5. Taiwan’s resilience and resistance
5.2 Taiwan’s Commitment and Communication to China
5.2.2 Taiwan’s National Identity and case for Self-determination
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Therefore Taiwan hopes to sensitize China about the cost of an attack and attempts to convince the CCP leaders that a war will turn into a disaster for the PLA and would also dramatically undermine China’s internal political stability. This is what Morgan talks about when he writes: “To be sensible is to be battered by doubts and fears to the point that as the risks and potential costs rise resort to force looks more and more like a last gasp, last ditch policy.”(Morgan P. , Deterrence, A conceptual analysis, 1977)329 But will the Taiwanese message reach Beijing and have any effect? Unfortunately for Taiwan, it is very doubtful that it will.
For Stein, “even the most elaborate efforts to demonstrate prowess and resolve may prove insufficient to discourage as a necessary means of preserving vital strategic and political interests” (Stein, 1985)330because the challenger’s motivations are too high, or because he is already committed to achieve its goal. So, for Lebow, the likeliness that challengers actually understand and comply to defenders’ “no trespassing signs”, or deterrence threats, is low, while both sides “may also prove insensitive to each other’s signals for a variety of political, cultural, or other reasons”.(Lebow, 1985)331
5.2.2 Taiwan’s National Identity and case for Self-determination
“Here, home is Taiwan, it is Taiwan’s political community that provides the Taiwanese with their passports and citizenship, military defense, national health care, education, high living standard, general welfare, national public institutions, free press and democracy.”(Danielsen, 2012)332
“To be Taiwanese meant to be a participant in the democratic experiment that is Taiwan, regardless of one’s ethnic background, language, social status, or voting tendencies. In other words, reflecting decades of engagement with Western culture, Taiwan was slowly becoming a multiethnic society that embraced a shared nationalism defined both by it is and what it is not.”(Cole, 2016)333
The Taiwanese choice to remain independent from China can be read through a long-term national building process in Taiwan, a unique social experiment in the world.
329Morgan, Patrick, “Deterrence – A conceptual analysis”, Sage Publications, 1977, ISBN 0-8039-0819-9, page 302.
330 Lebow, R.N., “conclusion”, in Jervis, R., Lebow R.N., Stein, J., “Psychology and Deterrence”, London, The John Hopkins Press Ltd, 1985, page 216, pp 203-232.
331 Ibid. 205.
332 Danielsen, “On the road to a common Taiwan identity”, in Chow, Peter C.Y, “National Identity and Economic Interest, Taiwan’s Competing Options and their Implications for Regional Stability”, Palgrave MacMillan, New York City, 2012.
333 Cole, J. M., “Convergence or conflict in the Taiwan Strait – the illusion of peace?” Routledge, 2017, page 130.
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Taiwan has been long denied a legal existence in the concert of nations, although its history of colonization and blend of different cultures and population have constituted a national narrative made of a particular history and political identity. All conditions are now gathered to allow people to talk about a Taiwanese nation, absent its official character. In this perspective, the constitutional framework provided by the Republic of China does not apply to a fictional and parallel Chinese society on Taiwan, but to the legal appellation of the state, to which the Taiwanese identify. This corresponds to a consensus, which is more or less well articulated among the Taiwanese.
According to Taiwan’s national narrative, the Taiwanese identity crystallized through a long history running from the arrival of the first Chinese settlers in the 17th to the recent democratization and blend of cultures which characterize the uniqueness of Taiwanese political culture. These developments are markedly different from what China has experienced: Taiwan did not know and does not keep a memory of a “century of humiliation”, but it certainly has built a particular identity through the experience of critical historical milestones such as the various colonization processes, the cut with China when the Japanese seized the island, the bloody events of 1947 and the White Terror, the post-war “economic miracle”, the lifting of the Martial Law, the following democratization and the strengthening of a national consciousness. Taiwan’s insularity and centuries of intra-island communications and exchanges have also strengthened Taiwan’s identity. For Cole, the scars left by the difficult cohabitation with the Chinese and the Japanese may have reinforced the desire of the Taiwanese to live alone.334All these events are read by the Taiwanese as a consistent historical national building process, which is not contradicted by the Taiwanese’ recognition of their Chinese background and culture, even if the extent of this acknowledgment varies from one Taiwanese to another.
