theory, the legacies of authoritarian developmentalism make it safe for regimes to concede democratic reforms. Having transformed the living standards of the average voter, these regimes believe that their popular legitimacy will transfer to their own party or its successor(s) in free and fair elections. The poverty reduction and social safety nets they initiated — as well as their repression of the left — means that they need not worry about distributive conflicts spiralling out of control once democracy arrives.

This “victory confidence” and “stability confidence,” per the book’s shorthand, are needed for regimes to democratise, but they don’t on their own provide the impetus for reform. Instead, Slater and Wong emphasise the contingencies that come into play when pressures for reform from below interact with the regime’s perceptions of its own strength.

Reform pressures can come in many forms, and can come simultaneously. A regime can be confronted with signals of declining legitimacy, including gains by opposition parties in stage-managed elections, the defection of middle-class groups to anti-regime movements, or nudges from democratic security benefactors (essentially, the United States).

As the case of Malaysia shows, a regime’s ability to read the signs of its incipient decline makes all the difference to its capacity to engineer a transition to democracy on its own terms. In 1998, seventeen years into his economically successful twenty-three-year stint as prime minister, Mahathir Mohamad chose to repress rather than accommodate the reformasi movement that emerged after he sacked and prosecuted his politically ambitious finance minister Anwar Ibrahim amid a dispute over the Asian financial crisis.

Mahathir’s party, UMNO, endured as the cornerstone of the Barisan Nasional government for another twenty years, but electoral gerrymandering masked a gradual erosion in its popularity. The party’s decay reached its terminus in the extravagantly corrupt prime ministership of Najib Razak, who oversaw Barisan Nasional’s first-ever election loss in 2018. The victor in that election was an opposition coalition led by Mahathir, who’d become embittered in his retirement. Najib is in jail, and after a thrashing in last November’s general election the party has been reduced to a supporting act in a coalition government led by none other than Anwar Ibrahim.

Singapore — the place where modernisation theory goes to die — could go either way. The People’s Action Party, or PAP, is exceptionally well equipped to anticipate the signs of decline and position itself to thrive in a democratic system. It has a luminous track record of economic development and competent governance. Tightly controlled elections and grassroots “consultation” processes give it regular health checks on its popular support.

But the PAP reckons those feedback mechanisms haven’t set off enough alarm bells to incentivise it to embrace reforms. Slater and Wong suggest the PAP is taking a risky path: the slump in its vote in the 2020 general election might be written off as a pandemic-era aberration, but if the government underperforms in polls due by 2025 — by which time a leadership transition is also due — the PAP will be at a fork in the road: democratise from a position of dominance or risk going down the UMNO route.

China has a quite different set of problems. Conceding to demands for political reform in 1989 would have represented what Wong and Slater call “democracy through weakness” — the precipitous collapse of an authoritarian regime — to a degree never before witnessed in developmental Asia. With China’s turn to capitalism having yet to generate broad-based prosperity, and the traumas of the Mao era still fresh in elites’ memories, a fragmented and poorly institutionalised Communist Party regime couldn’t be confident of maintaining power or stability in a more competitive system. Too weak to concede, it cracked down violently.

The tragedy of today’s China, by contrast, is that the regime has become too good at repressing dissent to receive reliable signs that its own legitimacy, and political stability more broadly, would be better served by conceding reforms. Without even the ersatz electoral processes that marked East Asia’s other developmental authoritarian regimes, or their conditional tolerance of liberal civil society, Xi Jinping’s party-state is trapped in a black box of its own making, so paranoid about its hold on power that it can’t tell the difference between politically innocuous forms of civic activity and bona fide threats to its rule.

The idea of democracy as something vouchsafed by self-interested elites doesn’t readily gel with our more romantic ideas about how political freedom is won. The notion that democracy can be fortified by the socioeconomic legacies of dictatorship can be hard to swallow, too. But Slater and Wong’s work is part of a growing body of scholarship that analyses democracy not as the outcome of a zero-sum contest between authoritarian incumbents and “people power” movements but as a product of intra-elite pacts.

Slater and Wong’s book doesn’t break new ground in terms of fresh interviews or archival research. It’s a drawing together of their own and other scholars’ work into a big-picture framework for understanding the political economy of democratisation in East Asia — one that is compelling in its analysis and thought-provoking in its implications for how governments and civil society can support democracy across the world.

Fitting democratisation ­— an intrinsically complex and contingent process — into one neat explanatory framework has its risks, of course. While Slater and Wong stress the critical role that popular pressures put on regimes in developmental Asia to reform political systems, I suspect that some country experts and scholars of social movements will feel that they overstate how much room for manoeuvre Asia’s authoritarians actually had once pressure for reform grew.

Even in the exemplary cases of Taiwan and South Korea, sustained popular protest presented elites with the choice between reform or a campaign of repression that may well have triggered greater unrest. Different observers look at the same set of facts and ask: did these regimes jump, or were they pushed?

And for a work so explicitly grounded in theories of the relationship between socioeconomic and political change, I was surprised by the minimal discussion of the ambiguous role middle classes have played in both demanding democracy and sustaining it after experiments in “democratisation through strength” are launched. Witness the highly problematic role of Thailand’s middle classes in its post-Thaksin politics, or how Indonesia’s intra-middle-class culture wars are eroding the quality of democracy there.

Slater and Wong could have enriched their analysis with more serious consideration of how popular preferences and agency augment the elite machinations they examine. After all, the middle class needs “victory confidence” and “stability confidence” too.

Yet my familiarity with Indonesia predisposes me to agree with Slater and Wong’s emphasis on the self-interested calculations of elites as a decisive factor in the emergence of durable democracies. While profound political change in Indonesia was almost inevitable once protests and riots threatened to make the country ungovernable by May 1998, the experiment with democratic reforms in the years thereafter was an “inside job” overseen by New Order holdovers. Slater and Wong are on solid ground when they observe that Indonesian democracy has survived against the odds in no small part because the old regime’s elites were assured of their ability to thrive in the new system.

But as Thailand and Myanmar make clear, democratisation through strength is a “reversible experiment” that doesn’t always bear fruit for those running it. Attempts to democratise through strength collapsed in Thailand (after Thaksin) and in Myanmar (after the National League for Democracy’s landslide election victories) because the conservatives who oversaw liberalisation realised they couldn’t effectively compete in the new system.

So what do we do with the insight that an essential precondition for democracy to take root in Asia has been authoritarian elites’ belief that democratisation won’t spell their political obsolescence?

Slater and Wong aren’t shy about taking their arguments to their logical conclusions. As they acknowledge, “one way to interpret the argument and evidence offered in this book is that democracy should only be pursued through strength.” They reject that sweeping idea, noting that it is possible for durable democracy to be born of people power movements.

Yet evidence from developmental Asia suggests that, on the probabilities, “by laying a stronger foundation for eventual stable democratic transition, gradual authoritarian strengthening is generally a preferable outcome to sudden and total authoritarian collapse” and the often-brittle democracies that emerge from the ashes.

For this reason, “we” — presumably, Western academics and policymakers — “should be looking at authoritarian regimes through lenses other than the standard lens of ‘democracy promotion.’” Instead, “authoritarian regimes that make genuine collective efforts to promote economic development, improve popular welfare, and build more predictable and durable political institutions should be offered the international community’s conditional encouragement rather than unrelenting pressure.”

As Asia feels the chill of a new cold war, it’s perhaps apt that Slater and Wong strike a retro note about the importance of encouraging state-building and development and hoping that, with a bit of luck, democracy might emerge as a side-effect. But their prescription seems oddly less relevant to Asia than to other parts of the world; indeed, it probably already describes what Western governments are doing in the region. Western aid programs and private foundations might still pay the bills for liberal civil society across developing Asia — supporting the “demand side” of the democratisation equation — but when it comes to top-level government engagement, Western policy already reflects the realpolitik that competition for influence with China demands of them.

Slater and Wong are less explicit about what their arguments offer to opposition parties and civil society. But the implication is that any struggle for change ought to prioritise reassuring authoritarian elites about their prospects in a democratic system. Perhaps one of this book’s most important contributions is to leave us with the unanswered question of how movements for democracy might thread that particular needle. •

From Development to Democracy: The Transformations of Modern Asia
By Dan Slater and Joseph Wong | Princeton University Press | $62.99 | 368 pages

The post Dictating democratisation appeared first on Inside Story.

Beijing has also raised the tone of its rhetoric on the unification of Taiwan with the mainland. But this move, if it ever came about, would be more likely to exacerbate China’s problems for years, if not decades, rather than solve them. Bali marked Chinese re-entry into the world while revealing the uncertainties that could undermine it.

China did make the most of its G20 presence. Unmasked and confident, Xi Jinping held court, giving or withholding favour from leaders eager to be seen with him. There was little doubt that he would meet Joe Biden, but other leaders seemed to compete for invitations. Emmanuel Macron and Anthony Albanese were invited in, with the latter’s visit seen as a sign of thaw in the icy relationship between Canberra and Beijing.

Others, including Britain’s Rishi Sunak, were not given a meeting, though it’s unclear whether the planned bilateral with Sunak fell victim to the erroneous report that Russia had bombed Poland, or Chinese anger at Sunak suggesting support for Taiwan.

Yet the demonstration of power by Xi belied the seeming hesitancy in Beijing about China’s international strategy. The years of the pandemic saw not only US–China relations entering a period of deep freeze, but also a general lowering of favourability for China in the Global North, in particular in the Anglophone countries. The Global South remained overall friendlier, but it was hard to avoid the impression that it was Chinese Belt and Road funding, not values, that kept them enthusiastic.

And all this was before the dramatic turn in Covid policy that followed mass protests in China in early December. China’s domestic woes, notably a weak economy, are not terminal but they are undoubtedly serious. And solving them is dependent on a clearer sense of where China’s international relations are going.

