Threat Perception in Taiwan

In analyzing the threat perception that dominates in Taiwan, there is no escaping the simple fact that the threat of annexation by China overshadows all others. There exist, of course, the postmodern threats that face other nations today: Islamic terrorism, for example, remains

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always on the radar, especially as Taiwan’s sole security guarantor, the United States, has been preoccupied with this particular threat (almost to the exclusion of all others) since 9-11, which means that there is pressure from Washington for its allies to likewise shift focus to the war on terrorism. But outside of the largely theoretical possibility of an Islamic terrorist strike on Taiwan soil or targeted at ROC citizens, there is little else that comes close to the ever-present China threat in the public’s consciousness.

Moreover, the nature of the China threat has enormous implications not just for force structure within the ROC military, but for society as a whole. This is because, unlike previous threat paradigms, the China threat is not restricted to force of arms and military matters, but rather encompasses other facets of nation-to-nation interaction.

While the current disparity between Taiwan and China—in military and economic terms—have forced ROC planners to adopt an asymmetrical approach to defense, it is perhaps ironic that China’s approach is also asymmetrical, largely as a result of Chinese planners configuring their assets and responses with an eye to fighting the United States: a military disparity of another scale. Knowing they could not fight conventionally against the forces of the US Navy, which would arguably be the only force deployed to assist ROC forces in a defense of Taiwan, the PLA began approaching the problem from a different perspective: seeking to fight asymmetrically, rather than head-on; seeking to deny access (A2/AD) to the theatre of battle, rather than to dominate. This asymmetrical mindframe vis-a-vis a fight with America may have had a spillover effect and informed planners concerned with the Taiwan question.

Following the doctrine of Unrestricted Warfare first enunciated by PLA colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, China has succeeded in creating the conditions whereby its economic and supply-chain integration with Taiwan’s economy can be used as a weapon to coerce capitulation. In addition to the economic sphere, Chinese attempts to effect rapprochement on Beijing’s terms take the form of a number of fields, including cultural (promoting the idea that the Taiwanese are the descendants of Yan and Yellow Emperor), electronic (PLA hackers are constantly launching cyber-attacks on Taiwan’s government and corporate websites and servers, often as a means to test out new techniques before using them on American targets), and covert (Chinese intelligence operatives have managed to turn many current and former military members, as well as civilians), among others.

How would this concept of unrestricted warfare find expression in practice? A hint can be found in Beijing’s reaction to tensions with Japan over a minor territorial dispute. On September 7th, 2010, a fishing trawler from China intentionally rammed two patrol vessels of the Japanese Coast Guard while fishing in waters near the Senkaku (Known as Diaoyu in Chinese) Islands, which are claimed by both countries, as well as by the ROC. The Japanese officers took the captain of the Chinese vessel into custody, spurring Beijing to push Japan for his release. The methods employed by Beijing to put pressure on Tokyo in this incident are worthy of close examination, as they offer an insight into how Chinese leaders view the various channels of relations between countries as potential weapons, and how the aforementioned consistency in the theoretical underpinnings of Beijing’s foreign policy among different portfolios can quickly be beat into swords and deployed in a time of conflict.

On the official front, in a breach of diplomatic protocol that analysts believe was specifically designed to provoke a reaction, the Japanese ambassador to China was repeatedly summoned—at one point in the middle of the night—to listen to Chinese expressions of anger over the incident. In the area of cultural ties, Beijing cancelled planned cultural exchanges and postponed high-level meetings on unrelated topics with officials from Japan.

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In the realm of tourism, four Japanese nationals in China were arrested, ostensibly for trespassing into a military area. Most distressingly, on the economic and trade front, China blocked the shipment of rare earth metals to Japan—raw materials essential to Japan’s IT industry, and which China had previously gone to great efforts to become the sole provider of.

Finally, the government either tacitly or implicitly fomented anti-Japanese sentiment among the population leading to anti-Japanese riots in the streets and vandalism of Japanese businesses in China. Faced with this onslaught of pressure being brought to bear on all fronts, the relatively inexperienced administration of then-Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan conceded, releasing the Chinese captain and handing the victory to China.

Although it may seem counterintuitive that a relatively minor maritime encounter should be escalated into one of the most intense diplomatic standoffs in recent years between the two most influential and responsible nations in the region, it is a clue that China was, even then, beginning to see itself adopting a new role in the region, one more commensurate with its growing economic and military might. Given this precedent, and especially the undisputed victory gained by Beijing, it is no surprise that China has since continued to aggressively defend what it considers its core interests, unilaterally imposing its territorial agenda not just on Japan, but on all of its neighbors in the South China Sea, as well as the East China Sea.

This is of special importance, as the list of territories that China considers its core interest appears to be growing from just Taiwan, Tibet and East Turkistan, to the Spratlys, Paracels and other disputed islands far removed from the Chinese land mass.

As a result, the threat from China as perceived in Taiwan exists on several fronts: political, diplomatic, cultural, economic, as well as military. In order to counter this threat, ROC defense planners developed and implemented the concept of “All-out Defense,” which conceptualizes national defense as a task to be carried out by the whole of society, and not just resting on the shoulders of the military.

