China has tried the kid glove. China has attempted intimidation and coercion. China has attempted political war. Nothing has worked. The people of Taiwan continue to achieve election results that are anathema to Beijing.
On Saturday, the voters of the island democracy chosen Lai Ching-te for president. Lai, the current vice president, now leads the Democratic Progressive Party, which emphasizes Taiwanese identity and is skeptical of closer ties with China. The current president, Tsai Ing-wen, also of the DPP, has described Taiwan as “an already independent country” under the name of “Republic of China (Taiwan)”. Lai has promised to stick to that formulation, which is consistent with the decades-old status quo, although several years ago he raised eyebrows by saying: referring to himself as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan independence.”
Beijing warned last week of the “extreme danger of Lai Ching-te triggering cross-Strait confrontation and conflict.” More than 40% of Taiwanese voters shrugged their shoulders and voted for him anyway.
Beijing may find solace in the fact that Lai won only a plurality of voters. If Hou Yu-ih and Ko Wen-je of the Kuomintang and the Taiwan People's Party, respectively, had formed a unity formula – as they did tried and failed do in November; the results may have been different. Both the KMT and TPP are more willing to forge closer ties with China, and the KMT has long been the Chinese Communist Party's main dialogue partner in Taiwan. Beijing would have been content with a victory for either.
But if the opposition had won, strong anti-unification sentiment would continue to drive Taiwan politics. The last period of cross-Strait detente, under Ma Ying-jeou's presidency of the KMT, ended in 2014 with the Sunflower Movement. A student-led occupation of the legislature sparked the mass protest, involving hundreds of thousands of demonstrators opposing the passage of a cross-Strait trade deal. The move slowed the strengthening of ties with China. In the run-up to Saturday's vote, Hou, the KMT candidate, had fiance not engage in political talks with China.
Even if Hou wanted to (and Beijing would ultimately have pressured him to do so), there would be little domestic support for the effort. Three decades of public surveys prove it decreasing support in Taiwan for the unification and development of a distinctive Taiwanese identity.
Indeed, Chinese President Xi Jinping appears to have concluded a few years ago that unification without coercion was not in the cards. After voters gave the KMT a surprising victory in the 2018 national elections for municipal and county leaders (roughly similar to the American midterm elections in political importance), the public approval ratings of Tsai and Lai, who then was the prime minister, they reached a historic low. A path seemed to open for the KMT to regain the presidency 14 months later.
Xi blocked that path. Delivering a speech in January 2019 to mark the 40th anniversary of Deng Xiaoping's “Message to Compatriots in Taiwan,” Xi offered more restrictive terms for unification than previous leaders had offered, eschewing past promises that Taiwan could maintain its military and political institutions. He continued to push a one-country, two-system unification approach (the arrangement under which Hong Kong had maintained political autonomy and personal freedoms) even as he increased his repression against Hong Kong.
Tsai skillfully presented herself as a defender of the freedoms China was trying to crush and won an easy re-election in 2020.
Xi's approach to cross-Strait relations in recent years, which has featured harsh rhetoric, military intimidation, economic coercion and political interference, suggests that advancing unification by winning hearts and minds in Taiwan is of little interest. for him, perhaps because he knows that, Without fundamental political change in China (and perhaps even then), such cooperation will not occur.
Turnout in Saturday's election (nearly 72%) provides ample evidence of the Taiwanese people's commitment to their democracy, even if they have different ideas about how best to protect it.
Perhaps not this year, and perhaps not even this decade, a crisis is looming. Not because Taiwan has chosen Lai, but because Taiwan has rejected China, and Beijing sees no practical way to change that. What happens when an unstoppable force collides with an immovable object? The world may find out sooner than anyone would like.
Michael Mazza is senior director of the Project 2049 Institute and a non-resident senior fellow at the Global Taiwan Institute.
