I’ve spent a lot of time in Taiwan – probably something like 15 visits over the last 20 years, some of them for up to 4-5 weeks at a time. I was there last month, as well as in Japan, my first time to either since Covid re-opening.
The Taiwanese don’t see a Cold War. Neither are they concerned about imminent invasion. Rather, Truss’s visit (and the Pelosi one, and others) is about Taiwanese domestic politics.
The current Green Party administration – in power for about 7 years with a presidential election due next year (President Tsai can’t stand again) is keen to show itself ‘standing up for Taiwan. It’s also mired in sleaze of the sort we are quite familiar with – dodgy covid contracts, plagiarism, sex scandals. It needs a distraction and all this fuss delivers it quite successfully.
Plenty of Green Party senior politicians either come from families that have made a fortune in commerce with China, or indeed made a fortune personally the same way. These are largely the same families that did well under 50 years of Japanese occupation. The families that came over with Chiang Kai Shek largely remain involved with the KMT – needless to say many of them did very well (not least Terry Gou, billionaire owner of Foxconn, who stood last time for the KMT presidential nomination and is running again).
So Taiwan is not disengaging from China economically. The only disagreement between the two parties is on strategy for maintaining effective independence – the KMT (perhaps increasingly naively since the arrival of President Xi) thinks this can be done by smoothing over difficulties and kicking constitutional questions into the long grass. The Green Party is rather more fearful, and is working to diversity the economy and build stronger alliances with the West and with Asian partner economies.
The Green Party sees Taiwan’s history as largely separate from China – after all it was only a made a province of the Qing government in the second half of the 19th century, in response to Japanese incursions, and was handed over to Japan in 1895. During the chaos of the Chinese Civil War after 1945, Taiwan was handed to the Republic of China and the island handed over by the Japanese to what was effectively just another lot of incomers (other than a few elite trading families, few Taiwanese spoke the RoC’s standard mandarin). Protests against RoC rule were ruthlessly put down (unarmed demonstrators shot in some incidents, many other activists detained, tortured and disappeared), and a Franco style dictatorship established that lasted effectively until the early 90s, though pluralism was a gradual process. The Greens belong to the tradition that fought for democracy throughout this period.
The KMT is the old RoC party, somewhat reformed needless to say. It has a vote reach that goes way beyond the 10-15% of the population descended from post 1945 immigrants (indeed, quite a few ‘elite’ Green politicians are decended from this group embracing their ‘progressive’ agenda – the KMT remains more Conservative). It sees itself as sensibilist, anti-boat rocking, but it should be noted that their history is very anti-Communist. At the margins there are a few Chinese stooges in the party but for the most part they are just as committed as the Greens to de-facto independence. And to making money.
So what can we do? First of all, mainland China cares not a hoot about Truss except where they can advance their own propaganda (and there’s plenty of that in bashing the arrogance of a failed politician from the country that kicked off the ‘century of humiliation’ that started with the First Opium War in the 1840s). Truss seems oblivious as to how this stunt reads in China and Taiwan – with laughable ignorance, she pronounces on things she doesn’t understand, a coda to her dreadful stint in No.10.
As for supply chain, any company that doesn’s have that issue in hand deserves to go to the wall – there’s no role for Goverment except perhaps to tweak procurement rules for the Government itself. The Confucius Institutes could easily be replaced, in partnership with Taiwan (Taiwan offers generally better Chinese teaching anyway than institutions in China because it comes without political bias and generally uses more modern teaching approaches, also enables more advanced students to learn both Traditional and Simplified Chinese).
As for cheap political stunts like Truss’s latest one – these are best avoided. The substantive work to assist Taiwanese democracy and values is far more important than tedious showboating.
It should be noted BTW that Taiwan is far more like Japan in its manners, cleanliness, openness and general way of doing business, than it is like China – also in its streetscapes and overall architecture, unsurprising perhaps as much of the infrastructure of modern Taiwan, from roads, reservoirs and railways to government buildings and theatres, was built during the Japanese occupation. The Taiwanese have a better sense of fun than the Japanese though – it’s a great place and I would recommend anyone who can to visit. It might shatter a few preconceptions.
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