Non-traditional security factors defining the China threat range from currency policy to economic integration and trade: from Beijing’s efforts to help shape a regional order though multilateral institutions (not unrelated to the diplomatic blockade against Taiwan) to a

“culture war” (that Beijing and its proxies are waging—and losing—in Taiwan) to convince the people of Taiwan that their identity is a Chinese one, not Taiwanese.

5.3(i) Threat Perception Among Mainlanders

The issue is threat perception; with the emphasis on perception. This complicates the issue somewhat in Taiwan due to the fact that various subgroups of Taiwan society have different perceptions of identity, and thus different views on Taiwan’s place in the larger Sinophonic world. The implications of this result in two divergent conceptions of just what the threat from China entails.

Persons in Taiwan who self-identify as mainlanders by and large see themselves as Chinese.

they see few differences between their cultural inheritance and the cultural inheritance of the people of China. Except for what social changes have evolved between the peoples across the Taiwan Strait over the past six decades, they are, in essence, the same culture. Indeed: in the early years of the separation, the evacuees of 1949 saw themselves and the KMT regime as being the more authentically Chinese: it was not only a political slogan that the ROC was the

“real China” or “Free China:” it was a social conception. Not only did the institutions, both government and social, of China transplant themselves in Taiwan after the Communist

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takeover of the mainland, but the regime became, by necessity, the guardian of the ages-old Chinese culture. This was only given impetus by events taking place on the mainland, such as the Great Leap Forward and, more importantly, the Cultural Revolution, in which millions of Chinese people died and entire traditions and ways of life were wiped out in the Communist zeal to remake society in the Party’s image.

To illustrate: Speaking about a government plan to allow more tourists from China to visit Taiwan, then ROC President Ma Ying-jeou explained May 19, 2011 that the focal point of the planned measure was “to allow for greater interaction between Taiwanese and Chinese”

(Chang and Wang 2011). “Because for many Chinese visitors,” Ma told the audience of students in the forum at the National University of Tainan where he was giving the speech,

“Taiwan is a place where they can really sense and experience Chinese culture.”

The comment drew expressions of surprise and derision, with some commentators finding the idea that Chinese people would have to leave their country to experience Chinese culture nonsensical. Upon deeper consideration, however, perhaps it is not so counterintuitive. We can define culture as the learned and shared human patterns or models for living; these day-to-day living patterns that pervade all aspects of human social interaction (Damen 1987:

367). By suggesting that Taiwan is home to a Chinese culture that no longer exists on the mainland, Ma was simply referencing the fact that the life patterns in Taiwan are different from those in China, and that the ones here are more authentically Chinese, as they are the inheritors of the legacy of Chinese ritual, belief systems and way of life in ways that those on the mainland are not.

This unbroken lineage of a Confucian worldview serving as a guide to life among the people of Taiwan puts them in direct contrast with those in China. The Chinese Communist Party attempted to purge the master and erase his lessons and legacy from the everyday lives of Chinese people. As the era of Mao Zedong wore on into the decade of the 1970s, an ardent anti-Confucius campaign was launched as part of the larger-scale Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that tried to erase the cultural and social traditions that had existed in China for millennia and replace them with the ideological precepts of Marxism. The “Criticize Lin (Biao), Criticize Confucius” Campaign ran from 1973 to 1974 and was started by Mao’s third wife, Jiang Qing. Meanwhile, Karl Marx was being worshipped by socialists in no less real a way than Confucius had been worshipped by Chinese: as far as his followers were concerned, he was the new sage.

Chinese attempts to airbrush out the strains of Confucianism that for so long defined Chinese culture went beyond the destroyed temples and burnt books in China proper and extended overseas. In 1972, when the People’s Republic of China was conferred the ROC seat in the United Nations, the delegation from Beijing lodged a complaint about a framed quotation by Confucius hanging on the wall of the assembly building and demanded that it be taken down.

It was.

In contrast, through the efforts of the KMT regime, Taiwan has served as a reliquary of sorts for this Han cultural inheritance even as it was being actively and violently dismantled across the strait. Even more than that: there are many within the old guard of the KMT who still believe that the party continues to hold the Mandate of Heaven, which it earned in 1912 with the fall of the Qing dynasty and the establishment of the Republic of China. This ancient Chinese belief in the tiānmìng (天命), or “heaven’s decree" is part of a worldview which views the structure of government on Earth as reflecting the structure in heaven, and that heaven itself has always granted emperors the right to rule, based largely on their ability to govern fairly. Since the ROC has been in continuous existence since the end of the Qing

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dynasty, this mantle has never been passed on to the Communist regime in China, and thus it is still held by the KMT. Of course, this concept is hardly a driving force in policymaking, nor is it forefront in the minds of Taiwan’s leaders who consider themselves Mainlanders.

Nevertheless, it does inform, even at a subconscious level, their worldview and their duties as the keepers of this inheritance and this responsibility. They are, to sum up, Chinese, not Taiwanese.

