Elections 2024: Taiwan ... Challenge of peace or war?

The election is over. Continued confrontation with Beijing seems likely. Or is it?

This report was first published in the magazine American Purpose. It can be seen there in its fully edited form and here, as part of our Elections 2024 series.

The issue in the wake of Taiwan's watershed election was less who won, but how China and America will react to this new challenge of a metastable peace that has held, more or less, for three quarters of a century.

For the first time in the history of democracy on Taiwan, the same party has captured the presidency for three successive four-year terms. This time the victor on Saturday was Lai Ching-te, who now succeeds Tsai Ing-wen who was term-limited out of seeking a third four-year mandate under the nation's constitution. Their party is the Democratic People's Party (DPP). But now they have a real challenge internally. And from the outside, Beijing is clearly watching.

Not surprisingly, after the vote, China retaliated with a warning. "Our stance on resolving the Taiwan question and realizing national reunification remains consistent, and our determination is as firm as rock," said Chen Binhua, spokesperson for the State Council Taiwan Affairs Office. Beijing’s stance on “realizing national reunification remains consistent, and our determination is as firm as rock” and will adhere to the "one-China principle," which of course the United States does recognize as well.

This language from Chen Binhua was as tough as Beijing's statement went, however. "The outcomes of Taiwan leadership and legislature elections reveal that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) cannot represent the mainstream public opinion on the island," he continued.

In the days since the election, both China and the United States have weighed in more directly focusing on the stakes involved that go well beyond this small island. In Davos, Secretary of State Antonin Blinken publicly expressed his hope for more engagement between Washington and Beijing this year despite the complexities in their relationship, collaborating in areas of mutual interest despite many “differences," while warning against any “disruptive” moves against Taiwan such as “the use of force." At the same time, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post reported that China's top spy agency, the Ministry of State Security said on WeChat, “Under the guidance of the party … the ministry will insist on combating ‘Taiwan independence’ separatist activities and interference from external forces, defend national sovereignty, security and development interests, and resolutely promote the great cause of the reunification.”

Beijing clearly recognized the reality of Saturday's vote. The DPP may have won the presidency, with a hardly resounding victory. But it lost its majority in the parliament. Moreover, Lai only won 40 percent of the vote in the presidential contest. The other 60 percent was divided between his two challengers—Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People's Party (TPP) and  Hou Yu-ih of the Kuomintang, the party that is the direct descendant of Chiang Kai-shek who fled the mainland 75 years ago to set up an anti-communist government on the island nation that has been a thorn to China ever since.

Last November, there was an effort to arrive at an alliance between Lai's two opponents, both of whom favor varying degrees of more open dialogue with Beijing. But that effort failed. Still, more than half of Taiwan's electorate voted against DPP-style confrontation. And more than 70 percent turned out, some even flying in from abroad since in-person voting was mandatory. It appeared to be quite a serious yellow light to any hardline confrontational policy.

Because even worse for the DPP and its confrontational tendencies, it lost its clear majority or even plurality in parliament. Indeed, its legislative representation has been shrinking for each of the last three elections when it won the presidency. In 2020 it lost seven seats over its 2016 majority, dropping to 61 from 68 in the 113 seat legislature, while the Kuomintang (KMT) added three to 38 and the newly-arrived TPP debuted with five. This time, the DPP dropped another ten seats, the KMT added fourteen and the TPP added three. This resulted in a one-seat plurality of 52 for the KMT, with the DPP scoring just 51 seats and an unaccustomed minority role.

The last such split was 20 years ago when the KMT's legislative plurality blocked more than sixty times military budgets proposed by the opposition president, forcing him to lower defense expenditures from a proposed $19.6 billion to $320 million.

President Lai paid tribute to this hard new reality in a glancing reference during his victory speech, suggesting that more dialogue with the opposition would be required. At the same time, in an apparent gesture to his less-than-overwhelming victory, he observed in dealing with the mainland, "We must replace encirclement with exchanges, and confrontation with dialogue, in order to achieve peace and co-prosperity, and the only way out is to have peace, equality and a democratic dialogue. This is most in line with the interests of the people of the two sides of the Taiwan Strait and is the only way for a win-win situation.”