The Bali meeting did show the US and China speaking in a civilised manner. After the ill-tempered encounter between the two sides in Anchorage, Alaska, in 2021, the polite language on both sides about mutual respect and cooperation was a welcome shift.

Biden was fortunate the G20 took place just after midterm elections in which his Democratic Party did surprisingly well: Chinese analysts follow US politics almost as avidly as Westminster Americaphiles, and it’s likely that the Chinese (rather like the Republicans) were expecting a Democratic rout and a weakened Biden arriving in Bali. In fact, the results left the US president chipper, and the Chinese side less able to lament the supposed continuing slide of the US towards fascism.

However, the meeting also showed that American leadership continues to be tempered by its partners’ varying priorities on China. In Europe, it’s evident that German chancellor Olaf Scholz is uncomfortable with the idea of a Western decoupling from China. His recent trip to Beijing, accompanied by top German business executives, emphasised that point. Even within Germany, there is unease at his position: the Greens in particular have been prominent in demanding a tougher position on China, and at least one senior politician, Reinhard Bütikofer, has been sanctioned by China.

To American complaints, however, Scholz can point out that a range of US corporate majors, from Ford to Coca-Cola, still have a major presence in China. Beijing is quite aware of the power of the China market for at least some Europeans. Xi will understand that there is no prospect of Europe staying neutral between the United States and China, and that the European Union as a whole has moved away from the idea of China as simply an economic partner, regarding it as a competitor in areas ranging from trade to security. Yet he also sees opportunities to remind the continent that simply following the US line is not the only option.

There is one European power that China has yet to figure out: Britain. That the scheduled bilateral between Sunak and Xi did not take place might have come as something of a relief to London (as did the avoidance of a Justin Trudeau–style drive-by tongue-lashing; the Canadian prime minister appeared caught by surprise when Xi harangued him about supposedly leaking a private conversation). Britain’s China policy has been in flux. Under Boris Johnson, it was balanced between the desire to find a post-Brexit market and the desire to respond to growing security (Huawei) and human rights (Hong Kong) concerns.

During Liz Truss’s brief ascendancy, there were moves to declare China as a whole as a “threat.” Sunak’s first major foreign policy speech has declared that the UK will display “robust pragmatism,” a capacious term that seems to indicate a desire to keep trade relations plausible while acknowledging that stronger national security measures are likely in areas such as high-tech scientific collaboration.

Beijing’s hopes, post-Brexit, that Britain would be a vulnerable actor potentially open to a deal with China have faded. But, overall, the perception remains strong in China that Britain is still in flux on its long-term commitment to the Asia-Pacific.

The presence of the G20 in Bali also flagged up another area where US power has become patchier: Southeast Asia. Indonesian president Joko Widodo pointedly appealed to both sides to avoid a new “cold war.”

Overall, the region’s powers have a growing sense of resentment that they are being forced to choose sides, as Beijing and Washington raise the temperature of their language against each other. They are wary of the growing strength of China’s navy, particularly in the disputed South China Sea.

As a result, the news of the AUKUS submarine collaboration between Australia, Britain and the United States in 2021 led to muted reactions in the region, with some concern that the delicate regional balance might be disturbed but also some satisfaction that the United States continued to show commitment to security there.

Yet the Bali meeting also showed up the major absence in the US proposition for the region: an unwillingness to acknowledge the centrality of China’s massive economic presence in Asia. The US security presence still lacks an accompanying economic story (or indeed, an acknowledgement that economics and security are aspects of the same issue regarding China). The US Asia-Pacific Economic Plan is abstract, and does not make up for the link that went missing in 2017, when the newly inaugurated Donald Trump pulled the United States fully out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

Nor is there any realistic prospect of the United States joining its successor, the CPTPP (Comprehensive and Progressive Trans-Pacific Partnership): Britain is currently more likely to join. The flaws of these two agreements are many, but that is beside the point. Instead, while the United States is only partially embedded in the network of trade relationships that marks the Asia-Pacific region (primarily through APEC, the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum established in 1989), China currently sits in all the major groupings except for the CPTPP and is currently applying to join the latter as well.

The United States has been more successful at passing legislation that will hold China back (notably, the CHIPS act that denies China access to advanced technology) than shaping a new model of political economy for the region.

Two issues hung over the US–China relationship as the Bali meeting unfolded: Ukraine and Covid. Ukraine presents the United States with a dilemma: how best to deal with the tacit support China gives Russia while not provoking Beijing into anything like a full alliance with Moscow.

The danger of such an alliance has receded; Putin did not attend the G20, his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov made only a brief visit, and overall Xi has given little indication that he wants any deeper connection with the war. China does benefit from cheap fossil fuels from Russia and enjoys greater leverage that will enable it to pressure Russia in areas where China has special interests, such as Central Asia, or growing new interests, such as the Arctic.

However, China has hedged its bets by making it clear that it remains neutral, rather than officially supportive of Russia, at the United Nations. Nor is China’s hand entirely free. There is more caution in Chinese elite circles about the closeness to Russia than might appear the case at first glance.

One of the most iconic Chinese nationalists of the 1990s, Wang Xiaodong, author of the classic anti-Western text China’s Unhappy, has been writing thoughtful blogs recently reflecting on the rise of what he terms “Nazi” ideology in Russia. Although he scarcely mentions China, it is evident that Wang’s comparing of China’s partner to the Third Reich is not intended as a compliment.

The shadow of the zero-Covid policy hung over Xi at Bali, and his unmasked public presence certainly attracted attention at the summit and at home. The policy seemed to presage a long period of China being closed off to the outside world. But the demonstrations in the streets of China’s cities in early December led to a surprising, and sudden, reversal of policy in mid December. This shift will bring comfort to the many Chinese who have become victims of the country’s Covid-lockdown-influenced recession.

Winter 2022–23 now threatens to be a period of great domestic turmoil. The shift in policy has happened without an effective vaccine rollout, and most analysts inside and outside China think that a sudden spike in infections is inevitable in a country with little herd immunity to the virus.

Chinese New Year 2023 may be particularly testing: the normal phenomenon of millions of people on the move during those weeks has the potential to be a superspreading event, but cancelling the holiday would immediately lead to an outcry that the abandoned policy is coming back. Either way, the difficulty of judgement on these issues argues for a strong concentration on the domestic situation in 2023.

Does the improved tone of US–China relations imply a reduced risk of war between the two? This largely depends on how much it affects China’s readiness to launch a move to incorporate Taiwan in the near future. The official Chinese position remains as it has been for years: bringing Taiwan under Beijing’s control is the last unfinished business of the cold war.

Xi has added to the urgency with his statement that bringing Taiwan into the fold “cannot be left to future generations.” The heightened tension after Nancy Pelosi’s visit in August 2022 has alerted governments and corporations in the region and beyond to the fact that they need to develop a viewpoint on any change in the island’s status in the light of a move from the mainland.

The likelihood of a full-scale invasion of Taiwan is still low. The island has difficult topography and beaches that are unfriendly to an amphibious operation. After seeing the build-up of troops on the Ukraine border in January 2022, the West would be on heightened alert if satellites showed troops and equipment massing on the Chinese coast. China has also seen that bold military moves can go horribly wrong, and that cities under assault can fight back. However, an action that does not involve a physical assault, such as a naval blockade of the island, as a challenge to US and Japanese naval power, might be more conceivable.

Still, such an action would have immense consequences. There would be a high likelihood of coordinated sanctions against China. Beijing might calculate that this is a price worth paying for a number of years in return for conquest of the island, but the medium-term effect on China’s economy would be huge.

Though there would also be a very damaging effect on the global economy as a whole, it would be China that would likely suffer most. In the next few years, the most obvious effect would be a breakdown in the supply of high-grade semiconductor chips from Taiwan, which would be a disaster for both China and the outside world since there seems little prospect of a diversified, reliable supply until sometime into the mid 2020s at the earliest.

Beijing and Washington are still inclined to talk past one another. Beijing insists that it is pushing back against any move towards Taiwanese independence. Washington reiterates that it has no intention of supporting independence (a position of which Taiwan’s politicians are well aware), but that it would defend Taiwan’s democracy, one of the most progressive in Asia, with full free media, multi-party elections, and an active civil society.

China’s latest (2022) white paper on Taiwan says very little about preservation of Taiwan’s freedoms, other than a vague statement that governance would be a “looser” version of the system for Hong Kong, hardly a reassuring response to the fears of Taiwan’s many democratic actors. There is little evidence that Beijing spends much time thinking about the reality that Taiwan is a vibrant society unwilling to give up its freedoms, and a danger that China’s leaders may, like Putin, believe their own propaganda that the island’s democracy is shallow and dysfunctional, and that Beijing’s control would win considerable support.

How likely is a blockade? Unexpectedly, we have more grounds to judge than even a few weeks ago because the sudden shift in policy over Covid gives a variety of clues about what might happen regarding Taiwan. Unfortunately, those clues point in different directions.

The first lesson is that the system does have some flexibility in it and that Xi can listen to advice. Although we have no idea what happens inside the notoriously opaque Chinese leadership bubble, it’s inconceivable that a change of that magnitude could have happened without Xi’s sign-off, and that must imply that he had to accept that his cherished zero-Covid policy had to change.

It’s also notable that the shift in tone turned attention to the economy and the need for growth: ironically, the subject of most concern to the members of the governing elite who seemed to have lost out in the announcement of the new Politburo top team (Wang Yang, Hu Chunhua and Li Keqiang among them). That might imply that an argument of economic rationality would also apply to any attempt to coerce Taiwan into unification, or to change a blockade policy if it showed major adverse economic effects with not much sign of a swift victory.

Just as reversing the zero-Covid policy doesn’t return China to the status quo, stepping back from a physical invasion would be immensely difficult. The government would experience a loss of credibility and the human and economic costs would mean a long period of recovery.

By contrast, in the short term, a naval blockade would be more easily reversible as long as it had not involved any physical attack on the island. If the effect of sanctions were to damage the Chinese economy even more than had been predicted, then the ships could be turned back (as in the Cuban missile crisis).

