The very prospect of a free election is a threat.
On Saturday, voters in Taiwan will head to the polls to choose their next president. The outcome will determine the course of relations between Taiwan and China. But even before the results are in, the very prospect of a free election in Taiwan raises an issue that goes to the core of the seven-decade dispute over the island’s fate.
The mere existence of a successful, democratic, Chinese society in Taiwan is an affront and a challenge to China’s leader, Xi Jinping, as well as to his political and global ambitions. Ultimately, if given the opportunity, Xi will destroy Taiwan’s democracy to eliminate the inherent threat to his vision for China’s future.
“I just don’t see him compromising on somehow allowing Taiwan to be autonomous or be a sort of democracy” that would operate without interference from Beijing, Bonnie Glaser, the managing director of the Indo-Pacific program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told me. “I don’t see how it fits into his worldview.”
A struggle between autocracy and democracy is playing out over the 100-mile strait that separates Taiwan from the Chinese mainland. And at the moment, a peaceful resolution appears improbable, perhaps even impossible. On one side is a Communist regime determined to assert its power on the world stage as its difficulties mount at home; on the other is a vibrant democratic society that has grown secure in its identity and desperate to preserve its freedom. The scope for agreement between the two is narrowing, and that has made their relations precarious and consequential.
Taiwan has become ever more important to American policy makers as they contend with a Beijing government intent on pushing U.S. influence from the region. The island is a vital link in both the network of partnerships that solidify U.S. power in Asia and the global technology supply chains that serve the U.S. economy. The more Xi turns up the pressure on Taiwan, the likelier that Washington will have to make a fateful decision as to whether it will defend Taiwan against a potential or imminent Chinese military assault.
This weekend’s election is unlikely to improve the outlook. The vote has become something of a referendum on what Taiwan’s relationship with China ought to be. Lai Ching-te, the current vice president of Taiwan and the presidential candidate for the Democratic Progressive Party, has defined the election as a choice between “allowing Taiwan to continue to move forward on the road of democracy” or “walking into the embrace of China.” Beijing has framed Taiwan’s choice in even starker terms, as one between “peace and war, prosperity and decline.”
From the January/February 2023 issue: I went to Taiwan to say goodbye
That language came from Beijing’s Taiwan Affairs Office, which manages relations with the island, in a not-very-subtle attempt to scare Taiwan voters away from supporting Lai. Beijing believes that the DPP is plotting to declare formal independence for Taiwan—anathema to the Communist regime, which insists that the island is an integral part of China. Lai has stated that he has no such plan, but Beijing has surely noted that DPP members are more independent-minded and willing to test Xi’s patience than those of the other major parties. Lai has made the case that declaring independence is “not necessary,” because “Taiwan is already a sovereign, independent country” and “not subordinate” to the government in Beijing.
Ironically, the Communists would much prefer that their historical archnemesis—the Kuomintang (KMT), which they chased off the mainland at the climax of China’s civil war in 1949—win the presidency. The KMT is in no rush to unify with China either, but it approaches Beijing with caution and argues that Taiwan is best served by constructive relations with the mainland. The KMT’s candidate, Hou Yu-ih, the mayor of New Taipei, is therefore more emphatic than Lai in his opposition to Taiwan independence, which, he said, “will only lead to war.” Beijing perceives the KMT as more committed than the DPP to the status quo, and Xi would be more likely to engage with Taipei if Hou wins the presidency.
But Xi probably won’t get what he wants. Hou has consistently trailed in the polls, and if anything, Beijing’s overt attempt to sway the vote may have damaged his appeal to an electorate sensitive to Chinese interference.
That doesn’t bode well for stability in the strait. Xi has been hostile to the current DPP president, Tsai Ing-wen, during her two terms in office, cutting off dialogue with Taipei and ramping up military intimidation of her government. Chinese jets buzz close to the island all too frequently. In an especially aggressive display of force, Beijing’s military enveloped Taiwan in a partial blockade after Nancy Pelosi, then the U.S. House speaker, visited Taipei in 2022.
Xi’s government has already warned that a Lai victory would bring more of the same. An official at the Taiwan Affairs Office said that a vote for Lai would “harm Taiwan’s future.” Steve Tsang, the director of the SOAS China Institute at the University of London, told me that Beijing would see another DPP administration “as one that it will not engage constructively and one that it will seek to deter from moving towards independence,” perhaps through “further intimidation, including the deployment of combat aircraft and warships.”
That may have already begun. Yesterday, Taiwan’s Defense Ministry said that China had launched a satellite that passed over the southern part of the island. Such moves raise an alarm to those who already fear that a regional war is imminent. According to CIA Director William Burns, U.S. intelligence believes that Xi has ordered his generals to be ready to take Taiwan by force by 2027. Xi has tried to assuage such concerns. In a November meeting in San Francisco, Xi assured President Joe Biden that he has no plan to invade Taiwan. And yet, Xi has also been elevating the importance of Taiwan in his ideology and rhetoric, indicating that China cannot attain what he calls the “Chinese Dream” of “national rejuvenation” without unifying with Taiwan.
