EXPLAINER: China and Taiwan
How two cultural cousins became socio-political polar opposites on the brink of war
‘We should actively oppose the external forces and secessionist activities of Taiwan independence. We should unswervingly advance the cause of national rejuvenation and reunification.’
These were the words spoken by China’s President Xi Jinping as he kicked off his historic third term in power this week at the National People’s Congress.
The rousing declaration - met with cheers and applause from Communist party delegates – is the latest of several flashpoints in recent years that have pushed the fratricidal relations between China and Taiwan close to breaking point.
Taiwan's government insists it is a self-governing country and has no desire to be kept under the thumb of China, while President Xi has refused to renounce the right to use force to wrest what he sees as a renegade province back under Chinese control.
China has not held back in demonstrating its military ferocity, conducting a series of large-scale military training exercises which have seen several of its jets encroach on Taiwanese air space and missiles plunge into the Taiwan Strait - a stretch of sea that splits the two territories by 100 miles.
Taiwan has responded to these perceived threats by ordering yet more defensive weaponry from America, leveraging its democracy and high-tech economy to strengthen foreign relations while revitalising its domestic arms production.
And to top it off, Joe Biden has deviated from decades of deliberately ambiguous American rhetoric on the China-Taiwan problem by claiming the US would intervene militarily should Xi's armies attempt to seize the island by force.
But how did two territories with such close cultural ties become socio-political polar opposites? Are they really headed for war? And why is the United States even involved?
Let's wind the clock back a few decades to understand all this and more.
Origins of the tensions
China and Taiwan share a deeply complex history dating back thousands of years, but the source of today's tension really begins in the mid-20th century.
Taiwan had been ruled by imperialist Japan since the 1800s but after the Japanese suffered defeat in World War II the island was handed back to China, which at the time was officially the Republic of China (ROC), led by the Nationalist Party (Kuomintang - KMT).
China had been wracked by a brutal civil war for years prior to WWII between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) - led by the infamous 'Chairman' Mao Zedong - and the KMT, whose ideologies were fundamentally opposed.
During World War II, Mao tactically allowed the KMT to fight the worst of the battles against the Japanese and by 1949 was able to overpower the battle-weary nationalist forces.
The defeated KMT fled to Taiwan and continued to govern there as the ROC, while the Communists assumed control of the mainland and established the People's Republic of China (PRC).
The KMT was still seen as the legitimate government of China for some time after it fled to the island, but in 1979 the US moved its diplomatic relations from Taipei to Beijing and began dealing directly with the PRC. Most other countries followed suit.
America did however maintain unofficial ties to the island with the Taiwan Relations Act, committing to provide the ROC with defence equipment, and military and economic support.
Taiwan: From authoritarian province to flourishing democracy
The establishment of the ROC in Taiwan in 1949 marked the inception of a fascinating period of political and economic transformation.
For roughly 30 years, public opinion on the island was strongly anti-KMT. Native Taiwanese wanted the KMT to leave, while Chinese citizens who settled in Taiwan wanted the island to reunite with the mainland. This discord sparked protests and dissent - on which the party swiftly cracked down, instituting martial law to maintain control.
But KMT leader Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975 and handed power to his son, Chiang Ching-Kuo, who forged a path towards reformation.
In the thirteen years before his death in 1988, Ching-Kuo encouraged the promotion of native Taiwanese into positions of power to legitimise his government, ended martial law, and committed to an optimistic economic and technological growth plan - all while strengthening relations with the US.
His successor, Taiwan native Lee Teng-hui, carried the baton even further, implementing the island's first democratic presidential elections in 1996 - a source of major alarm for China which conducted a series of threatening naval tests and missile launches in the Taiwan Strait.
The advent of a legitimate democracy in Taiwan - hailed by Lee as 'the most valuable moment in the nation's history' - helped to cultivate a burgeoning pro-independence movement whose efforts culminated in 2016 when Tsai Ing-Wen, leader of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was elected.
One of the cornerstones of Ing-Wen and the DPP's campaign was a refusal to recognise the 1992 Consensus.
This was an agreement between the PRC and ROC which established the 'One China' principle - the idea that there is only one Chinese state - but allowed both sides to interpret what that means in their own way.
The consensus for a time helped to improve cross-strait relations but was ultimately doomed - partially due to its ambiguity, but also because the PRC concluded that it was indeed the only legitimate government of China, which by its estimation encompasses Taiwan.
Ing-Wen's DPP meanwhile dismisses the 1992 Consensus and the One China policy, instead claiming the island is a self-governing nation.
This conviction places Taiwan firmly in the crosshairs of China's authoritarian president. But on the island, support for partial or full independence from China is now stronger than ever.
According to a December 2022 poll conducted by the National Chengchi University, a record low of just 1.2 per cent of Taiwanese citizens want to reunify with China immediately, and only 6.2 per cent think unification should happen at some point in the future.
Conversely, 28.5 per cent of citizens want to maintain the status quo – i.e. self-government and de-facto independence from China – and 25.4 per cent actively want to move towards gaining official independence.
In 2022, Taiwan scored 94/100 on Freedom House's analysis of political and civil liberties and is ranked among the Top 10 most democratic countries in the world by the Economist Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index.
It is also one of the most technologically advanced nations, whose industry leads the world in the development and manufacturing of semiconductors and other electronics.
China meanwhile has become a true world power, with the largest economy and a fearsome military. But this dominance has come at the expense of its people's freedom.
Xi’s China ranks a lowly 156th in the Democracy Index, thanks to its political hegemony, strict media controls, increasing content censorship, well-documented human rights abuses against Uyghurs in Xinjiang and recent zero-Covid lockdown policies to name just a few factors.
Could China and Taiwan go to war?