But that would not return matters to the status quo. International investors, already wary of putting their money in China, would not come flooding back. Foreign firms with production facilities in China would change their risk calculus, even though this would mean the sacrifice of huge sunk costs in China. (And after all, after such a debacle, how likely is it that a sullen Chinese public would buy Western-branded cars and toothpaste as if nothing had changed?)

Beijing’s analysts can make these calculations just as much as Washington can, which is why it is perfectly plausible that China will, in the end, decide that an attempt to subdue Taiwan simply poses too much risk to a Chinese economy under strain. Much of the Chinese public might want Taiwan to be unified in the abstract, but offered the actual price of doing so, might well recoil. (Not that such consequences are likely to be spelled out within China.)

In the last resort, it is another issue that may well persuade Xi that strong rhetoric on Taiwan should continue but it should not be accompanied by action, language that would still be likely to deter any declaration of independence from Taiwan.

That issue is China’s demographic decline. In 2022, new statistics made it obvious that China’s already swift acceleration towards a smaller population, exacerbated by the one-child policy, was heightening a crisis in pensions, eldercare and health provision. China needs to work out now how it can raise pension ages and deal with a fast-approaching reduction in the number of working-age taxpayers. To do this, it needs a stable economy with strong consumption-driven growth, as well as even more exploitation of its real advantages in technological innovation in hubs in Shenzhen, Hangzhou, Beijing and beyond.

Overall, a range of economic problems, from a fragile property sector to rising graduate unemployment, are challenging China in the 2020s. None are insoluble, but an assault on Taiwan would do nothing to fulfil any of them. Avoiding such an assault, and growing the economy, by contrast, stands a chance of creating a “moderately prosperous” middle class that might genuinely stand as a challenge to the Western model.

Apocalyptic stories of Chinese global dominance or collapse should give way to a less glamorous but more probable reality: China will likely be a major power with global influence for decades to come, but its internal crises will continually force it to redirect attention inward. •

This article first appeared in the Substack newsletter Comment is Freed.

The post What next for China? appeared first on Inside Story.

Commentators generally agree a Chinese takeover of Taiwan would involve the following elements, alone or in combination:

• a decapitation strike, using special forces to kill or capture the Taiwanese leadership and install a Beijing-aligned government

• a seaborne invasion, with a large force crossing the Taiwan Strait

• an extensive bombing campaign using aircraft and missiles

• a blockade of the Strait to cut off Taiwan’s imports and exports.

All of these approaches have been tried by Russia, under highly favourable conditions, since it attacked Ukraine. All have failed.

In the lead-up to the 24 February invasion, the Russians were able to assemble large forces on Ukraine’s borders while maintaining ambiguity about their intentions. For fear of inflaming the situation, Ukraine could do little to prepare, and its allies provided little or nothing in the way of lethal military aid.

These conditions were ideal for Russia’s opening move. A rapid assault on Kyiv was planned to begin with the takeover of Hostomel Airport by elite airborne troops, who would be followed in by a much larger airborne force. Things didn’t go to plan: the assault force was driven off with heavy casualties and the main force turned back. By the time Russian land forces reached Hostomel, the chance of a surprise attack was lost.

Even if the strike had not been a military failure, the political calculation on which it was based turned out to be absolutely wrong. Far from welcoming Russian invaders as liberators, Ukrainians fought back furiously. Even in Russian-speaking cities like Kharkiv, Putin found little or no support.

A decapitation strike against Taiwan would face immensely greater difficulties. There would be no possibility of surprise. Taiwan’s air defences have been built up over decades. Reunification has essentially zero support among Taiwanese. And even if the current leadership could somehow be eliminated, local replacements would be equally or more hostile.

The most commonly discussed scenario for forcible reunification is a seaborne invasion. Even before the Ukraine war this idea seemed far-fetched, as a comparison with the Normandy landings in 1944 shows. The Allies had complete air superiority, the narrow English Channel to cross, a wide choice of poorly defended landing sites and a numerical superiority of five to one. The Germans didn’t detect the attack until landing craft were within reach of shore. Even so, the Allies fell far short of their Day 1 objectives.

A Chinese invasion fleet, by contrast, would have to cross the 170 kilometre Taiwan Strait with no chance of avoiding detection, then land on one of a handful of well-protected beaches and face numerically superior defenders.

The Ukraine war drives the lesson home. Before the invasion, Russia’s Black Sea fleet was widely seen as a major strategic asset. When the initial attacks on Kyiv and Kharkiv failed, a seaborne attack on Odessa was generally anticipated. Ukraine had only a handful of domestically produced anti-ship missiles, and its own navy had been wiped out on the first day of the war. Russia was in complete command of the sea.

Yet the attack never took place. The sinking of the Moskva in April by a Ukrainian Neptune missile proved that the Russians had been right to hold back. Russian naval forces were inadequate even to defend the famous Snake Island, kilometres from Ukrainian mainland. With Ukraine’s acquisition of increasing numbers of modern missiles, most of the fleet has been withdrawn entirely to the relative safety of Novorossiysk on the eastern shore of the Black Sea.

Ukraine repelled the Black Sea fleet with a handful of missiles. Taiwan has hundreds, including American-made Harpoons and domestically produced missiles easily capable of hitting Chinese ships before they leave port. Many are truck-mounted and effectively impossible to destroy even with an intensive air campaign.

All the evidence suggests that China understands this. While it is politically necessary for the government in Beijing to maintain that it has the capacity to reunify China by force, the announced plan for doing so is outlandish. It involves securing landing sites with a handful of craft then sending in the main force on lightly modified civilian ferries. No sensible person could take such a plan seriously.

Much the same points can be made about the idea of an extended bombing campaign. Bombing an enemy into submission has been tried many times since its initial success at Guernica in 1937 and has almost invariably failed.

Moreover, Russia’s massive air force has proved incapable of overcoming Ukrainian air defences, or even driving the much smaller Ukraine air force from the skies. With the exception of the mythical “ghost of Kyiv,” air-to-air combat has been almost non-existent, and crewed aircraft have played at most a marginal role. It is highly unlikely that the Chinese air force, operating under far less favourable conditions, could do any better against Taiwan.

Finally, there is the possibility of a blockade. Like the other options for an assault on Taiwan, this idea has always been problematic. It would be easy enough to close the South China Sea to shipping, but that would be more damaging to China than Taiwan, which could use air transport or develop ports on its eastern coast.

By contrast, Russia’s strategy of blocking Ukrainian exports through the Black Sea looked relatively easy, and for a while it seemed to work. But a combination of military failures (notably the loss of Snake Island) and global condemnation forced it to abandon the idea. The resumption of Ukrainian grain exports (billed as a “goodwill gesture”) has reversed one of the few successes of Russia’s war.

Taiwan is clearly aware of this, and has shifted its focus  from traditional air and naval warfare to a defensive “hedgehog” strategy based primarily on anti-ship and anti-aircraft missile warfare. (Sam Roggeveen of the Lowy Institute has suggested a similar “echidna” strategy for Australia.)

If an invasion of Taiwan is militarily impossible, why is it continually discussed? The answer is that it is in the interests of all the major parties to pretend that an invasion is a real possibility. The Chinese government can’t concede that it lacks the capacity to unify the country by force. The Taiwanese government has every reason to present itself as being threatened by China. And the US military, particularly the navy, has no incentive to downplay threats that demand high levels of defence expenditure.

This continued focus on conflict over Taiwan, and more generally in the South China Sea, increases the risk of accidental escalation, possibly even involving nuclear weapons. Moreover, it distracts attention from arguably more serious threats, most notably the rise of North Korea as a rogue nuclear power under effective Chinese protection. It also undermines possibilities for cooperation, particularly in relation to climate change.

A realistic Western approach to China would accept that it is a powerful adversary in a number of strategic dimensions but a necessary partner in others. The same realism is needed on the Chinese side. Focusing on the chimerical idea of an invasion of Taiwan is counterproductive on both sides.

The post Why an invasion of Taiwan would fail appeared first on Inside Story.

On the mainland, though, the departure of Japanese forces had allowed the civil war to resume between Chinese Communist Party forces and the army of the Republic of China, led by the Kuomintang, or Nationalist Party. When Communist troops captured Nanjing, the Chinese capital, in April 1949, the Nationalist forces retreated initially to Guangzhou and eventually to Taiwan. During the months after Mao Zedong announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China on 21 September, hundreds of thousands of refugees and defeated Kuomintang soldiers arrived on Daishan and other Zhoushan islands. They made the islanders work for them, confiscated their food and assaulted islander women.

By May 1950, with the islands no longer safe from the forces of the People’s Republic, the Kuomintang prepared to leave. On that fateful day, the fifteenth of the month, Jiang and two of his classmates were abducted by a group of Kuomintang soldiers. The three boys were among 13,521 male Zhoushan islanders press-ganged into military service and taken to Taiwan.

Jiang had little choice but to serve in the Kuomintang army. He would later remember his service as a form of slavery. When he tried to escape, he was caught and sentenced to three years in prison. It was not until 1982, inspired by the 1977 American television miniseries Roots, that he sneaked back into China. He was reunited with his parents on Daishan Island, but only as a visitor, and never returned permanently to his native island.

The title of Jiang Sizhang’s memoir, published in 2008, translates as “Nostalgia: Diasporic Displacement, Memory and Grief of a ‘Mainlander.’” The quote marks around “mainlander” are significant. Jiang, the abducted Daishan Islander who now considers himself at home in Taiwan, is one of the protagonists of Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang’s outstanding book The Great Exodus from China, which examines what it means to be a “mainlander,” or waishengren.