The ROC allowed a shared identification to the island by both the mainlanders and native Taiwanese, thus facilitating reconciliation of different ethnic groups. Later on, democracy and tolerance facilitated the apparition of multiculturalism on the island.335Despite a common cultural ground, Taiwan and China shared less and less, with Corcuff talking about the “liminal” period of Taiwan, to explain that the country was at the crossroad to fully define itself as nation.336 During his terms, Ma Ying-jeou sought to appear as both protector of Taiwan and president of the Taiwanese people, a serious shift for the conservative KMT.337During the 2016 presidential elections, by electing a DPP candidate rather than the KMT, the Taiwanese have demonstrated their attachment to Taiwan’s sovereignty. China's pressures on Taiwan have not led to increased support for unification, quite the contrary. This coercion could be caused by
334 Ibid. 127.
335 Tierny, H., "‘Mainlanders’ and what it means to be a Taiwanese", Taiwan Sentinel, March 14, 2017, URL: https://sentinel.tw/mainlanders-means-taiwanese/.
336 Read Stéphane Corcuff’s analysis of Taiwan’s liminalidentity: Corcuff, S., “The Liminality of Taiwan: A Case-Study in Geopolitics”, Taiwan in Comparative Perspective, Vol. 4, December 2012, pp. 34–64 ISSN 1752-7732 © Taiwan Research Program, London School of Economics.
337Rigger, S., “Why Taiwan matters. Small Island, Global Powerhouse (updated edition),” Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, Lanham, Maryland, 2014, page 37.
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the recognition of the Chinese government that its policy of economic rapprochement and attempts to win the hearts and minds of Taiwanese failed, so Beijing lose patience and intensified its pressures, causing misunderstanding and resentment in Taiwan.338 Naiteh Wu, a researcher from Academia Sinica (Taipei) conducted a survey and asked the Taiwanese: “If Taiwan and China were to become comparably developed economically, socially, and politically, would you agree that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait should be united into one country?”339 Sign of a growing alienation from China, after more than a decade of economic integration, the Taiwanese were numerous to consider China’s development a less legitimate factor in conceiving unification. Even if they are attracted by China’s economic and technological edge, Taiwanese are also witnessing the authoritarian turn of the CCP as well as the numerous economic and political setbacks in Hong-Kong since the retrocession, two repellents that undermine support for unification.
There is little use to declare independence since Taiwan, or the Republic of China, is already a fully sovereign state with no link to the People’s Republic of China. For this reason, Taiwan is not a case of secessionism. However, the Taiwanese certainly prefer normal relations with China and the rest of the world. For this, Taiwan needs self-determination to escape the confinement caused by other countries’ One China Policy and the attendant diplomatic isolation.
However, China’s sword of Damocles discourages many Taiwanese to express their feelings towards what they really want for the future of the island with respondents to regular surveys usually preferring status quo over independence en bloc. The majority of people answering support for status quo, although it designates the continuation of Taiwan’s de facto independence in the current settings, is misleading overseas with commentators concluding that the Taiwanese are indecisive regarding the island’s future. This directly plays for Beijing, which propaganda states that desire for independence is limited to a small amount of people. Instead for Cole, support for the status quo equals to “support for independence minus the “dangerous” word
“independence”, a vague concept that has allowed Taiwan to continue to exist as a sovereign entity despite lack of international recognition and the China threat.”(Cole, 2016)340Therefore, the Taiwanese are sure to prefer formal independence than de facto independence, but they don’t want it at the price of a war against China.
Absent the military threat, surveys about Taiwan’s political future would likely give higher figures for pursuing de jure independence than they do now. Interestingly, in a Taiwan Brain Trust conducted in 2017, while 65% of respondents expressed support
338 Tierny, H., "Taïwan : un an de gouvernance DPP marqué par une Chine à l’offensive", Asialyst, July 17, 2017, URL: https://asialyst.com/fr/2017/07/17/taiwan-un-an-de-gouvernance-dpp-marque-par-une-chine-offensive/.
339Wu N., “Will economic integration lead to political assimilation?” in CHOW, Peter C.Y, National Identity and Economic Interest, Taiwan’s Competing Options and their Implications for Regional Stability, Palgrave MacMillan, New York City, 2012,page 190.