China, of course, has done its best to persuade Taiwanese voters just how high the stakes were in this election. For Xi Jinping, reclaiming Taiwan is a core to the legacy he hopes for regime as China's leader. To that end, confrontation played a key role in the leadup to Saturday's balloting.  Flotillas of balloons, of the type that drifted across the United States a year ago, were spotted over the straits separating Taiwan from the mainland, one even drifting across the island itself the morning voters were going to the polls. During the election campaign, China sent at least 43 military aircraft and seven ships into airspace and waters near Taiwan, leading the island to scramble jet fighters, sending Taiwanese military ships into these same waters and placing land-based missile systems on alert. The Chinese military deployments frequently crossed into Taiwan's defense identification zone, though not its territorial space.

At the same time, Chinese officials descended on the United States to help focus Americans on how high the stakes would be in the voting. Liu Jianchao, the senior official of the international department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, arriving in New York, reminded an influential group at the Council on Foreign Relations, "For China, the Taiwan question is at the very core of the core interests. It’s the red line that mustn't be crossed and we take seriously the statements of the United States not supporting Taiwan independence. And we hope that the U.S. side will honor this commitment."

The week before the vote, senior Chinese military officials had flown to Washington to resume Defense Policy Cooperation Talks, which Beijing had broken off after then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan and met with President Tsai Ing-wen. The Chinese officials lost no time warning their American counterparts of the need to abide by the "one-China principle" and stop arming Taiwan. Of course, if the Kuomintang again blocks Lai from getting a defense budget through parliament, all bets on this score would be off.

All this may have played some role in Biden's post-election comment. Emerging from the White House Saturday morning and in response to pool reporters' questions about his reaction to the Taiwan elections, he said simply, "We do not support independence." Still, the United States has been quite successful in assembling a number of Asian nations around its notions of free navigation of the South China Seas in opposition to China's hegemonic persistence, which by extension should mean safer passage for Taiwan and its determination to maintain an independent path forward.

The reality, however, is that at the moment, the American military is stretched thinner than it has been for a very long time. Between the desperate needs of Ukraine in its full-scale war with Russia, the Biden administration's commitment to supply Israel with whatever it needs in its war in Gaza, threats of expansion of this conflict to the Red Sea and the Houthis activities in Yemen, not to mention Congress's reluctance to approve funding for either of these theaters, any major commitment to Taiwan's security poses serious challenges.

For that matter, China's really not ready for any full-scale invasion either. Just this month, China sacked its minister of defense and nine senior generals. The new defense chief, Admiral Dong Jun, is the first from the navy—a not-so-subtle suggestion of where the nation's leading challenges might be going forward.

Moreover, the generals were from the "rocket forces"—accused of corruption after it was discovered a number of its major missiles were filled with water rather than rocket fuel, while in vast missile fields, the lids on silos would not allow effective launches.

For a look back and ahead in China and its relations with the world, watch next week for the special Unleashed Voice of Audrey Topping

Celestial horses, foreign devils & Taiwan's future

Still, history, it would seem, is very much on the side of stasis. It was 75 years ago December 20, 1949, when nationalist Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek took off at 2 pm from Chengdu airport headed for exile in Taiwan, passing over Guangzhou which had just been taken over by Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army. [ https://phtv.ifeng.com/program/tfzg/200901/0112_2950_964266.shtml ] Chiang would regroup his army where thousands had arrived by ship from the mainland.

As Chiang was in the air, the decision was debated whether to pursue the plane, force it down, or shoot it out of the skies killing all aboard. They did not have much time. The plane was in the air.

"It's better to kill first and then show off. Fight first and then talk about it," said the local party leader. "It would be a pity to let the number one war criminal run away."

"Whether it's a pity or not, we can't do it anyway if there's no response from the central government," was the reply from the ground. No response came from Beijing. Chiang Kai-shek landed, unmolested in Taipei.

Today the standoff continues.