“Taiwan,” in the words of Sydney University’s Salvatore Babones, “has a messy history of invasion, occupation, colonisation, refuge, and intermarriage.” The history he is talking about began in the seventeenth century, when Hokkien- and Hakka-speaking Hoklo and Hakka settlers from coastal southeastern China began displacing the island’s Indigenous population, and Taiwan became part of the Chinese empire. After the Japanese replaced the Qing emperors as Taiwan’s colonial masters in the late nineteenth century, they set about Japanising the island and its inhabitants. Hundreds of thousands of Japanese moved to Taiwan; rebellions, by both Indigenous and Chinese Taiwanese, were brutally put down.

After the Japanese were defeated at the end of the second world war, the Kuomintang took over control of Taiwan. As far as most Hoklo and Hakka were concerned, the departure of one coloniser meant only the arrival of another. When the local population revolted against the Kuomintang government in 1947, Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, the director-general of the Kuomintang and the undisputed leader of the Republic of China, despatched troops to Taiwan. Thousands of Taiwanese were killed in the “228 Incident” (so-named because the massacre took place on 28 February).

Two years later, the Kuomintang were defeated by the Chinese Communists on the mainland. About a million mainlanders then either fled, were evacuated or were forcibly taken to Taiwan. They joined tens of thousands of refugees and Kuomintang personnel who had moved to Taiwan before 1949. Chiang Kai-shek’s government set up shop in Taipei, declaring it the “provisional capital” of the Republic of China. The Nationalist government’s imposition of martial law on 19 May 1949 initiated the “White Terror,” thirty-eight years of Kuomintang dictatorship. The island’s Nationalist rulers also embarked on the (re)Sinicisation of the islands and its inhabitants.

The influx of Chinese in the late 1940s left Taiwan with four distinct ethnic groups: the island’s Indigenous inhabitants (the yuanzhumin), who today comprise about 2 per cent of the population; the Hoklo and Hakka (referred to jointly as benshengren, meaning “people of the local province”), who between them make up about 85 per cent of islanders; and waishengren (“people from outside of the province”), the mainlanders who arrived after the Kuomintang was driven from the mainland, and their descendants. As long as Chiang Kai-shek was alive, waishengren ruled supreme. After his son Chiang Ching-kuo took over in 1975, the Kuomintang slowly relinquished some of its power and the waishengren’s supremacy gradually eroded.

Once martial law was lifted in July 1987, a process of democratisation began alongside a “localisation” of politics and society. A greater emphasis on a distinct Taiwanese identity naturally privileged the ethnic groups with longer ties to the island. Taiwan’s first direct presidential elections were held in 1996. Four years later, the Taiwanese elected their first non-Kuomintang president. In 2016, the Democratic Progressive Party’s Tsai Ing-wen, of Hakka and yuanzhumin descent, won the presidential race, and her party won a majority of seats in parliamentary elections — the first time that the Kuomintang had lost the majority in the Legislative Yuan, Taiwan’s legislature.

Taiwan, once the country notorious for spending the longest period under martial law, had become a model representative democracy. In the Economist Intelligence Unit’s most recent Democracy Index, it ranks first in Asia, and eleventh globally, ahead of longstanding democracies including Britain, the United States and Switzerland.

For many of Taiwan’s waishengren, democratisation also meant the loss of the privileges they had enjoyed under the Kuomintang dictatorship. Taiwanese-born Canadian historian Yang traces a series of traumas experienced by waishengren in and on their way to Taiwan, and explores the malleability of their social memories and identities. Drawing on interviews, published memoirs and archival sources, he shows how people who once thought of themselves as exiles — and who were convinced that they would soon be able to return to mainland China — became Taiwanese. “[W]hat we are witnessing in contemporary Taiwan,” he writes, “is a paradoxical case of diasporic narratives/memories being used for an anti-diaspora purpose to claim a local identity — turning the concept of diaspora on its head.”

The Great Exodus from China begins with the arrival of waishengren in Taiwan, in itself a complex story. Some of the newcomers were military and government officials who were ordered to move to Taiwan with their families when the island became the last Nationalist stronghold. Some were civilian refugees who anticipated retribution at the hands of the victorious Communists. Others, like Jiang Sizhang, ended up in Taiwan against their will.

For some, the exodus out of China was an orderly and well-prepared departure; for others it was a risky escape. In January 1949, the ocean liner Pacific sailed from Shanghai towards the Taiwanese port of Keelung. It carried about a thousand refugees and was dangerously overloaded. A few hours out of Shanghai, it collided with a cargo ship. Only thirty-six of its passengers and crew survived, rescued by an Australian warship, the Warramunga, that happened to be in the area.

While the departure from mainland China was traumatic for many of the refugees and exiles, their arrival was no less traumatic for those already in Taiwan. “The great exodus disrupted normal social life and transformed living conditions on the island,” Yang writes. “A floating male population, many of them defeated soldiers and traumatised army abductees, contributed to a rise in the frequency of robberies, rapes, and other violent crimes — crimes that terrified the native Taiwanese.” The refugees were at once invaders and colonisers, taking what wasn’t theirs because they had the support of the Nationalist regime. “Displaced people from China with political clout forcibly displaced local people in Taiwan with little clout,” Yang notes.

But the mainlanders hadn’t come to stay. Taiwan was meant to be merely a temporary refuge. After all, the civil war hadn’t ended in 1949 (skirmishes would indeed continue for many years); soon, they thought, the Nationalist army would launch a successful counteroffensive, and then they would all return to mainland China.

It was only in 1958, after the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis, that waishengren began to doubt that they would ever go home. In return for US assistance, the Americans had forced Chiang Kai-shek to publicly renounce the use of military force as the primary means of reconquering mainland China.

Yang calls the effect of those doubts the “social trauma of the diminishing hope (for return)”: “When the displaced waishengren thought they might not be able to return home in their lifetimes — and never again see the parents, grandparents, spouses, siblings, and children they had left behind, let alone resume the lives they once knew or be buried in a communal graveyard with their ancestors — intense feelings of loss, disorientation, and depression began to set in.” They had thought of themselves as sojourners, but now they became “reluctant migrants.”

From the 1980s, though, mainlanders were at least able to visit their home towns and villages. Jiang Sizhang, for example, entered China via Hong Kong with the help of a fake identity in 1982. Afterwards, he and other former soldiers formed the Veterans’ Homebound Movement to lobby for an opening of the border. Their efforts effectively forced the hand of the generalissimo’s successor, Chiang Ching-kuo, who in October 1987 “lifted the ban on residents in ‘Free China’ traveling to the ‘communist bandit territory’ of mainland China.” This decision, which was not the “logical corollary to the larger democratisation process” but the outcome of pressure on the regime by disenfranchised veterans, was perhaps as momentous for the future of Taiwan as the lifting of martial law had been three months earlier.

The government’s announcement resulted in what the Taiwanese media called the “visiting relatives fever.” Hundreds of thousands of waishengren travelled to the mainland, Yang reports, seeking to “rekindle old feelings of home: warmth, affection, and a sense of belonging.” For most of them, though, visits “home” turned out to be hugely disappointing. They couldn’t reconcile what they saw with their memories, and were confronted by greedy kin who expected the long-lost relatives from comparatively affluent Taiwan to shower them with gifts. They returned to Taiwan “physically exhausted and emotionally drained — many of [them] only with the clothes on their back,” Yang writes. “It was a déjà vu all over à la 1949. In a seemingly bizarre historical coincidence, elderly former exiles arrived back in Taiwan not too differently from how they first set foot on the island nearly half a century ago.”

Only a small minority decided to move back to the mainland for good, and even many of those decided to live with other former exiles rather than their own kin. As disappointed waishengren realised that their destiny lay in Taiwan rather than on the mainland, they began to remember their own past differently. Where once they had identified as people from particular home provinces and native places on the mainland, now they began to think of themselves as waishengren who had in common the traumatic experience of the great postwar exodus. They mobilised memories that had previously been publicly suppressed.

The waishengren were partly responding to how, during Taiwan’s democratisation and localisation, the formerly repressed majority of the population were increasingly treating them as remnants of the Nationalist dictatorship. “Behind the exilic/diasporic narratives is an autochthonous claim to a Taiwan-based identity,” writes Yang, “an identity that resists, negotiates, and at the same time, adapts to the rising trend of Taiwanisation and Taiwanese nationalism following democratisation.”

Would the trend of Taiwanisation necessarily pit waishengren against benshengren? As much as anything, “Taiwanese” identity had been an outcome of the Japanese occupation of the island. Hakka and Hoklo were presumably able to bury any differences they had when they found themselves at the receiving end of Japanese discrimination (before 1945) and mainlanders’ discrimination (after 1945). So far, the threat posed by Communist China seems not to have turned loyalist mainlanders against separatist islanders, as Beijing hoped; on the contrary, China’s increasingly blatant attempts to interfere in Taiwan’s affairs may have aided the Taiwanisation of the island’s entire population.

The Great Exodus from China is a carefully researched, intellectually ambitious and thoughtful history. Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang cast his net wide in terms of both source material and the academic disciplines that informed his analysis. In the process, he throws fresh light on wider issues: the meaning of diaspora and exile, and how trauma persists and is used by people — particularly those who have been forcibly displaced — to form their identities. His observations also apply to aspects of other histories and contexts, not least that of Palestine/Israel.

The book is also an empathetic, and at times moving, history of waishengren’s multiple traumas and their memory- and history-making. In the epilogue he confides that he began his research “being rather unsympathetic and sceptical of waishengren’s trauma.” Yang himself was born to Hakka and Hoklo parents; one of his grandparents had been imprisoned by the Nationalist regime for having served in the Japanese army, and a grand-uncle had been executed by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops during the 228 Incident. “[T]he traumatic experiences I am writing about are not my grandparents’ or parents’ experiences; rather they belong to people who had wronged and injured my family,” Yang notes, as if he too was surprised.

“How can we bring people with dissimilar pasts and incompatible historical memories together?” he asks. The Great Exodus from China is a plea for a “mending [of] fences between mnemonic communities wrapped in the aggrieved, self-righteous, or sublime ambience of their own historical wounds,” as well as an exemplary attempt at understanding. Mutual recognition of the strictures of identity and memory-making would go a long way towards reconciling communities at loggerheads with each other. Such recognition would entail an empathetic listening to others’ grievances and histories, but also a self-critical awareness of how one’s own narratives are used to justify injustices, lay claim to illegitimate possessions, and denigrate others.

