Article #3
Beware a Chinese Attack on Taiwan in the Context of
Current Global Conflict
With regional hostility now at great heights in the aftermath of the Hamas October 7 rocket attacks on Israel and the immediate Israeli response with air strikes in the Gaza Strip, a second major theater of global conflict has now opened in West Asia (with implications also for North Africa), in addition to the now nearly two years of confrontation provoked by the Russian attack on Ukraine.
In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), leader Xi Jinping is observing these events with elevated interest. Given Xi’s recent enhanced expression of amity with Vladimir Putin when the two met in Beijing beginning on October 17, prudent observers of international events must strongly consider that the Chinese leader’s narrow cast of bellicose advisers might successfully assert that now would be a favorable time to launch an attack on Taiwan.
Military analysts at organizations such as West Point’s Modern War Institute and the well-respected private Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) relate that the PRC would be best prepared for an attack on Taiwan in 2027, but such experts also comment that authoritarian leaders have their own logic, so that despite the catastrophic impact that would come from a PRC attack on Taiwan at any time, Xi Jinping’s increasingly aggressive stance must be taken seriously.
In the event of such an attack, the United States public should have a better understanding of the PRC’s faulty claim on Taiwan, which is no more part of China than the United States is a part of Great Britain.
With the victory of Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communist victory over the forces of Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang in 1949, the latter retreated to Taiwan and until Chiang Kai-shek’s death in 1975 maintained the fiction of representing the legitimate government of China, still under the banner of the Republic of China (ROC), which purportedly would one day return to conquer their Chinese Communist foes.
But President Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law in 1987 and his successor, Li Teng-hui, soon superintended an astounding political transformation. In 1996, Li won Taiwan’s first democratic presidential election then, in the year 2000, Chen Shuibian, of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), won the presidential election and ended the dominance of the Kuomintang. The DPP lost control of the presidency to the Kuomintang in 2008 but regained the top office in 2016, when current president Tsai Ing-wen prevailed. Right now, DPP candidate William Lai seems likely to win the looming presidential contest in January 2024; the Kuomintang’s Hou Yu-ih is polling third, behind Ko Wen-je, the nominee of a new party, The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), with former Foxconn CEO Terry Gou running fourth as an independent.
Taiwan’s leading Democratic People’s Party had nothing to do with the documents and agreements so often given reference in the press; those were generated when the Kuomintang was still leading a one-party police state on Taiwan. The Shanghai Communique, issued in 1972 during the Nixon and Mao administrations, acknowledged that “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain that there is but one China.” This position was consistent at the time with the official positions of Mao’s PRC (which claimed legitimacy as government of China) and Chiang Kai-Shek’s ROC (which still made the same forlorn claim from its Taiwan redoubt). And in an agreement known as the “1992 Consensus,” the PRC and the KMT (still clinging to diminished power on Taiwan) affirmed that, “There is only one China.” Today’s dangerous situation results from the increasingly bellicose PRC insistence that Taiwan is part of China and the equally forceful position on the part of the DPP that Taiwan is a de facto independent nation that is most decidedly not part of China.
Taiwan was inhabited first by its indigenous population, which arrived four thousand years ago. The Qing Dynasty claim on Taiwan, only made in 1683 after vigorous court debate as to the pros and cons of governing Taiwan, had been preceded by the claims of the colonial regime of the Dutch (1624-1661) and the administration of anti-Qing rebel Zheng Chenggong (often known in the West as Koxinga, 1661-1683). But the Qing lost Taiwan to the Japanese in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895; the Japanese ruled the island through the end of World War II in 1945. Hence, Taiwan has not been governed by any force with actual control over all of China for 128 years.
Taiwan is a de facto nation with a unique history. The island nation ranks number 12 among the nations of the world in GDP per capita (ppp indices) compared to number 73 for China) and is rated number 10 as a “full democracy” by the highly respected Freedom House and Economist Intelligence Unit indices (China, brutalizers of the Uighur and Tibetan peoples, is ranked “authoritarian”). Taiwan’s people have long identified primarily as Taiwanese, not Chinese.
Given numerous economic challenges, a likely DPP
victory in the looming presidential election of January 13, 2024, and the
attention that the United States and its allies is now giving to two major
conflicts, Xi Jinping could decide that the time for an attack on Taiwan is
now. The United States and allies must as
a moral and geopolitical imperative make preparations to render all necessary military
assistance to democratic Taiwan in a global situation that could quickly gain
appellation as World War III.
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