Many pessimistic commentators have begun referring to Taiwan as the 'next Ukraine' amid Russia's February 24, 2022 invasion of its neighbour, and on the face of it, the circumstances appear to share some similarities.
President Xi has been clear he believes in the 'One China' concept and sees Taiwan as part of China - much in the same way that Vladimir Putin has referred to Ukraine as historical Russian land under his 'Russian World' doctrine.
Like Ukraine and Russia, Taiwan is also much smaller than China in terms of its landmass, population, economy and military, and therefore vulnerable to an all-out attack from a more fearsome foe.
But that's where the similarities fade.
Unlike Ukraine, which began to steadily accrue weapons, training and economic support from Western backers after Russia launched its invasion, Taiwan is already exceptionally well-armed with state-of-the-art US air defence systems, fighter jets and missiles, and its armed forces benefit from regular bilateral military training exercises.
Taiwan also shares no land borders with its would-be aggressor, meaning any Chinese attack would be conducted primarily by air and sea - both methods susceptible to Taiwanese bristling arsenal.
Despite Russia's poor military performance in Ukraine, its armed forces are still better prepared for large-scale conflict given the Kremlin's willingness to engage in a string of international military engagements from Afghanistan to Syria in recent years.
China by contrast has been far more reluctant to fight a war. It last deployed troops on foreign soil for a large-scale military engagement in the 1979 invasion of Vietnam - which went about as well as the US attempt that concluded four years prior.
And what's more, both countries enjoy much more profound economic and trading ties with the US and other Western nations than Russia and Ukraine.
China arguably has much more to lose than Russia by entering a conflict that would be condemned by many of its key trading partners, and also has the benefit of hindsight having watched the international response to Putin's decision to attack Ukraine.
Taking these factors into account, it is reasonable to suggest China is unlikely to launch a military operation against Taiwan in the very near future - even if its armed forces would likely be able to overrun the island's defences and ultimately take control of one of its closest trading partners.
But Beijing's incessant war games in the Taiwan Strait and Xi's recent declaration that 'China will never renounce the right to use force' to reunite the island leaves the door ajar for a violent conflict.
China's 2020 security crackdown in Hong Kong also showed the CCP's willingness to tolerate international condemnation in subjugating a provincial population, curbing voting rights, arresting dissidents and introducing media censors.
Why does the United States support Taiwan, and will it risk an armed conflict with China to defend it?
US foreign policy towards the China-Taiwan problem has long been one of strategic ambiguity – an approach designed to strike a balance between developing relations with the PRC while maintaining cultural, economic and defence ties with Taiwan.
The Taiwan Relations Act, passed in 1979, committed the US to support Taiwan's security after Washington officially moved diplomatic relations from Taipei to Beijing.
The Six Assurances, given by President Reagan three years later, pledged not to set a date for ending arms sales to Taiwan and reinforced American promises to continue selling arms without consulting the PRC.
But the very act of moving diplomatic relations to the PRC conceded that the island was a Chinese province rather than a self-governing nation.
Meanwhile, Reagan's assurances also maintained that Washington would not play a mediation role between Taipei and Beijing, and that the US would not change its stance that Taiwan was not an independent nation.
The US State Department's official statement on the issue says 'we do not support Taiwan independence', but adds 'we expect cross-Strait differences to be resolved by peaceful means'.
Now though, the Biden administration has all but abandoned four decades of doctrine, with the president declaring late last year he would send US troops to Taiwan should China launch an attack.
And a series of US officials - including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi - have embarked on high-profile diplomatic visits to Taipei in which they made grand gestures of support to President Ing-Wen and denounced Chinese aggression in the Taiwan Strait.
‘America stands with Taiwan,’ Pelosi declared, breaking with decades of strategic ambiguity with four simple words. ‘We don’t want anything to happen to Taiwan by force.’
China’s Foreign Minister Wang Yi immediately responded with fury, labelling Pelosi’s visit an ‘out-and-out farce’ and declaring the US had violated the PRC’s ‘sovereignty under the guise of so-called democracy’.
But why, after years of toeing a fine line to maintain and develop relations with both territories, is Washington now taking sides?
We know already that Taiwan is economically and technologically important to the United States.
But more significantly, the island’s geopolitical and ideological utility is vital for a White House concerned by the increasingly authoritarian Xi and seeking a way to counterbalance what it sees as a potentially dangerous growth in the eastern superpower’s influence.
Taiwan is part of the so-called ‘First Island Chain’ – a string of territories encompassing Japan, parts of the Philippines and Indonesia – which together with South Korea, Australia and Thailand constitute an arc of allied nations with whom Washington can cooperate to monitor the development of China’s already fearsome navy and its threat to foreign territories in the South China Sea.
It is worth mentioning that, although China may argue that American involvement in the region is classic US interventionism – Uncle Sam sticking his nose in other people’s business – all of these territories mentioned above have sought US support and worked to develop bilateral relations in fear of the PRC’s expansion.
And finally, Taiwan’s impressive rise to prominence as an economically prosperous capitalist democracy is something the White House wants to be seen to protect - and project - as a shining ideological example in contrast to China’s highly-centralised, one-party system and heavily stage-managed hybrid capitalism.
The island’s safety and security from Chinese aggression is therefore extremely important to the United States – but any US administration would baulk at the idea of sacrificing American lives to protect an island on the other side of the world in a fight against a nuclear-armed global superpower.
Biden is likely hoping that the mere threat of escalation and a military conflict against America’s mighty fighting forces will act as an effective deterrent to Xi’s ever-growing ambition and ensure that diplomacy wins the day.
But whether the administration can walk the fine line of deterrence without tipping over and tumbling toward war remains to be seen.