In “a land of fantasy,” Yang writes, such a mutual listening would also be possible between those living in the People’s Republic of China and those in Taiwan. A mutual listening could help deconstruct the memories undergirding territorial claims and identities. It might acknowledge that the Chinese Communist Party’s One China Policy, according to which Taiwan is a breakaway province that needs to be reincorporated into China, is itself the outcome of China’s “powerful victim consciousness”: the existence of an independent Taiwan is a permanent reminder of the “century of humiliation” in which China was invaded and divided by foreign powers.

Back in the world we inhabit, US admiral Philip Davidson told the Senate armed services committee in March that China was poised to invade Taiwan as soon as six years from now. A couple of weeks later, John Aquilino, the US admiral who was recently appointed to lead the US Indo-Pacific Command, refused to be drawn on that time frame, but he was no less alarmist: “My opinion is this problem is much closer to us than most think.” Arkansas Republican senator Tom Cotton even suggested that China might act immediately after the Beijing Winter Olympic Games in February next year, in the same way that Russia invaded the Crimea four days after the conclusion of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi.

The United States and their allies have their own geopolitical rationales, of course, for deterring China from swallowing Taiwan (as they had their own reasons for recognising the Communist government as the only legitimate representative of the Chinese people and agreeing to Taiwan’s expulsion from the United Nations in 1971). In the world we inhabit, the fact that Taiwan is a vibrant democracy counts for little. The attempts of Taiwanese — waishengren, benshengren and yuanzhumin — to work through their messy histories of invasion, occupation, colonisation, refuge and intermarriage count for even less. •

The Great Exodus from China: Trauma, Memory, and Identity in Modern Taiwan
By Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang | Cambridge University Press | £75.00 | 330 pages

The post Becoming Taiwanese appeared first on Inside Story.

Four days earlier, Chinese president Xi Jinping visited a naval base on Hainan island for the commissioning of three new warships, including a giant amphibious landing vessel capable of putting hundreds of marines ashore by helicopter and hovercraft. Two more are under construction, and Chinese media listed Taiwan among their potential targets.

Here in Australia, Michael Pezzullo, the powerful secretary of the home affairs department — a man given to dark warnings — spoke on Anzac Day about the “drums of war” beating louder, declaring the need to avoid the mistakes of the 1930s by arming to deter aggressors.

In Canberra’s political, official and media circles, Taiwan is suddenly a big strategic question. Will China use force to gain control of the island of twenty-four million people it claims as ancestral territory? If so, when? How far will the United States go to defend it? And if Joe Biden is drawn into a war over Taiwan, will Australia be fighting alongside him?

Answering the last question is possibly the easiest for many of our most seasoned officials. “There’s absolutely no doubt that if the Americans were to go to war over Taiwan we would be in it,” says John McCarthy, a former Australian envoy to the United States, Japan, Indonesia and India.

“Australia is not a major player,” Cavan Hogue, a former ambassador to Russia, South Korea and the Philippines, tells me. “But if the Americans decided to defend Taiwan they would expect us to join in — or at least offer our flag even if the military contribution were minimal.”

The Americans would be hoping for a fair bit more than that, says Scott Harold, a senior China analyst with the RAND Corporation think tank in Washington. “US policymakers would be expecting, at a minimum, intelligence support, political-diplomatic support, probably facilities access of some sort,” he tells me, adding it would not be surprising if Washington also expected some “niche” capabilities, such as special forces, anti-submarine operations and air and surface ship deployments.

The Australian Defence Force has spent decades working up the capability to join in such an operation. The navy operates three Aegis destroyers that can be networked into a theatre air-and-missile defence system. Its submarines have American combat systems and weapons. Its two landing ships can each carry a battalion of troops to take back islands. The air force flies American F-35, P-8 and Wedgetail aircraft. All three services have senior officers rotating through US command positions. Seamless “interoperability” with US forces is the doctrine.

It would be hard for Canberra to decline. “If we lost a war against China over Taiwan and Taiwan was forcibly absorbed, and our allies stood on the sidelines,” says RAND Corp’s Harold, “then it’s quite clear that would be the end of the liberal international order in the Indo-Pacific, and quite possibly worldwide.”

Even if the United States did fight off a Chinese assault on Taiwan without visible help from Australia, it would mean the effective end of the ANZUS alliance, according to Australian strategic thinker Paul Dibb.

Only in recent years has a war of this kind become a contingency that the United States and its allies needed to worry much about. In the early decades after nationalist general Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan with the remnants of his Kuomintang forces in 1949, it became something of a pariah state. Washington transferred its recognition to Beijing in 1979, leaving the Chinese nationalist regime in Taiwan in a kind of diplomatic limbo. American defence assistance was promised only so long as the Taiwanese didn’t start a fight with China or provoke one by declaring independence.

But circumstances began changing after Chiang’s son ended martial law and his successor, a native of Taiwan, opened up contested elections. Since then, government has alternated between the Kuomintang and the Democratic Progressive Party, which promotes a Taiwanese identity and has veered close to outright separatism.

Under president Tsai Ing-wen, the DPP has held power since 2016. Elections, a female leader, and liberal social policies have made it a successful testbed for Chinese democracy. Its handling of Covid-19, a danger it recognised before Beijing sounded the alarm, has added to its kudos. The transformation has weakened the argument, still held in some quarters, that Western powers and Japan, with their records of meddling and exploitation, should stand back and let two not-entirely-admirable Chinese regimes settle their differences.

Rather than the convergence many expected in the 1970s, the democratic transition set Taiwan on a path of political divergence from the communist mainland. The gap has widened, especially since Xi became China’s leader, tightening internal political and ideological control, promoting an expansion of China’s global influence, and crushing hopes of autonomy in Tibet, Xinjiang and Hong Kong. He has raised the recovery of Taiwan to a sacred goal and has devoted huge budgets to converting the People’s Liberation Army into a high-tech force that can contest American control of nearby seas.

Xi’s deadline for taking back Taiwan is unknown. It is unlikely to be the hundredth anniversary of the Communist Party of China in June this year — the preparations would have been apparent to US satellites. Xi himself has set 2035 as a target for some of his other plans.

In recent weeks, US Pacific fleet commanders have signalled to Washington their concern about a window of vulnerability within the next five or six years, before their own modernisation programs take effect. Scott Harold points out that America is responding to China’s growing power by dispersing its forces from bases vulnerable to Chinese strikes. It could be seen as a window of opportunity closing for PLA commanders.

Would Xi risk an all-out attack on Taiwan? It would almost certainly involve missile strikes on US bases in Japan, drawing Japan into the conflict by triggering the carefully drawn provisions about self-defence in its constitution. PLA generals talk about using nuclear weapons, which would invite retaliation in kind, shattering the carefully built-up economy and perhaps the party’s domestic grip.

“Would a communist regime really put those equities at risk when Xi Jinping knows that as long as I don’t do something incredibly stupid, I’ll still be the effective emperor of China tomorrow?” asks Harold. But hidden power plays within the Chinese Communist Party could work a different logic: “Xi could be pushed to be more hawkish than anyone else.”

Mark Harrison, a China specialist at the University of Tasmania with a deep knowledge of Taiwan, thinks all-out invasion is highly unlikely. China’s leaders know that seizing the island would be just the start, involving an occupation force of hundreds of thousands of troops who would be vulnerable to blockade. “It’s a crisis that would go on forever, and be incredibly testing of the PLA and China’s military infrastructure,” he says.

“Australia would be involved” in such a large-scale scenario, says Harrison. “But China is more likely to act in a way that makes it much more equivocal for the US and its allies, including the Taiwanese, about their best response. What we’re much more likely to face is a smaller event where you don’t have a clear choice. And Beijing will seek to use that to its tactical advantage.”

Smaller operations could include grabs for the Taiwan-held islands on the Fujian coast — islands like Kinmen, which the nationalists held against attack in the 1950s, or the remote Pratas islands in the South China Sea.

“It’s almost a version of grey-zone coercion,” says Harold, referring to China’s use of swarms of fishing boats and coastguard vessels to push its maritime claims. “A little bit beyond that because it’s actually occupying territory and kills a limited number of Taiwanese people. That’s a pretty serious threat, and to not respond to it would feel a bit like the militarisation of the Sudetenland” — Hitler’s occupation of German-speaking parts of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

“There would be some people saying it’s either this or we fight the big war, and are we going to fight the big war over this small thing?” Harold adds. “The reality is that’s how status quo powers get manipulated by aggressive, risk-accepting, risk-manipulative rising powers.”

Since taking office, US president Joe Biden drawn Washington back behind the Chinese “red lines” that Donald Trump trampled all over when he sent high-ranking officials to Taiwan. But his secretary of state, Antony Blinken, has declared “rock-solid” support for Taiwan, and supplies of missiles, extra F-16 fighters and other advanced munitions continue. When Biden met with Japan’s Yoshihide Suga the two leaders reiterated their support for “peace and security” in the Taiwan Strait — a coded signal that alarmed Beijing.

“In a sense,” says Harold, “this is in some ways more threatening because it suggests the US is returning to a recognition that it needs to be an active leader, not necessarily the only one but certainly the most capable one among others. If you look at the calculations of Tokyo and Canberra, clearly those are much more closely aligned with trying to respond to and support Taipei’s continued de facto independence from Beijing.”

Taiwan itself has been angling for more explicit support from Canberra, notably during a long interview with foreign minister Joseph Wu on the ABC last year. Some analysts see a division between Australia’s defence and foreign affairs departments. But foreign affairs secretary Frances Adamson, who has served in Beijing and Taipei, told a Senate estimates inquiry that Canberra had made several representations to China about Taiwan recently. Nor are defence secretary Greg Moriarty or his deputy secretary for strategy Peter Tesch — both former ambassadors — noticeably pushing for change. ADF chief General Angus Campbell says a conflict over Taiwan would be “disastrous.”

