Taiwan on the faultline

Lai Ching-te began his presidency with a geopolitical tightrope walk. As Taiwan’s newly installed head of state stepped up to deliver his inaugural address last Monday, he did so against a backdrop of escalating tensions between China and the US over the future of the island nation.

A staunch defender of Taiwan’s independence, Lai knew that every word would be scrutinised in Beijing and Washington. China claims Taiwan as part of its own territory and China’s Communist party has branded Lai as a “dangerous separatist”. The US meanwhile has a legal commitment to help Taiwan defend itself through arms sales — but keeps it unclear whether American troops would come to the rescue if Beijing ever attacked the island.

Lai sought to please all sides, asserting his country’s sovereignty while also sounding both conciliatory to Beijing and assuring Washington that Taiwan will also do more to strengthen its defences. Whether he succeeded remains to be seen. For those who dissect — and judge — Lai’s words, it is crucial to develop an understanding of Taiwan’s inner workings and the genesis of the current situation.

Fortunately, the growing tension around the country has sparked a flood of new books about it. Three that will be published in the coming months offer invaluable perspective: The Boiling Moat, edited by Matt Pottinger, The Struggle for Taiwan by Sulmaan Wasif Khan, and Rebel Island by Jonathan Clements. The three works combine the military, the political and the historical to highlight the roles its consecutive colonisers and the US have played in shaping the polity.

Pottinger’s book is a rallying cry for Taipei, the US, and its allies to face the risk of war in the Taiwan Strait and take swift action to avert this. During his time as Donald Trump’s former deputy national security adviser, Pottinger, a former journalist and Marine, was one of the then US administration’s China hawks and a proponent of more support for Taiwan.

For this volume, he assembled a team of mostly hawkish defence experts and security analysts from the US, Japan, Taiwan, Israel and Europe. Their resulting hard-hitting analyses make for uncomfortable reading as they pinpoint a glaring lack of preparation for a conflict on the part of China’s potential adversaries.

Some of the book’s diagnoses echo Washington’s prescriptions for smarter and more effective defence policies — which Taiwan’s military has been ignoring for more than a decade. For example, Ivan Kanapathy, another former official in Trump’s NSC, urges Taipei to reallocate its limited defence budget from big-ticket prestige items such as warships to a large number of cheap, mobile weapons such as Stinger missiles.

The volume’s major merit is that it acknowledges two key things. One is that the Taiwan military’s history as the force of the Kuomintang (KMT), the Chinese Nationalist party that ruled Taiwan under martial law for decades, has tainted its image in society, hindering decisive reform. As three defence experts, from the US, Taiwan and Israel, write in one of the essays, the military was for decades “under the command of, and served as the enforcement arm for, the authoritarian KMT regime”.

As a result the defence ministry was neither modernised nor properly brought under civilian control and has failed to keep up with Taiwan’s process of democratisation. To address this and break systemic inertia, the authors recommend that Lai initiate a structural overhaul of the reform-resistant ministry, stripping it of its monopoly on defence and security issues.

The other issue acknowledged by the book which distinguishes it from the countless think-tank reports on the topic churned out in recent years is the shortfalls of America’s armed forces in adjusting to the fact that China has become its peer. Over three chapters, the book delivers crisp, clear-eyed analysis of the capabilities the US military needs to help deter or counter a Chinese invasion or blockade of Taiwan, and what it needs to do to mobilise for either scenario.

It finds that the US navy’s submarine fleet, the Pentagon’s best chance at dealing decisive blows to any Chinese invasion fleet in the Taiwan Strait, is hampered by one-third of its attack boats idling at maintenance shipyards. It also notes that the air force is buying the wrong missiles — land attack ones rather than those that can be launched from the air — to enable its bomber aircraft to help sink an invasion fleet.

US policy on Taiwan is more like a haphazard accumulation of questionable decisions

To read The Boiling Moat is to come away with the impression that the danger to Taiwan is clear and present. It urges defence reforms by Taipei, a rapid ramp-up of munitions production by the US and decisive joint training and planning with its allies to avert that danger.

In stark contrast, the two other books introduce a historical perspective as a means to understanding how we arrived at the current situation.

Khan, a history and diplomacy professor at Tufts University, confines himself to the past 80 years as he zeroes in on the roots of the conflict and the risk of it spiralling into war. The result is a rigorously researched and gripping account of how driven by ignorance and internal divisions, successive US administrations stumbled from one quick fix to the next in their policy towards Taiwan.

