Mainland China's Taiwan Policy

From Peaceful Development to Selective Engagement

Xin Qiang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000610567
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Military Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Taiwan issue has always been a core national interest of mainland China, which has steadfastly vowed to fulfill national reunification. This book provides a comprehensive and updated explanation of the strategic motivations, behavioral logic, and policymaking rationale of Beijing's Taiwan policy. It will aid readers in predicting the future development of cross-Strait relations, reducing the risk of strategic miscalculations, and defusing potential geostrategic perils.

The book analyzes Beijing's changing policy toward Taiwan during the Kuomintang and Democratic Progressive Party administrations. It explains the key driving forces for Beijing's Taiwan policy in these different periods, which have displayed fundamental shifts from confrontation to cooperation and then back to confrontation. The book also delves into how the rising strategic rivalry between China and the US may influence Beijing's Taiwan policy and the prospect of cross-Strait relations in the near future.

The book will be a useful reference to deepen intellectual understanding of Beijing's broader security and diplomatic policies. It will also appeal to government policymakers who have a keen and vested interest in peace and security in the West Pacific.

1 IntroductionThe turbulent Taiwan Strait

DOI: 10.4324/9781003163275-1

Few issues are as crucial to international security and East Asia’s regional stability as the Taiwan issue – particularly in light of the inherent geostrategic risks and great power competition associated with the island that could potentially lead to a devastating conflict between two nuclear-armed states. Ever since the Democratic Progress Party (DPP), a pro-independence party on Taiwan Island, won the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, relations between mainland China and Taiwan have been under intense strain, constantly exacerbated by repeated confrontations amidst a strained US–China relationship.

On October 1, 2021, when China started celebrating the seven-day holiday commemorating the National Day of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), a six-state naval formation composing 17 warships, including 2 US aircraft carriers – the USS Ronald Reagan and USS Carl Vinson – was deployed to the waters adjacent to the Taiwan Island to conduct a military exercise. The military fleet was accompanied by the Royal Navy’s aircraft carrier HMS Queen Elizabeth of the United Kingdom and helicopter carrier JS Ise of the Maritime Self-Defense Force of Japan. When the exercise kicked off on October 1, Kathleen Hicks, US deputy secretary of defense of the Biden administration, remarked at a virtual event at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) that the US was monitoring the situation in Taiwan “very carefully” and that it had “a significant amount of capability forward in the region to tamp down” China’s ambitions.¹

Unsurprisingly, the exercise, which was held amid growing tensions between Beijing and Washington as well as between Beijing and Taipei, drew a furious reaction from Beijing. In response to the high-profile muscle-flexing of the US-led armada of allied ships, the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Air Force flew an unprecedented 150 sorties and entered the southwestern air defense identification zone (ADIZ) claimed by Taipei over a four-day period beginning on October 1.² It was reported by Taipei’s Ministry of Defense that on October 1, the PLA deployed 38 warplanes, followed by another 39 on October 2.³ On October 3, US State Department spokesman Ned Price issued a statement claiming that Beijing’s military activity “is destabilizing, risks miscalculations, and undermines regional peace and stability,” pledging that the “American commitment to Taiwan is rock solid.”⁴ Subsequently, Taiwanese Foreign Minister Joseph Wu told Australian broadcaster ABC on October 4 in an interview that “if China is going to launch a war against Taiwan, we will fight to the end, and that is our commitment.”⁵ Despite the alert raised by Taiwanese officials about the readiness of Taiwan for war, 56 aircrafts, including H-6 bombers, KJ-500 airborne early warning airplanes, Y-8 anti-submarine warfare crafts, and J-16D and SU-30 fighter jets, were sent by the PLA toward Taiwan on October 4 alone, setting a new record for the scale of PLA’s aerial operations over the Taiwan Strait. The Taiwan Air Force responded to this by issuing radio warnings, mobilizing air defense assets, and scrambling planes to monitor the mainland Chinese aircraft.