Australia’s official position is still strictly “one China” — that Taiwan is part of China — while urging that reunification happens by consent, which is now a forlorn prospect. Yet reports do suggest that the defence department is updating its scenarios for Taiwan to include some major military assets. ANU strategic expert Brendan Taylor sees this move as a response to pressure from Washington for Canberra and Tokyo to add their weight to American deterrence.

“Because of the capabilities that the Chinese have been developing it’s going to become more and more difficult for the Americans to come to Taiwan’s defence in the way they were able to, not without cost but relatively easily in the past,” says Taylor.

Harrison, at the University of Tasmania, sees no likelihood of an upgrade in relations with Taiwan. “There is a view in certain quarters that Australia is particularly belligerent towards China, but that really isn’t the case,” he says. “In really significant areas — Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang — Australia’s actually been very reticent.”

Canberra’s loudest drumbeat of war comes from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, whose dire scenarios are lapped up by the media and some politicians. “The place is getting a lot hotter under the collar than it should,” complains former ambassador McCarthy. “Everybody is whipping everybody else up.” •

The publication of this article was supported by a grant from the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas.

The post Is China’s claim to Taiwan approaching its end game? appeared first on Inside Story.

“If the US doesn’t come to the defence of Taiwan then that will mark the end of the US alliance system in the Asia-Pacific region,” says the Australian National University’s Paul Dibb, who developed the groundbreaking “defence of Australia” doctrine as deputy secretary of the defence department in the 1980s. “Japan and South Korea would be likely to reconsider the option of acquiring their own nuclear weapons.” But if the United States defends Taiwan and Australia refuses to join in, adds Dibb, “that may well threaten the raison d’être for the ANZUS treaty.”

A Chinese victory would end American hegemony in the Western Pacific, breaking the “First Island Chain” from Japan through the Philippines to Indonesia, a series of channels wired by the United States to detect Chinese submarines heading into the Pacific. For Japan, it would bring Chinese power right up against the Okinawa Islands, a tributary state that played off Japan and China until it was annexed by a modernising Japan in the nineteenth century.

A defeat for Beijing, on the other hand, would have unpredictable consequences for China itself, shaking Xi Jinping’s leadership and the Communist Party’s mystique, and creating domestic (as well as global) economic shockwaves — so much so that Beijing could even resort to nuclear weapons to stave off the possibility, a scenario some hawkish Chinese colonels paint in supposedly unofficial writings.

Speculation about the possible scenarios has been feverish in strategic policy circles, where analysts have noted the rising urgency of Xi’s calls for “reunification” of the island, a goal he says can no longer be passed “from generation to generation.” The qualification “peaceful” has been dropped, and Xi has ordered the People’s Liberation Army to be ready for war.

In the United States, meanwhile, next Tuesday’s vote won’t necessarily end the political distraction. As Gideon Rachman wrote last week in the Financial Times, “Beijing’s window of opportunity could look even more tempting after the US has voted on November 3 — particularly if the election result is disputed and the country is plunged into a political and constitutional crisis.”

Despite the risks, it almost seems as if Donald Trump has been trying to provoke Beijing into a military gambit. An “October surprise” of this kind might have provided a pretext to claw back his voting base with a show of arms. The recent official visits to Taiwan by his health secretary and a State Department under-secretary were the highest-level — and most provocative — engagements in decades, and this month Washington announced the sale to Taiwan of US$1.8 billion in precision missiles capable of hitting targets on the mainland side of the Taiwan Strait.

So far, a week out from the US vote, Xi has not risen to that bait. Nor do reports suggest a mobilisation of People’s Liberation Army troops of the size necessary to launch an invasion across the 120 kilometre–wide Taiwan Strait. But that doesn’t preclude other more symbolic shows of force against the small islands held by Taiwan along the mainland coast or in the South China Sea, or naval and air probes to wear down Taipei’s forces.

Is defending Taiwan worth the risks? In the early 1980s — a decade after Richard Nixon met Chinese premier Mao Zedong as part of the American president’s grand play against the Soviet Union, and a few years after Washington moved its embassy from Taipei to Beijing — it didn’t seem so. A moribund dictatorship of the Kuomintang, or Chinese Nationalist Party, ruled the island, having regrouped there in 1949 after defeat by the communists on the mainland. Its secret police and underworld friends murdered dissidents at home and overseas.

Mao’s death in 1976 and the rise to power of the pragmatic Deng Xiaoping had begun opening up China. Hu Yaobang, Zhang Zemin and other younger leaders began experimenting with free enterprise. Neither side of the strait was politically liberal or democratic, but the economies, at least, were converging. And hadn’t Taiwan been part of China since 1683?

But then the Taiwanese president Chiang Ching-Kuo began easing the government’s tight grip. He appointed Taiwan-born, US-educated Lee Teng-hui as his vice-president, allowed the opposition Democratic Progressive Party to form in 1986, and lifted martial law, after thirty-eight years, in 1987.

When Chiang died in 1988, Lee became president and pursued political reforms, kicking the members purporting to represent mainland electorates out of the legislature and filling it with Taiwan-elected members. In 1996, when Lee became the first directly elected president in Chinese history, Beijing fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait to express its disapproval. The Democratic Progressive Party and the Kuomintang have alternated in power since Lee retired in 2000.

Mainland China, by contrast, ended the 1980s with the crushing of hopes of political evolution in Tiananmen Square. Since then, it has pursued its version of mixed capitalism under rigid party control with a resolve that has only intensified since Xi took power at the end of 2012. Where Taiwan’s president is limited to two four-year terms, Xi has removed the Communist Party’s previously unwritten limit of two five-year terms.

Any hope of Beijing’s winning over Taiwan’s people with a “one country, two systems” formula has foundered with the clampdown on Hong Kong over the past two years, along with the frequent threats of last-resort military force if Taiwan tries to formalise its de facto independence. Resistance to this pressure helped the Democratic Progressive Party’s Tsai Ing-wen win a second term as president in January this year with a record margin of the vote. As well as electing its first female leader, Taiwan showed its social liberalisation by legalising same-sex marriage last year, a first in Asia.

Tsai presides over advanced living standards and a semiconductor and computer industry at the commanding heights of technology. Her country is also one of the largest outside investors in the People’s Republic of China, which is also its biggest trading partner.

Taiwanese authorities detected the seriousness of January’s Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan before Beijing did. Its public health measures limited its own case numbers to 571 and deaths to seven. Well-targeted support for domestic consumption is forecast to yield 1.6 per cent economic growth this year, making it one of only two major economies not to contract because of the pandemic (the other being mainland China).

Taiwan, in short, has transformed itself over the last four decades. And certainly as long as Xi Jinping is in charge in Beijing, it is only going to move further away from identifying as primarily Chinese.

America’s ambiguous attitude to Taiwan is evident in the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. Strong enough to deter any Chinese military moves — not that Beijing had much power-projection capability back then — it isn’t so strong as to make Taiwan think the United States will let it get away with a move as drastic as declaring independence.

Australia’s attitude is more explicit. Having transferred its embassy to Beijing in 1973, Canberra has long hoped that economic and political reform on the mainland will win over popular opinion in Taiwan and smooth the way for reunification. While it kept open a trade office in Taipei, it has taken the view that the island belonged ultimately to China.

During a period of cross-strait tension in 2004, I asked foreign minister Alexander Downer if the ANZUS treaty would oblige Australia to support US forces in a conflict over Taiwan. The treaty applied only to an attack on one or the other treaty partner, he replied, and was only an obligation to consult. His prime minister, John Howard, side-stepped the same question by declaring the issue “hypothetical.” The curtain of ambiguity came down again.

But some American figures made it clear that Australia would be expected to step up in the event of an armed clash. Much to Howard’s alarm, former deputy secretary of state Richard Armitage frequently said that Australians should be “fighting and dying” alongside Americans. When I spoke to academics close to the US Pacific Command in Hawaii after questioning Downer, they said that the Americans would expect both Japan and Australia to lend support, though in a back-up role more than at the forefront of any conflict.

It will be harder for Canberra to hide in the background if conflict erupts now. Australia’s armed forces have been equipped and configured to integrate with the Americans and operate in high-intensity conflicts. Australian officers are embedded in US command structures in the Pacific. Ships, submarines and aircraft are increasingly networked to US commanders. Our room for manoeuvre is sharply diminished.

The same is true for Japan. Its defence forces are also increasingly networked with the Americans, and its recent “reinterpretation” of its constitution allows Japanese forces to join collective security operations outside its own waters. Taiwan, which Japan took from China in the 1895 Sino-Japanese war and ruled until 1945, also has nostalgic appeal among Japanese conservatives. Japan’s new defence minister, Nobuo Kishi, is close to Taiwan, and attended the recent funeral of the former president Lee Teng-hui along with other MPs from the ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Like recently resigned prime minister Shinzo Abe, he is a grandson of wartime armaments minister and postwar prime minister Nobusuke Kishi.

A win by Joe Biden next week would not lessen American appreciation of Taiwan. “We’re a Pacific power, and we’ll stand with friends and allies to advance our shared prosperity, security, and values in the Asia-Pacific region,” Biden wrote last week in World Journal, the largest Chinese-language newspaper in the United States. “That includes deepening our ties with Taiwan,” he added, “a leading democracy, major economy, technology powerhouse — and a shining example of how an open society can effectively contain Covid-19.”

In Australia, only those retired from office are taking forthright positions. Tony Abbott wrote in the Australian in July that it was hard to see Australia standing aside from helping a “fellow liberal democracy.” On the other side, figures such as former Labor foreign minister Bob Carr tend to see Taiwan’s situation in the context of drawing back from Washington. In academia, the strategic “realists” accept as inevitable that China will get the Americans to back off, and don’t dwell on the likely consequences of a Taiwan conquered by the People’s Liberation Army: the purges of “traitors,” the mass “re-education” of millions of others, and the torrent of refugees to Okinawa and the Philippines.

