Taiwan’s perilous path in a distracted world
Subtle threats are accumulating in and around the island’s waters amid persistent US-Chinese tensions
Alec Russell
© Ann KiernanIn our age of dispirited democracies and general global funk, where better to seek inspiration on ingenuity and the human spirit than Taiwan?
Has anywhere else in the past half century moved on so successfully from one-party rule to flourishing liberal democracy?
The Czech Republic, maybe, but the stakes there are hardly as high.
Has, for that matter, anywhere else emerging from autocracy in this period forged such a dynamic economy?
Taiwan’s monopoly of advanced semiconductors is just one symbol of its entrepreneurial ethos.
Many of its companies have pivoted smartly to address the fallout of the US-Chinese trade war, not least TSMC, the chip behemoth now building offshoots in Germany, America and Japan.
It pays to compare and contrast the debate in Beijing and Taipei.
As China faces a near-existential dilemma over its macroeconomic strategy, one of the main headaches for Taiwan is a boom in high-end housing.
Executives heading back from mainland China have pushed up prices — and, one boss tells me, golf club fees too.
Set against China’s woes it is, as they say, a good problem to have.
But can all this endure?
Worryingly, events in recent weeks suggest another crisis over Taiwan’s future could be at hand — and at a time when the world is deeply distracted.
The uncertainty over China’s unifying ambitions has been overshadowed by the calamitous wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
But this low profile does not reflect the acuteness of the drama unfolding in and around Taiwan’s waters.
The long-feared scenario has been of a Chinese invasion across the 180km-wide strait separating China from Taiwan.
This may yet unfold.
But a more insidious threat is at hand.
The scenario that Xi Jinping had told his forces to be ready to attack by 2027 seems to have been supplanted.
Strategists are now exercised by the rise of confrontational Chinese activity in the “grey zone”, semi-hostile behaviour which falls just short of aggression.
Frequently this is via fishing boats and coastguard vessels on the fringes of Taiwanese waters, designed, it seems, to keep testing and squeezing Taiwan.
Last month China’s coast guard boarded a Taiwanese tourist boat near the Taipei-run island of Kinmen.
Earlier, two Chinese citizens were drowned when their speed boat capsized as a Taiwanese coast guard ship chased it out of waters near Taiwanese military facilities.
Simultaneously there has been an increase in such manoeuvres in the other regional hotspot, the South China Sea, aimed at the Philippines, which since 2022 has taken a more assertive stance against Beijing.
Chinese coast guard and militia boats recently rammed Philippine ships and used a water cannon and laser against sailors.
Such antics may seem small beer.
But the incursions are part of a relentless effort by China to pile pressure on regional adversaries.
The fear is that one overreaction could give China a pretext to escalate.
It is surely not a coincidence that this comes as Taipei and Washington are in a political transition.
Beijing certainly sounds more belligerent.
It recently sharpened its rhetoric saying it must “fight” Taiwanese independence, rather than “oppose” it, its previous preferred formulation.
Gloomier experts speculate that China could bring the island to its knees in days with a blockade, including the cutting of submarine electricity cables.
For years Taiwan has sought to tiptoe along, trying not to provoke its much larger neighbour.
Recognised by a dwindling handful of countries, it relies on the strategic ambiguity of America.
While not recognising Taiwan and keen to avoid straining its relationship with China further, the Biden administration has made clear it would defend Taiwan if Beijing attacked.
Taiwanese business people and officials hope this limbo-land can keep going until the Chinese Communist party falls under the weight of its own internal contradictions.
Their favoured scenario is a slow puncture of the Chinese economy, on the grounds that authoritarian governments have a nasty tendency of responding to a collapse by launching a nationalist war.
But politics makes this calculation more strained.
Into this delicate arena will shortly step an ingenu Taiwanese president.
Lai Ching-te has a successful record in politics but scant experience on the global stage at a time when a canny style in the manner of the incumbent, Tsai Ing-wen, is essential.
He has much to prove.
And then there is Donald Trump.
The presumed Republican nominee for November’s election was staunchly anti-China in office, but he discombobulated Taipei last year, when he accused it on Fox News of stealing America’s chips.
In the event of a second Trump term, Taiwan officials expect to be called on to fund more of their own defence.
Privately they fear they would no longer be able to count on America.
It has long been tempting to see freewheeling Taiwan as a model of how Chinese society might have been if the CCP had crumbled.
But as Ukraine knows, in the wrong neighbourhood an overweening neighbour with old territorial claims can snuff out freedoms overnight.
One difference between Ukraine and Taiwan is that of strategic deterrence — America had made clear it would not intervene if Russia invaded its neighbour.
Another is that a war over Taiwan would be a catastrophe for everyone — which is why some wonder whether China isn’t now banking on the island eventually falling into its lap.
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