The aptly named opening chapter “The Making of the Taiwan Problem” describes how Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s lack of understanding of China led him to promise Taiwan to Chiang Kai-shek, the KMT generalissimo who had only a very shaky grip on China and would wind up camped out in Taipei after losing the Chinese civil war to Mao Zedong’s communists in 1949.

In the Cairo Declaration of December 1943, Roosevelt, UK prime minister Winston Churchill and Chiang said all territories Japan had “stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China”. Pointing out that the leaders were “restoring” territory to Chiang’s ROC that a different state — the Manchu Qing empire had lost — Khan remarks that Roosevelt was “distributing territory in this casual manner — a handshake at Cairo, without any thought of what the people whose future was being decided might want”.

During the war and then during the first few years of KMT rule in Taipei, American officials repeatedly suggested making Taiwan a trustee of the United Nations or of the US — a scenario that could have put it on the path to independence and a statehood that would not be questioned internationally as it is today.

Instead, KMT forces landed on Taiwan in 1945 with US support and accepted the Japanese capitulation there, dragging the island into the KMT’s civil war with China’s Communist party. This in turn spawned the CCP’s enduring claim to the island.

Roosevelt, who died in April 1945, had “blithely ignored the faults of Chiang’s China with a view to constructing what he thought was a better world”, Khan concludes his description of that period of history. “In this ignorance lay the seeds of the Taiwan problem.”

Political persecution and misrule by the KMT quickly attracted the attention of senior US diplomats and military top brass who sent damning accounts of the situation on the island to the White House but were largely ignored.

With similar rigour, Khan dissects later key episodes of US policy towards Taiwan and China. For example, his description of Washington’s switch of diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979 again shows the US inadvertently laying the groundwork for later tension. By fudging its position — while Taiwan was consigned to a diplomatic no-man’s-land, it was not dropped completely — Washington managed to raise China’s expectations only to then disappoint it time and again.  

Those details have long been known. Still, in Khan’s beautifully written book, they come together to highlight that US policy on Taiwan is not, as often suggested, an intricately balanced framework that has kept the peace for decades, but more like a haphazard accumulation of questionable decisions.

But Taiwan’s history, of course, did not start in the 1940s. “Taiwan’s own sense of self is usually understood, if it is understood at all, in vastly simplified terms that have only meant something in the last century,” writes Jonathan Clements in the preface to Rebel Island. He then proceeds on a tour de force through several millennia of human habitation on the island.

Clements delves into the creation myths and languages of Taiwan’s different indigenous groups and discusses their similarities with certain Pacific island peoples but also with some tribes in southern China. He describes the complexities of Chinese migration to Taiwan since the 17th century and the different settler groups’ interactions with each other and with indigenous groups.

The reader encounters the powers that over the centuries landed on Taiwan’s shores and made shortlived attempts at setting up colonies — the Spanish and the Dutch — or otherwise exploiting its natural riches and strategic location — the British and the French.

Clements, a British writer who has authored both fiction and history books about east Asia and benefits from his literacy in Mandarin and Japanese, makes all this come alive through the key characters whose stories he tells. There are chiefs of warring indigenous tribes, abusive Qing government officials, adventurers, pirates. Each of them tried to shape this island to their personal aspirations and had vastly divergent understandings of what it was. Clements documents in great detail how no administration actually controlled the entirety of Taiwan until 1915, well into Japan’s 50 year colonial rule of the island.

He argues that Taiwan has “enjoyed a unique territorial status” throughout its history — a conclusion that makes the way the great powers dealt with Taiwan towards the end of the second world war all the more astonishing.

For Lai Ching-te, other things are top of his mind: He needs to somehow reassure China that Taiwan will not drift further away, but without going against the will of his compatriots who want to keep their independence. Meanwhile he must initiate the boldest defence reforms in decades to keep the US happy. Having scraped to victory in the election with just 40 per cent of the vote and without a legislative majority, that is a tall order. 

But if the US is serious about keeping the peace in the Taiwan Strait, it will have a better chance of succeeding if it tries to understand Lai’s challenges, and acknowledges that, as the books under review show, they are in part the consequence of uninformed and at times hapless decisions by outside powers.

The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan edited by Matt Pottinger Hoover Institution Press £22.95/$25.95, 304 pages

The Struggle for Taiwan: A History by Sulmaan Wasif Khan Allen Lane £25, 336 pages

Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan by Jonathan Clements Scribe £26.40, 320 pages

Kathrin Hille is the FT’s Greater China correspondent

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