In the evening of October 5, Carlos Del Toro, the US chief of naval operations, proclaimed that the goal of the US is to prevent the mainland from attacking Taiwan, and that “if China is going to launch an attack against Taiwan, they are going to suffer tremendously as well,” as he was introducing a strategic guidance at the US Naval Academy (USNA).⁶ On October 6, an article written by Tsai Ing-wen, leader of the Taiwan administration, was published by the bimonthly journal Foreign Affairs with the title of “President of Taiwan,” presenting a new overt challenge to the one-China principle insisted for decades by Beijing as the key political foundation for cross-Taiwan Strait relations.⁷ The publication of Tsai’s article came out alongside criticisms from US Secretary of State Antony Blinken on October 6, who reiterated concerns that Beijing was undermining regional peace and stability with “provocative action” and urged Beijing “to cease its military, diplomatic and economic pressure and coercion directed at Taiwan.”⁸ On the same day, in the face of Beijing’s military pressure campaign, Chiu Kuo-cheng, Taiwan’s defense minister, raised the alarm that military tensions between Taipei and Beijing were at a 40-year high and that the risk of an accidental “misfire” was growing.⁹ In the evening, a proposal of an extra budget of US$8.7 billion over the next five years to upgrade and boost Taiwan’s asymmetric warfare capabilities, including developing indigenous warships, and long-range and mobile missiles, was passed by the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Committee of Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan.

Just one day later (October 7), Jake Sullivan, US national security adviser, told the BBC in Brussels that the US will “stand up for its friends” and that “we are going to take action now to try to prevent that day from ever coming to pass,” when he was asked whether the US was prepared to take military behaviors to “defend Taiwan.”¹⁰ William Burns, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), announced the establishment of a new China Mission Center, whose purview includes assessing Beijing’s intentions and activities over Taiwan, to “further strengthen our collective work on the most important geopolitical threat we face in the 21st Century – an increasingly adversarial Chinese government.”.¹¹ A news report published by the Wall Street Journal on October 7 added fuel to the tension, quoting from a Pentagon official that a small unit of US special operations forces and a contingent of Marines have been secretly stationed in Taiwan for at least a year with the aim of instructing Taiwan ground forces on how to bolster the island defense and repel a possible attack by the mainland. It was the first time the US had publicly released or verified news about the deployment of US forces in Taiwan.¹² The presence of US military forces was unsurprisingly deemed by Beijing as a violation of China–US agreements on the one-China principle based on the three Sino-US Joint Communiques.¹³ Responding to this, the Foreign Ministry of the PRC immediately expressed outrage at a daily news briefing, warning that China “would take all necessary measures to safeguard its sovereignty and territorial integrity” and urging the US to abide by the one-China principle, which is “the political foundation of Sino-US relations.”¹⁴ On October 7, the chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT), James Moriarty, vowed to help Taipei to maintain sufficient self-defense capacities and develop asymmetric warfare capabilities against the “real and imminent” threat from Beijing.¹⁵

On October 8, Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, claimed that Taiwan should not be “falsely” excluded from the United Nations (UN) and “it is a common expectation for Taiwan to participate in the UN” since the United Nations General Assembly 2758 (XXVI) passed in 1971 had not denied Taiwan’s representation in the UN.¹⁶ Outraged by the aforementioned moves of Tsai’s administration and the US, China’s president, Xi Jinping, fired back on October 9 at a commemorative meeting marking the 110th anniversary of the Revolution of 1911, stating that Taiwan’s independence “was a grave lurking threat to national rejuvenation.” President Xi further stated that “external forces should respect China’s sovereignty, security and development interests,” and that “no one should underestimate the Chinese people’s strong will, determination, and ability to defend national sovereignty and territorial integrity.”¹⁷ On the same day, Taiwan’s army commander, Hsu Yen-pu, flew to the US for a series of secret meetings with top officials of the Pentagon and General Alberto Aquilino, commander of the Indo-Pacific Command, to further enhance US–Taiwan military cooperation.

On October 10, one day after Xi’s speech, Tsai delivered an address at “Taiwan National Day 2021” celebrations and repeatedly emphasized the “72-year history” of the “Republic of China Taiwan.” She also asserted, for the first time, that Taiwan will insist on the “enduring commitment” that “the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China should not be subordinate to each other (hubu lishu).”¹⁸ Tsai’s statement was blasted by the Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) of the PRC that the cross-Strait relations are by no means “state to state relations,” therefore the claims made by Tsai were “an unclad peddle of the ‘Two States Thesis.’”¹⁹ Tsai’s address was followed by a large-scale military parade displaying several types of missiles, including the Thunderbolt 2000 multiple rocket launcher, and the medium-range Sky Sword II and Sky Bow III, as well as cruise missiles Hsiung Feng II and III. On the same day of Tsai’s speech, the army and navy battle groups under the leadership of the Eastern Theater Command of the PLA started amphibious landing combat exercises and live-fire maneuvers along the southern coast of Fujian Province, the closest mainland province, which lies 100 miles off the Taiwan coast, sending a “solemn warning” to the Taiwanese “secessionist factions” and their “foreign backers.”

