If Xi orders the People’s Liberation Army to seize Taiwan according to the timelines predicted by top US generals – 2025 to 2027 – Lai, a coal-miner’s son, will be the one to lead Taiwan into war.
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But the self-governing island of 24 million people didn’t exactly showcase democracy at its best on Friday, when legislators broke out into fisticuffs on the floor of Taiwan’s parliament. The scuffling illuminates another reality of Lai’s presidency – his DPP party does not command a majority of the parliament.
And yet, despite all these pressures, the Taiwanese people’s choice of Lai is a powerful statement of defiance of Beijing. Taiwan is tiny compared to the giant that looms 180 kilometres from its western shore. Xi Jinping describes “reunification” as “inevitable”.
In his new year’s address in January, Xi said: “China will surely be reunified, and all Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait should be bound by a common sense of purpose and share in the glory of the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” Beijing always has claimed the right to use armed force to take control of Taiwan.
In other words, Xi intends to impose on the Taiwanese his version of “glory”, like it or not. But the more Xi has pressured Taiwan, the more the Taiwanese have resisted.
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How? On a grand scale – the people keep voting for the political party that Beijing detests. The DPP, and Lai himself, have a history of favouring a more independent stance for Taiwan. So Beijing fiercely opposes the DPP and Lai’s presidency.
Instead, the Chinese Communist Party smiles on the more pro-Beijing party, the Kuomintang. Beijing has waged campaigns, overt and covert, for decades to help get the Kuomintang into Taipei’s presidential residence. But the harder it pushes them, the more the Taiwanese people resist. Lai’s first term will be the DPP’s third consecutive term in the presidency, an unprecedented tenure. It is establishing Xi’s nemesis as the long-term party of government.
The outgoing president, the DPP’s Tsai Ing-wen, stood up to China’s intimidation and toughened its defences. She reintroduced a year of mandatory military service for all men over the age of 18. Her government bought and built much greater military power, including launching Taiwan’s first home-made submarine.
She knows that Taiwan alone cannot defeat a determined Chinese invasion; instead, she worked towards maximum deterrence: “The cost of taking over Taiwan is going to be enormous,” Tsai told the BBC. “What we need to do is increase the cost. Strengthening our military capacity is one [way] and working with our friends in the region to form a collective deterrence is another.”
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And the Taiwanese people have become more Taiwanese, and less Chinese. The more Beijing demands their loyalty, the more loyal they become to Taiwan. In 1992, the proportion of Taiwanese who considered themselves as solely Chinese or as dual Chinese-Taiwanese stood at 25 per cent, in the survey by National Chengchi University. That has fallen to just 2 per cent today.
A case study in the failure of China’s pressure tactics is Taiwan’s famous microchip mogul Robert Tsao. He spent his life advocating for unification with the mainland. Until Xi cracked down against Hong Kong’s democracy.
Tsao was converted instantly. He pledged $US100 million to national defence: “You have to make people understand that the Chinese Communist Party in nature are just like a mafia – they are a crime syndicate disguised as a national government.”
President Lai took office on Monday calling on Beijing to “cease political and military intimidation of Taiwan” and engage in dialogue. “Peace is the only option.”
But Beijing seems intent on force. In Taiwan and in the wider world, China’s bloody-minded overreach has generated defiance. What price is Xi prepared to pay for conquest? Under Lai, Taiwan will continue to raise the cost.
Peter Hartcher is international editor.