Opinion

China’s bullying of Taiwan highlights its helplessness against the drift of Taiwanese society

J. Michael Cole says that Beijing’s hopes for a gradual reunification of Taiwan with the mainland have been frustrated, not by Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP, but by Taiwanese society’s growing drift from mainland China. Unable to admit this, China has resorted to heavy-handed tactics that are pushing the Taiwanese further away

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J. Michael Cole is a Taipei-based senior fellow with the Global Taiwan Institute in Washington, DC, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute in Ottawa, Canada, and the Taiwan Studies Programme at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Published: 2:00am, 2 Aug 2018Updated: 3:40pm, 3 Aug 2018

The election of Tsai Ing-wen of the Taiwan-centric Democratic Progressive Party in January 2016 marked the end of a phase in cross-strait relations when Beijing still believed in the possibility of winning the hearts and minds of the Taiwanese through “goodwill” and economic incentives. Since then, Beijing has embraced a strategy that seeks to corner, isolate and punish Taiwan for its intransigence on the unification question.

Although many would ascribe that change in attitude to the 2016 elections and blame the Tsai administration’s refusal to acknowledge the so-called “1992 consensus” for the souring relations, this reckoning actually occurred earlier – two years earlier, in 2014, when the Sunflower student movement derailed the partial rapprochement that had prevailed since 2008 under former president Ma Ying-jeou of the Kuomintang. More than an incident over a particular trade agreement, the movement epitomised a society’s refusal to associate too closely with authoritarian China, a reality that not only contributed to Tsai’s victory but also to the KMT’s dismissal of its initial candidate for the presidency, who was regarded as too ideologically close to Beijing – even for the blue camp’s taste.

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Unwilling to acknowledge this fact (at least publicly), the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has conveniently attributed the downturn in relations to Tsai, her DPP and the deadlock on the “1992 consensus”. It has constantly depicted them as a reckless minority in Taiwan, a posse of extremists who refuse to embrace what Chinese President Xi Jinping has described as “historical trends” and the “coordinates of history”.

Xi and his top cadres probably know better. But they cannot admit it, as this would confirm the fact that Beijing’s Taiwan strategy over the years, especially under Xi, has miscarried. Not only have the sticks and carrots failed, closer contact in fact pushed the Taiwanese in the opposite direction – towards a deepening identification with Taiwan and the liberal democratic values that define it.