In the space of just ten days in early October 2021, cross-Strait relations witnessed another round of finger-pointing rhetoric and military posturing. Even worse, these threatening moves were simply a sketchy footage of a long chain of escalating tit-for-tat between Beijing and Taipei, and doubtlessly came at a particularly tense and competitive time for relations between China and the US. Amid the heightened tensions, many Western officials, generals, and observers believed Beijing is changing, or even has already changed, its long-term “peaceful unification policy” and is ready, or even willing, to use force to achieve national reunification shortly. For example, Admiral Philip Davidson, then commander of the US Indo-Pacific Command, gave his prescient warning to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in March 2021 that the mainland was likely to attack Taiwan “in the next six years.”²⁰ The current cross-Strait situation was also described “as the most serious” by Minister Chiu Kuo-cheng, adding that Beijing already had the ability to attack the island and would be completely prepared to mount a “full-scale” attack with minimal losses by 2025 with regard to the ability of the PLA.²¹

It is obviously not groundless for the Economist to label Taiwan as “the most dangerous place on earth.”²² Nonetheless, military warnings aside, it is also noteworthy that President Xi reiterated in his October 9 address that “peaceful reunification of the motherland best serves the overall interests of the Chinese nation, including the Taiwan compatriots,” and reaffirmed that “we have adhered to the basic principle of peaceful reunification of one country, two systems, the one-China principle and the ‘1992 Consensus’, and have promoted the peaceful development of cross-Strait relations.”²³ It echoed Xi’s pledge to “promote the peaceful reunification of the motherland” with Taiwan compatriots in his speech given at the ceremony celebrating the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of China (CPC) on July 1, 2021.²⁴ In a virtual meeting with US President Joe Biden on November 16, Xi emphasized again that “we will strive for the prospect of peaceful reunification with utmost sincerity and efforts.” ²⁵

In spite of the extending political impasse and military tension, cross-Strait economic and trade exchanges boomed even if shadowed by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. According to the statistics released by China’s General Administration of Customs on October 13, 2021, trade volume between the mainland and Taiwan from January to September in 2021 was US$239.52 billion, of which the mainland imported US$182.47 billion from Taiwan, up 28.9% from the previous year. Notably, in the first three quarters of 2021, Taiwan’s trade surplus with the mainland topped US$120 billion.²⁶ With these figures in mind, can we then still be certain that cross-Strait relations are hurtling to the edge of a potential crisis or are indeed on the verge of a preordained military conflict? How and to what extent would such a robust economic relationship impact on the likelihood of military conflict between mainland China and Taiwan?

It is no exaggeration to say that mainland China’s relation to Taiwan has been in constant contention since the founding of the PRC in October 1949, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang (KMT), or the Chinese Nationalist Party, was ousted from mainland China. As a legacy of the CPC–KMT civil war, the 1950s witnessed the outburst of two bloody Taiwan Strait Crises. Fortunately, given the fact that both sides were defenders of the one-China principle, the cross-Strait relationship did not deteriorate into sanguinary conflict in the 1960s and 1970s in spite of the enduring historic hostility.

Starting in the 1980s, when Beijing decided to pursue economic reform and the policy of opening up, the mainland turned to cultivate closer economic and social ties with Taiwan in the hope of peacefully unifying with the island under the “one country, two systems” framework. The resumption of dialogues on a semiofficial basis between the two sides shed a ray of light on the frosty cross-Strait relations. However, the outbreak of the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis following the visit of Lee Teng-hui’s visit to the US in 1995, and Chen Shuibian’s successive election victories in 2000 and 2004, drove cross-Strait relations to rock bottom and spiked continuous tension. In the face of Lee’s shift away from KMT’s commitment to the one-China principle and Chen’s pro-independence policy, Beijing had to return to a blanket “little-contact” or even “no-contact” policy to address the cross-Strait standoff.

After May 2008, when the island was ruled by Ma Ying-jeou of the KMT, the pro-one China party, Beijing began to adopt a much mor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• 1 Introduction: The turbulent Taiwan Strait
• 2 Peaceful development: Mainland China’s institutionalism-oriented Taiwan policy (2008–2016)
• 3 Selective engagement: Mainland China’s dual-track Taiwan policy (2016–)
• 4 Changes and continuity in mainland China’s Taiwan policy
• 5 Conclusion: Navigating the cross-Strait turbulence
• Index