340 Cole, J. M., “Convergence or conflict in the Taiwan Strait – the illusion of peace?” Routledge, 2017, page 139.
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for the “status quo”, 88% also expressed the wish of “Taiwan becoming a normal country”, which logically suggests normal statehood, and perhaps de jure independence.341 These figures seem contradictory but they are not: respondents answering the first question had the China factor in mind, while the second figure reflected what the respondents truly wanted, absent the China threat.
In fact, more than 70% of Taiwanese agree with the statement that Taiwan is already an independent country called the Republic of China. Also, people in Taiwan increasingly identify as Taiwanese rather than Chinese. In the early 1990s, 25% of Taiwanese identified themselves as “Chinese”, 25% as “Taiwanese” and about 50% considered themselves both Chinese and Taiwanese. However, in 2014, only 3 percent identified as Chinese, whereas more than 60 percent identified as Taiwanese. The gap was wider among those who are 29 or younger with about 78 percent hold an exclusively Taiwanese identity — as did about 70 percent of people younger than 40 years-old.
Figure 13 Chinese / Taiwanese identity in Taiwan, source: NCCU Election Center
This being said, this trend has been reversing since 2015. In 2018 the decline of Taiwanese identification and the rise of dual identification was noticeable, with more people identified themselves as Taiwanese and Chinese. As we have mentioned in Chapter 3, these are maybe the result of successful Chinese limited-aims strategies and carrot and stick policy against the island. It will be very important to check the progression of this trend to see whether it is structural or not. If the lowering of national
341 Yeh, S., Low, Y.F., "Majority favors maintaining cross-strait status quo: survey" Focus Taiwan, June 20, 2017, URL: http://focustaiwan.tw/news/acs/201706200013.aspx.
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identification to Taiwan is a structural trend, then it could mean that the national building process in Taiwan had reversed in the opposite directions, and that the strengthening of Taiwan’s identity was conjectural. Implications for this subject would be numerous and would invite us to change our conclusions about the future of cross-strait relations.
However, unfortunately for Chinese leaders, the number of people identifying themselves as Chinese has not rose as a result of the stalling of national identification to Taiwan. Therefore, we could interpret the recent results as indecisiveness, or as an effect of China’s intimidations and saber rattling. Also, if the term “Chinese” reflects an ethnic-cultural identity rather than a nationality, the rise in dual Chinese-Taiwanese identifications among the Taiwanese could mean nothing more than a growing recognition of Taiwan’s Chinese cultural roots without calling into question the independence of Taiwan vis-à-vis China. Taiwanese identity, as the graphic makes plain clear, is subject to changes due to contextual events, but deep-down, the tendency still shows that the Taiwanese national identity is on the rise. Reflecting China’s pressures, the percentage of Taiwanese considering China as “hostile” is as high as 80%342, while 70%343 declared that they would be ready to fight if China attacked Taiwan, according to two recent surveys. This speaks volumes about Taiwan’s defense spirit.
The future will tell if there really exists a theorem according to which the more pressure China exerts against the island, the deeper the roots of Taiwan’s national consciousness and estrangement from the continent would grow. But right now, there exists a risk for China to trap itself in a strategic deadlock. Chinese pressures, even if they successfully numb the Taiwanese quest for normal statehood, might as well strengthen rather than limit the emergence of Taiwan’s national identity and unity.
The existence of two clashing nationalisms explain why misperceptions between Taiwan and China are so rife. Taiwan’s fundamental objective is to survive as a sovereign state, in total opposition to China which insists that unification with the island is vital to its national unity. The collision course of both nationalisms makes the situation look like a zero-sum struggle, with little prospects for appeasement.
Absent a compromise, the issue may go on indefinitely unless China succeeds to attract Taiwan’s in its orbit by reversing the trend of Taiwan’s national building process, or, out of impatience, decides to resort to the military option.
342 Hsu, S., "Most Taiwanese see China as hostile to Taiwan: poll", Taipei Times, March 30, 2017, URL: www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2017/03/30/2003667744.
343 Lin, S., "Taiwanese willing to fight China", Taipei Times, April 20, 2018, URL:
www.taipeitimes.com/News/front/archives/2018/04/20/2003691661.