But one analyst who doesn’t accept that inevitability is Paul Dibb. “It is in our interests to stand up for the defence of a successful democracy of twenty-four million people living on an island,” he argued recently. “Does that geography sound familiar to you? If Taiwan is not worth defending, why would anyone come to Australia’s defence?”

While in office, though, our politicians keep behind a thinning smokescreen of ambiguity, as Chinese military capability grows and America tires of foreign wars. •

The post Sabres rattling in Beijing appeared first on Inside Story.

It’s important to start with the central issue. Xi Jinping, China’s sole dominant figure, has inexorably personalised and centralised political and economic power. His core quality — complemented by his propensity to take political risks and a significant measure of good luck — is his zeal.

Xi’s driving belief is that the Communist Party must remain in perpetual and untrammelled control. More than an end in itself, party rule comprises a belief system, which is evident in the quasi-religious language used by party figures. (In one recent case, Australian Liberal MPs Andrew Hastie and James Paterson were requested to “sincerely repent” of their criticisms of China.)

China is being transformed into one of the most ubiquitously surveilled and controlled societies the world has seen. Beijing is making extraordinary efforts to rewire the loyalties and identities of China’s ethnic minorities, including the Uighurs and Tibetans, and its religious adherents, including Buddhists, Muslims and Christians, so that their primary culture becomes essentially Han Chinese.

That the ultimate success of this great, ambitious project that comprises the People’s Republic of China — created of course by Mao Zedong, Xi’s foremost hero — may not be inevitable, is slowly being sensed beyond the party core, seventy years after it began.

To date, the country’s economic growth has driven a rapid rise in global influence and has been crucial to the success of Xi’s ambitious Belt and Road Initiative. But growth is inevitably flattening, and demographic and structural constraints may mean that China’s economy won’t surpass that of the United States for many decades.

In recent weeks, Vietnam, Indonesia and Malaysia have expressed unusually strong concern, bordering on anger, about Chinese fishing and naval incursions (the two being often hard to disentangle). Along with South Korea, Mongolia, Singapore and just about every east Asian nation, these countries know much about “foreign humiliation,” but unlike China they have declined to treat it as the key driver of their foreign policies.

Meanwhile, the world has watched, sometimes with intense anxiety, the depth of commitment to freedom, democracy and the rule of law on display in Hong King. Admiration has been tempered, though, by fears of a cataclysmic response from Beijing.

Those values clearly run far deeper among Hong Kongers, and across a far larger proportion of the population, than most observers had previously imagined. They are certainly more intense than the commitment to money making that many, including Beijing, had assumed to be the core value of the territory. The local elections there six weeks ago underlined this in spades, with pro-democracy candidates winning 388 seats to the pro-Beijing candidates’ sixty-two.

Now Taiwan has also spoken, giving president Tsai Ing-wen an overwhelmingly victory in her bid for a second term. Her own vote rose to 57.1 per cent, a margin of almost 20 per cent over her Kuomintang opponent, and her Democratic Progressive Party retained control of the Legislative Yuan, or parliament, albeit with the loss of half a dozen seats.

With just over twenty-three million people, Taiwan has about the same population as Australia. Its physical beauty and environmental variety are extraordinary. Its Aboriginal tribes bear strong linguistic, cultural and hereditary affinities with the people of the Pacific islands, many of whose ultimate origin, their stepping-off point from Asia, was Taiwan. In contrast with China, the country’s wealth is distributed more evenly than in most Asian countries. Culturally, it is highly creative. It is Australia’s sixth-largest export market.

In just thirty years Taiwan has thrown off the authoritarian system created by the Kuomintang military after it decamped from China in 1949. Now a model liberal democracy, its government has changed hands three times — between the centre-right “blue” Kuomintang and the centre-left “green” Democratic Progressive Party — remarkably smoothly.

Tsai has apologised for the historic oppression of Aboriginal tribes, presided over the introduction of same-sex marriage, and overseen an increase in the economic growth rate to 2.6 per cent while maintaining low unemployment. Last year, $A30 billion was reinvested, chiefly in local high-tech operations, by Taiwanese companies that had long focused on developing their businesses on the Chinese mainland.

Unlike recent elections, the weekend vote focused on identity rather than living standards. Young Taiwanese in particular, but also a majority of the population as a whole, identify as Taiwanese rather than Chinese, and only about 13 per cent are descended from those who came from mainland China in the 1940s. The continuing turmoil in Hong Kong has been much on their minds.

Taiwan has long had a unique identity. Dutch and Spanish naval expeditions fought for control of its key ports in the early sixteenth century, with immigration from mainland China following. The Europeans favoured the farming and labouring skills of the new arrivals, and relations with the indigenous inhabitants were tense.

The island wasn’t exactly treasured by the Manchus, whose Qing dynasty controlled China at the time, with Emperor Kangxi describing it as “a ball of mud beyond the pale of civilisation.” In 1895, following a naval defeat, the Qing ceded Taiwan to Japan, which introduced modern technologies and infrastructure during its fifty-year rule.

Taiwan is one of the “tigers” that drove Asia’s economic resurgence. Like Hong Kong, it invested heavily in China after Deng Xiaoping’s reforms opened up the country, and it backed its capital with management skills and technical training. But the opportunity to prosper did not fully occupy hearts and minds in Taiwan or Hong Kong, as recent events in both locations have amply attested.

With Xi Jinping restructuring his party and striving to incorporate all of China’s troubled borderlands, these outlying populations have tended to reassert their identities. China’s one country, two systems formula, also proposed for Taiwan, has very little attraction, especially for young people. They feel little or no connection to a state they see as increasingly reverting to a modernised form of restrictive Maoism.

As usual, Beijing blames this kind of unrest on Western “black hands,” But it is becoming clear that today’s young Taiwanese and Hong Kongers, who increasingly exchange analyses and information, are even more deeply committed to liberal democracy than most of their Western counterparts.

As President Tsai said on New Year’s Day, “Democracy and authoritarianism cannot coexist within the same country. Hong Kong’s people have shown us that ‘one country, two systems’ is absolutely not viable.” Taiwan’s voters, and especially its youth, have resoundingly agreed with their rather academic but increasingly politically canny president.

But Xi is not for turning, or even for talking. Despite needing to come to terms with the popularity of Tsai and her party, and despite the fact that Tsai is the rational, even bureaucratic, kind of leader with whom such a conversation could be feasible, Xi has not sought to negotiate with her.

Throughout his career, in fact, the Chinese president has shown a propensity to double the odds rather than sticking with the cards in his hand, and to instruct rather than engage in conversation. He clearly believes that bringing Taiwan into the Chinese embrace would cement his place in history — something that his public remarks indicate is of great moment to him.

The resulting contest of ideas and wills is one for the ages. It is also a battle in which Australia, gradually becoming aware of the need to assert its own political culture, will become increasingly invested. •

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Their struggle has intriguing echoes of the “spirit of struggle” that Xi Jinping urges on the Chinese people, a phrase he used sixty times in a speech to officials at the Central Party School in Beijing last week. The development of Marxism and of a socialist nation was full of difficult struggles, the president said, and achieving a great dream also takes a great struggle.

One of China’s more persistent stereotypes, especially among the northern mandarin elite of the imperial and now the communist dynasties, is that the Cantonese-speaking people of the south — especially Hong Kongers — are greedy folk readily satisfied by the opportunity to make money. How hollow that perception seems today.

While Beijing persists with its own watching game, the demonstrators are showing extraordinary determination. One by one, pro-democracy leaders are being arrested, although they are also being bailed.

Many Australian and other onlookers are puzzled by these events, unsure why Hong Kongers appear to be expending so much energy at the risk of the kind of state violence unleashed by the People’s Republic in 1989. But it is equally puzzling that the goals they are pursuing — representative government, rule of law, free expression and access to information — should appear so remote from our own priorities in Australia, and should fail to resonate among our own student populations, excepting those from Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland.

For many desperate young Hong Kongers, it feels like the last roll of the dice. They believe that core features of the way of life they have grown to treasure, as well as their desire to choose who rules the city of seven million, are under remorseless threat. They worry that the “one country, two systems” formula devised by Deng Xiaoping in negotiation with Margaret Thatcher is being steadily transformed into “one country, one system” that better fits with the staunchly unified, unitary China championed by Xi Jinping.

The late Lee Kuan Yew, founder and leader of Hong Kong’s great rival Singapore, forecast that sooner rather than later, his competitor would end up as “another Chinese provincial city.” That is the fate that the young demonstrators are attempting to resist. Their identity is wrapped up in the unique nature of Hong Kong; their interest is in maintaining that character rather than changing China itself. Xi’s “Thoughts on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era,” meanwhile, which has been cemented into the state and party constitutions, emphasises the current era’s differences from Deng Xiaoping’s hopeful era of reform and opening up.

“Young Hong Kongers want nothing to do with China,” an old friend of mine, former journalist and newspaper publisher Liu Kin-ming, recently told the New York Times. “They have no more interest in subverting China than they do in subverting Zimbabwe.” The same attitude pervades young Taiwanese, who are largely indifferent to mainland China, and young South Koreans, who rarely if ever think about the North.

These young Hong Kongers feel terribly let down by older generations. The city was passed from Britain to China without any politically significant effort by residents to have their views heard, and without any serious resistance to the process of swapping colonial status for rule by what feels like an imperial power.

Today, Hong Kong is governed by a professionally competent caste of mandarins who run the city much as they did under British colonialism, their allegiance transferred and their massive remuneration packages — originally introduced to counter corruption — still ranking them among the world’s top-paid public servants. The governor of the equivalent of the central bank is paid more than the chair of the US Federal Reserve, even though Hong Kong’s dollar is pegged to the US dollar.