Now that the Mao era is over, the leaders of the Communist party have turned China into a capitalist state, albeit one in which the party still holds the reins. Moreover, since the death of Chiang Kai-shek, much of the anti-Communist fervor has dissipated and more practical approaches to cross-strait relations have prevailed. What remains is a population of very powerful and influential, albeit numerically disadvantaged, people in Taiwan who conceive of themselves as Chinese and who long to effect a return to their ancestral lands. Annexation of Taiwan by China is therefore not an existential threat to them—not in the way that declaration of a “Republic of Taiwan” would be. In essence, a dissolution of the ROC in favor of a victory of the Taiwanese identity is a much greater threat to the conception of

“Taiwan as China.” Thus, those aspects of PRC efforts to manipulate Taiwan society by promoting a conception of shared Chineseness is readily embraced by members of the self-identified mainlander population. Therefore, the China threat, in the eyes of Mainlanders, is very much still a military and economic threat. It is, in many ways, a continuation of the Chinese Civil War, fought between the CCP and the KMT, for control of China – for the Mandate of Heaven. Persons who self-identify as Taiwanese, however, perceive additional aspects of the China threat, specifically in the added dimensions of society and culture.

5.3(ii) Culture War

Cultural leaders with their own agendas have always used different interpretations of Taiwanese history to advance those agendas (Hsiau 2000: 157). Today, the competing visions of national identity play out their expression in the culture war. On one side, the Mainlander faction sees Taiwan as part of China and goes to great lengths to organize events and exhibitions that celebrate the images and values of Chinese culture, and to emphasize the line of continuity from the ancient China of thousands of years ago to the Han Chinese people of Taiwan today. This faction, which until recently has held almost absolute power in Taiwan and has been the dominant power broker for much of the post-Japanese-colonial period, is collaborating in this effort with forces across the strait, simply because they genuinely share this vision. The PRC does not want to risk alienation in the international community by launching an exercise in military adventurism in order to annex Taiwan. Therefore it must compel the Taiwanese to willingly give themselves over to the center of the Chinese world:

Beijing. To do this, the PRC knows that the emerging sense of Taiwanese identity is a threat, and it spares no expense to help its allies on the island to win the culture war and consolidate a widespread sense of Chinese identity in Taiwan.

On the other side, the new Taiwanese, whose political expression is traditionally seen as having accreted in the pan-green coalition of political parties that, directly or indirectly, support Taiwanese sovereignty and presumably eventual formal independence from China.

Proponents of this camp organize cultural and social exhibitions and events that aim to inculcate a widespread sense of pride in Taiwan and everything that distinguishes the island from China. To them, the threat from China is also being waged on the cultural front.

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Ironically, however, the closer Taiwan becomes to China in terms of increased levels of economic integration, trade, tourism, and cultural exchanges, the stronger the sense of Taiwan identity becomes. National Chengchi University’s Election Study Center has, since 1992, annually conducted a poll as part of an ongoing study on political attitudes, national identity, and the unification-independence issue. It is widely regarded as one of the most accurate and methodologically sound polls on this issue in Taiwan, where such surveys are often suspect due to ideological bias. In 2015, results indicated that 23.9 percent of respondents supported independence, with 60.6 percent identifying as Taiwanese. This is a significant upward change since the 17.6 percent registered in 1992 (Taipei Times, Mon, Jan 26, 2015, Page 1).

The 2015 numbers also registered a record-low 32.5 percent of respondents self-identifying as both Taiwanese and Chinese, which is down from 47.7 percent in 2004. Meanwhile, just 3.5 percent of respondents reported identifying as Chinese, down from 1994’s 26.2 percent. It is important to note that this shift has taken place in an era when the door has been opened to China in terms of tourism, greater economic and trade exchanges, and more people-to-people interactions than had taken place in the previous century. The inescapable conclusion to be drawn is that, the more interactions the people of Taiwan have with the people of China, the more they perceive themselves as being uniquely Taiwanese. This is why the push by both the KMT and the CCP to foment a sense of shared Chineseness by the peoples across the strait is not gaining purchase in Taiwan.

The nature of the political threat from across the Taiwan Strait has become more complicated in the new millennium as the once-ardent anti-Communist party ruling Taiwan, the KMT, has become the Chinese Communist Party’s closest ally in terms of engineering an eventual unification. The KMT administration of Ma Ying-jeou allowed the influx of Chinese tourists, expanded greatly the number of direct cross-strait flights, and signed a number of trade deals that critics charge will hollow out Taiwanese industries and shift wealth from Taiwan to China. The biggest and most consequential of these was the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), which according to a report by the Legislative Yuan Budget Center, has been more economically favorable to China than it has been to Taiwan.

5.3(iii) Research Findings

The current research employs two items designed to measure and characterize this threat perception among the minds of the population:

 Q10．Countries face many threats, but there is usually one main threat. What is the main threat facing Taiwan?

 Q11．Over the past year or two, as the situation across the Taiwan Straits has changed, the PRC has continually increased its military capabilities against Taiwan. Concerning these military threats from the PRC, some people are worried, and other people are not worried. Are you worried or not worried?

The responses received were instructive. It was anticipated that attack from China would be perceived universally as the main threat facing Taiwan today. The results, however, are more nuanced. Those respondents with Chinese parents (mainlanders), as well as those who