Early last week, China sent 56 warplanes into the air defence identification zone around Taiwan, marking record activity for the third time in four days. It was the latest escalation in a year of rising tensions. The situation, said Taiwan’s defence minister Chiu Kuo-cheng, is the most dangerous he has experienced in 40 years. By 2025, he said, China will be as ready as it ever can be to launch a military assault.
Xi Jinping, China’s president, warned that Beijing has the resolve, will and ability to achieve “complete reunification” between the two countries. Taiwan’s president Tsai Ing-wen said for her part that the island should “resist annexation or encroachment upon our sovereignty”, and that Taiwan’s future should be determined by its people. Other regional performers, such as Japan, have spoken out about Taiwan more loudly than ever before. As Beijing’s military threat becomes increasingly credible, these exchanges acquire a sharper edge.
The tensions around Taiwan come despite the first steps towards a thaw in relations between the world’s two superpowers, China and the US. Meng Wanzhou, the chief financial officer of Huawei, has returned home after reaching a deal with US prosecutors; Beijing has released the “Two Michaels”, a pair of Canadians it detained after Meng’s arrest, having previously insisted there was no link with the Wanzhou case. Following top-level talks on trade, US president Joe Biden will hold a virtual summit with Xi before the end of the year.
One goal of their talks should be to calm the situation around Taiwan. In that regard, it is welcome that both Xi and Tsai were measured in their recent remarks. While cautioning those who would “betray the motherland”, Xi said that Beijing wants unification by peaceful means, and did not restate China’s threat of military force. While insisting that Taiwan and China “should not be subordinate to each other”, Tsai said Taipei wants to maintain the status quo.
Even the incursions by Chinese warplanes have a context, as they came during exercises in waters east of Taiwan by naval vessels from the US, Japan, the UK, Canada, the Netherlands and New Zealand. The aircraft were apparently simulating attacks on some of those vessels. Beijing should be wary, however, of taking out its anger at other countries via constant pressure on Taiwan. That is the route to ever greater tensions and a heightened risk of military accidents that could spill over into war.
The need for peace and stability does not mean there must be compromise. Beijing will not waver on its territorial claims. No matter what the temptation, Washington should avoid any dealings in which Taiwan becomes a bargaining chip. The democratic rights of 23m Taiwanese people can never be exchanged for concessions on trade or anything else.
Most fundamentally, future decades of peace across the Taiwan Strait depend on recognition that military conflict would be a disaster for Taiwan, China, the US and the world. Quite aside from the hideous human cost of any fighting, any war would overturn a global order under which Taiwan and China have both prospered mightily, to their own benefit and that of their trading partners. Beijing and Washington would emerge from such a conflict to a world riven into hostile blocs. Whoever the ‘winner’, all would lose.
The choice across the Taiwan Strait is between a tolerable status quo and a disastrous conflict. That will not change. On all sides, therefore, the need is for common sense, calm and cool heads.
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October 12, 2021 at 07:46PM
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The acute dangers of a conflict over Taiwan - Financial Times
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