The deals cut between this bureaucracy and the core tycoon dynasties in colonial times have also been maintained, restricting the amounts of land made available for development while those figures, almost all primarily property developers or financiers, drip-feed new estates from their precious land banks. The price of flats remains among the highest in the world, meaning that virtually all of those young demonstrators are still living at home with their parents as they reach their twenties and even their thirties.

Those who gaze over the border into the mainland — and many have travelled there, studied or worked there, or stayed with relatives there — used to be encouraged to feel, after the 1997 handover, that this was the face of their future, of their brightest opportunities. But steadily, this sentiment has eroded — especially during the Xi Jinping era of personalised, centralised power through extraordinary surveillance and control — and has been replaced by a new, probably unprecedented, sense of loyalty to the values they associate with Hong Kong.

Attempts in recent years to involve themselves in Hong Kong’s governance have been quashed. Fresh, youthful leaders who emerged from the Umbrella Movement in 2014 have been jailed, prevented from taking their seats in the legislature after getting elected, or pushed aside in other ways. They say they have tried to play the game according to the regime’s rules but have been banished by vested interests.

Two of those young politicians, Joshua Wong — arrested with fellow activist Agnes Chow on 30 August, then bailed — and his close ally Nathan Law, have told me that they still believe time is on their side. They intend focusing on engineering a better deal for Hong Kong when the fifty-year “one country, two systems” agreement ends in 2047. They will still only be fifty and fifty-three respectively. But many more protesters worry that Hong Kong will have lost not only its flavour, but its identity, by then. It’s now or never.

Jimmy Lai, the remarkable autodidact owner of popular Chinese-language Hong Kong paper Apple Daily, was smuggled from the mainland into Hong Kong to become a thirteen-year-old factory worker, and then built a massive fortune. “The Hong Kong identity… has really emerged much more into our consciousness,” he recently told CNN. “We identify as Hong Kongers like never before. If we fight, we might have a miracle happen. If we don’t fight, we have to submit to the tyranny.”

In democratic Australia, one of the best-known artists in the Chinese world, Badiucao — who has made his home here — and Cantopop star Denise Ho, flying from Hong Kong, were denied access to various public venues including the National Gallery of Victoria to hold public discussions (titled, after the tactic of the Hong Kong demonstrators, Be Water) of events in that city. In Hong Kong itself, middle-class families are placing their futures on the line to identify publicly with what they assert as their core values.

In Beijing, where Marxism has been revived energetically by Xi, the opportunity for constantly enhanced prosperity is seen as enough to keep Chinese people, including Hong Kongers, happy. The city’s developer-tycoons have been blamed by Chinese media for triggering the trouble with greed that denies to many young Hong Kongers the living standards to which they aspire. Also blamed is the shadowy influence of snake-like “black-hand” foreigners.

The counter-evidence is everywhere in the city. On a recent visit, I walked through the many long subway tunnels leading to the MTR (subway) station at Tai Po. For hundreds of metres, every square centimetre of the walls was covered by post-it notes, posters, photographs and artworks urging on the cause of democracy and free expression — and this was just one of many, many such “Lennon walls” throughout the city.

There is almost nothing that chief executive Carrie Lam — a cool bureaucrat — can now do to gain traction with the protesters, who are supported by millions of others. Even the withdrawal of the extradition law that triggered the whole train of events has had little impact.

Xi may have initially been happy with the opportunity for the state-owned media to package the “chaos” in Hong Kong for mainland consumption. It would have seemed like a good opportunity to contrast the stability wrought by the party at home with the mayhem generated by the capitalist-style system under the one country, two systems arrangement.

But the longer the protests persist, the greater the difficulty in persisting with this public explanation — and the greater the danger of infection spreading to some young mainlanders, as well as of cross-fertilisation between Hong Kongers and those ungrateful Taiwanese who have rejected even the one country, two systems formula.

Restraint is still likely for a few more months, however. Nothing should disrupt the grateful spirit in which people around China are encouraged and expected to greet the seventieth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic on 1 October. Then, on 11 January, come the Taiwan presidential and parliamentary elections. It may now be too late, Beijing realists may rightly feel, to “win” the presidential poll by seeing incumbent Tsai Ing-wen defeated, but there remains a reasonable chance that voters will elect a Kuomintang (Nationalist) majority in the parliament, limiting Tsai’s options in her second term.

After that, Beijing’s options in Hong Kong again broaden, as the clash of cultures reverberates noisily around our region. •

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It is not clear that China really understands the evolving political dynamics of Taiwan. Things have grown complicated very quickly. Gone are the good old days of dealing with the nicely bifurcated world of the KMT (the governing Kuomintang, an old enemy and therefore almost something of a friend now) and the DPP (the Democratic Progressive Party, which has been painted into a corner as the true enemy by the People’s Republic). The causes of this shift are many, but the Sunflower Movement, which rocked Taipei and other Taiwanese cities in March and April, clearly marked the advent of third-force, oppositional, grassroots politics. Those taking part didn’t support the KMT, and nor (despite initial assumptions otherwise) did they support the DPP. Like the Occupy Wall Street movement, or protest movements throughout much of the world since the financial crisis of 2008, they were composed of people who largely loathed the organised political parties and were fed up with elites.

Going on talks I had with government officials and academics last month in Beijing, as part of a European delegation on cross-strait issues, the result on the mainland seems to be general bemusement. Faced with the fact that there is now an amorphous third force in Taiwan politics, the old discourse of cursing the ground the DPP walks on and generally accepting the KMT wilts a bit. That force may only just be getting organised, and has yet to show its true face, but it is a substantial new player. Like newly emerging parties elsewhere, from the UK Independence Party to the Palmer United Party, it might currently be small but it promises to put a disruptive cat among some fairly entrenched and complacent pigeons.

Mainlanders engaged with Taiwanese issues lack an updated conceptual framework to make sense of this new development and factor it into their thinking. There is no doubt that this year’s protests were symptomatic of a deep sense of disenfranchisement and unease. According to the August monthly survey by the Taipei-based New Taiwan Peace Foundation, neither the DPP nor the KMT can draw much comfort from recent public opinion trends. The DPP is polling better than the incumbent government, and should be able to win the presidential election in 2016 when Ma’s second term ends. But the lack of confidence in both parties is high. Some 63 per cent dislike the KMT, and 53 per cent the DPP. This is hardly a ringing endorsement of either party. And while the street protests have ended, those who assume everything is back to normal need to take heed of the August survey conclusion: “The Sunflower Movement has deepened Taiwan identity and independence mentality.” News of Hong Kong’s travails has probably only sharpened this.

For Taiwanese politicians, this means fighting on two fronts, domestic and foreign. Since 2008, Ma and his government have managed to stabilise what had been very fractious relations with China during the DPP’s period in power, 2000–08. A major framework agreement for economic cooperation was signed in 2010, and air, postal and people-to-people links have flourished. But the price has been high. Many Taiwanese evidently feel overwhelmed; the mainland, they feel, is starting to dominate their economy, dictate their international space, and encroach on them in ways they have never experienced before.

The New Taiwan Peace Foundation’s survey gives a stark snapshot of this feeling: in August, 60 per cent of those surveyed said they were Taiwanese and 32 per cent Chinese Taiwanese. Only 4.5 per cent said they were simply Chinese. When asked whether they would chose “Taiwanese” or “Chinese” as the single word to describe themselves, 88 per cent opted for “Taiwanese.” And while 63 per cent felt they were an independent country, 60 per cent wanted to preserve the status quo, under which tough issues like the island’s final status are simply shelved till the day they might be resolvable. Taiwanese politicians have to work in this territory of ambiguous opinion. No wonder they often look bemused.

Across the strait, the Beijing leadership is not good at dealing with identity politics. For them, it is a threat to unity, and its expressions in any shape or form are dealt with curtly. Coming up with a flexible framework that allows at least some expression of Taiwanese identity without enraging the Chinese leadership has been tough. As the mainland’s economy has rocketed ahead and it has become geopolitically more empowered, “One China” ideas have gravitated more in Beijing’s favour.

Recent years have seen attempts in Taiwan to stress kindredness while leaving at least some space for difference. In government, the DPP used the term “brotherhood relations.” Leaving aside the gendered nature of this expression, the fact that it has had little take-up in Taiwan, and almost none on the mainland, shows how challenging it is to encapsulate the issue of Taiwanese identity in ways that grant it space and dignity without causing political battles internally or across the strait.

The menu of political headaches on the island is unlikely to diminish. China will continue pushing economically and diplomatically. Domestic politics will continue to become more complex. There is wisdom in crowds, however, and the large numbers on the island who want the status quo to continue are probably right. Any other option – a push for more international diplomatic recognition, a unilateral declaration of independence – would be like supplying a spark to an unlit bonfire. No one really knows where things might eventually end up. And Taiwanese already know that a security guarantee from Washington is a currency that diminishes in value by the day – not because of a lack of American support, but simply because the mainland is now a much more formidable military opponent and the risks of getting dragged into a conflict would be unimaginably steep even for the world’s sole military superpower.

The European Union and others like to declare their desire to see the political system in China move in a more pluralistic, tolerant direction. But the Taiwanese have the most vested interest in this happening. A Beijing that had a system closer to theirs in Taipei might at least be one where a more flexible political deal could be done. But the day when such a system exists looks like lying far into the future, if indeed it ever comes into being at all. The most that Taiwan can do is to continue what it has managed to do for the past six decades – maintain its prosperity, seek quiet space where it can find it, live by its wits, and practise the Dengist virtue of “keeping a low profile and biding its time.”

The greatest threat is a Chinese leadership that might, just might, think the risks of going for the ultimate prize – a China reunified completely after over a century of division – are worthwhile. The world should not be complacent about this. Taiwanese certainly aren’t. International support for the status quo is pragmatic, wise and prudent; in this policy area, at least, innovation is not at present necessary. Preserving the way things are is safest and best, and that should be the aim even of the most instinctive radicals. •

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