With the Chinese economy faltering, Xi is no longer able (or willing) to justify his repression the way his predecessors once did—by providing rapid gains in welfare—and so he appeals instead to nationalist fervor to build support for his regime. Talk of taking back Taiwan serves that end. In his New Year’s address, Xi confidently stated that “China will surely be reunified” because, he claimed, “all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose.”
But they aren’t. Unification is a top priority of Chinese leaders, and probably among a meaningful portion of China’s (indoctrinated) populace, but only a minuscule fraction of Taiwan’s population favors it. The Taiwanese seem much more interested in preserving their democracy: Voter turnout in the island’s 2020 presidential election was an impressive 75 percent.
In theory, Taiwan’s residents shouldn’t have to choose. Beijing’s formula for unification is “one country, two systems,” in which Taiwan would come under Chinese control but retain enough autonomy to allow democratic processes to continue as a local affair. The Communist Party views itself as the sole legitimate and appropriate ruler of China, but it has at times shown some tolerance for democratic systems. In the early 2000s, for instance, the party experimented with permitting workers to elect their union leaders within companies. The Communists also forged fruitful and friendly relations with the world’s major democracies and participated in the liberal global order led by the United States and its allies.
That tolerance has waned, however. Labor-union elections largely ended in the mid-2010s. Abroad, Xi has challenged the global primacy of democracy and tried to promote China’s authoritarian system as a superior alternative, calling it “whole-process democracy.” Chinese leaders even link loyalty to the party with being properly “Chinese”—an idea promoted particularly heavily during Xi’s tenure. Those who do not show such patriotism, the Communists argue, have been brainwashed by foreign forces or suffer the ill effects of “colonialism.”
The shift has played out in Hong Kong. The United Kingdom handed the former colony back to China in 1997 under the “one country, two systems” framework, in which Beijing promised to preserve Hong Kong’s basic laws and governing principles for at least 50 years. Hong Kong was sectioned off as a “special administrative region” with significant autonomy. In 2010, Beijing even consented to an expansion of the number of directly elected seats in Hong Kong’s legislative council.
Xi, however, couldn’t wait to get his hands on the place. Prodemocracy demonstrations surged in Hong Kong in 2019 and 2020. Beijing broke both its treaty with London and its own “one country, two systems” policy to impose a national-security law on the territory, allowing Xi to override Hong Kong’s legal protections for civil liberties and crack down hard on dissent. Democracy advocates were jailed, the movement crushed, and Hong Kong forever changed. In 2021, Beijing drastically slashed the number of seats on Hong Kong’s council that could be filled by representatives directly elected by the public.
In Hong Kong, “one country, two systems” means that Xi tolerates the form of democracy (elections), but not its substance (unacceptable candidates are barred from participating). If Taiwan were unified with the mainland, it would almost certainly suffer the same fate, whatever pledges Beijing might make. A democratic process that would allow political movements opposed to or truly independent from Beijing—in other words, a system in which a party like the DPP could gain power—would be unacceptable to the Communist leadership.
From the December 2022 issue: Taiwan prepares to be invaded
“They could, in theory, tolerate a system where there were multiple political parties, where there were elections” in Taiwan, Eli Friedman, a China specialist at Cornell, told me. But “the thing they really cannot tolerate is that one of the political parties might have a different idea about the question of Taiwanese sovereignty,” and therefore, “it is impossible to imagine the Communist Party accepting the political system that exists in Taiwan.”
Taiwan’s leaders have certainly learned the lessons of Hong Kong. At a news conference just days before the polls, the DPP’s Lai said, “Peace is priceless and war has no winners,” but “peace without sovereignty is just like Hong Kong. It is fake peace.”
Beijing’s hardening toward democracy could be a function of China’s economic and geopolitical rise, which has given the country’s leaders confidence in the superiority of their political system. “They have come to believe that they have the right and the capability to force on Taiwan their own system,” Glaser, of the German Marshall Fund of the United States, told me.
But the attitude is also inseparable from the rise of Xi Jinping. He has shown decreasing tolerance for any form of dissent, civic action, or even debate within China and has intensified censorship and ideological indoctrination. Just last month, the country’s internet watchdog started suppressing videos on social media that conveyed pessimism about China. If Xi won’t let people complain, how could he allow them to vote?
Democracy in Taiwan “doesn’t have to be a problem if they don’t want it to be,” Sulmaan Khan, an expert on Chinese foreign relations at Tufts University and the author of the forthcoming book The Struggle for Taiwan, said of China’s leaders. “There are ways a savvy ideologue could play down the significance of these elections, but I don’t think that’s going to happen, because that’s not the brand of ideology that is in fashion in Beijing right now.”
No Communist leader is likely to be generous with Taiwan’s democracy, any more than Taipei’s leadership is likely to trust Beijing to allow the island’s society to flourish as it does today. The Communist Party has all too clearly shown its intentions toward liberal societies. Thus, the more democracy entrenches itself in Taiwan, the more intractable the cross-strait conflict becomes, and the more urgently Washington must prepare for the worst.
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