And Taiwan, like Cold War-era West Berlin, is undoubtedly feisty. The occupation of the Pratas and Itu Aba proved it.
Yet in the capital of Taipei, as in Singapore, I have a bout of cognitive dissonance. I stare at an antiseptic, angular cityscape—skyscrapers rising like bamboo shoots—from where I take a gleaming high-speed rail train to the south of the island, the engine’s very power pressing at my back. Smart shops and liquid crystal screens flashing Chinese characters are everywhere, once again, consumerism and efficiency raised to the status of a foundational creed. Intellectually speaking, I know it has often been such wealth that fuels a weapons boom in the first place. But my instinct tells me that I am wrong: people this prosperous just don’t go to war. They have too much to lose.
Nevertheless, the two realities I have encountered almost everywhere in the region are shopping malls and submarines. The malls are packed with shoppers from Taipei to Kuala Lumpur, even though, as one analyst in Singapore had told me, submarines are the new bling as far as the area’s defense ministries are concerned.
Complimentary coffee and cakes are served; such service is unknown on American trains. As soon as I finish, a hand removes the cup and wrapper. Asia’s efficiency has often struck Westerners as extreme. Imagine such efficiency applied to war, I thought. Large-scale war here would be horrific because it would be an outgrowth of Confucian Asia’s very dynamism as a whole.
I am headed south to see a Taiwanese historical landmark. The background is the following:
For hundreds of years, Taiwan was better known as Formosa, short for “Ilha Formosa,” which means “Beautiful Island” in Portuguese. In the first two decades of the sixteenth century, Portuguese navigators made numerous forays in the Indo-Pacific. Among the most notable was the voyage of the merchant Tomé Pires, dispatched by the viceroy of Malacca to open trade with China. On one of these expeditions, perhaps one led by Fernão Mendes Pinto, the Portuguese traveled along the island’s lush western coast. The name “Taiwan” itself, spelled in various ways, is said to mean “foreigners” in the local aboriginal tongue, and Dutch colonists in the third decade of the seventeenth century picked it up as a constantly repeated word in the natives’ conversation. Seventy percent of modern Taiwanese have aboriginal blood, which is ethnic Malay in origin. Taiwan, in addition to being an offshore extension of China and the southernmost extension of Japan’s Ryuku Island chain, also represents the northernmost extension of Southeast Asia, hence the link to Malaysia.6 In geographical terms, to say nothing of political ones, Taiwan is the linchpin and organizing principle of the Western Pacific. Taiwan was central to the security of late-nineteenth-century French Indochina, even as its de facto independence is key to the integrity of the Taiwan Strait that guarantees Japan’s trade routes, and even as its repossession by Beijing is necessary to end the century of humiliation that the mainland suffered at the hands of foreign powers. Taiwan impinges on every sub-theater in Asia.
In antiquity and the Middle Ages, mainland China’s contacts with Taiwan were intermittent, with expeditions made during the Wu, Sui, and Tang dynasties. With the geographical drama of Chinese history playing out on land—in which the agricultural cradle of Chinese civilization was constantly in a struggle to subdue and manage the pastoral tablelands to the north, west, and southwest—national energies were in a comparative sense turned away from the sea. However, this did not prevent seaborne activity in the form of pirates and fishermen from plying the Taiwan Strait, or prevent the development of a blue-water fleet in the ninth century. The early Ming dynasty explorer Zheng He is best known for his voyages in the Indian Ocean, but some of Zheng He’s ships may have visited Taiwan. A warlord-pirate, Cheng Chih-lung, whom the Ming emperor had dispatched to contain the Dutch in the Taiwan Strait region (so that the imperial armies could concentrate on fighting the Manchu invaders from the northern plains), settled many thousands of settlers from famine-stricken Fujian province in Taiwan. Thus began the mainland’s organic connection with the island.
But it is Cheng’s son, Cheng-kung, or Koxinga, who really is at the heart of the historical interaction between the mainland and Taiwan. Koxinga, educated in the Chinese classics and a patron of high culture, was a warlord general and admiral extraordinaire, able to fend off the political pressures of both the dying Ming and rising Manchu-Qing dynasties. He came to Taiwan from Fujian on the mainland with four hundred ships and 25,000 troops. It is Koxinga who, in 1662, after a successful siege of the Dutch fort of Zeelandia on Taiwan’s southwestern coast, allowed the Dutch to leave for Batavia (Jakarta) in Indonesia with all their possessions, “with drums beating, their banners flying, their guns loaded, and the fuses lit.” Such was his wisdom and generosity. Koxinga, who died young at thirty-nine, before he might have become corrupted by absolute power, is “deified” both on the mainland and on Taiwan as the “ideal Chinese prince,” proof that a warlord could be more enlightened and better educated than a formal head of state. On the mainland, he is revered as a nationalist hero who expelled the Western colonialists and forged forevermore the mainland’s claim to Taiwan, governing as he did on both sides of the strait. On Taiwan itself, Koxinga is seen as the “original ancestor,” who forged an independent identity for the island. There are sixty temples dedicated to his worship. In light of the island’s evolution as a democracy, and the half century of Japanese occupation from 1895 to 1945, the fact that Koxinga epitomizes progress and had a Japanese mother constitutes further proof here that he spiritually belongs to a free Taiwan.7
Koxinga was succeeded by his son, Cheng Ching, who ruled in the enlightened manner of his father, leading Taiwan to many prosperous years in commerce and agriculture. However, it all proved shortlived, as a succession battle was set off upon Cheng’s death, and Taiwan became a backwater of the Qing Empire for the next two hundred years. “Taiwan is nothing but an isolated island on the sea far away from China, it has long since been a hideout of pirates, escaped convicts, deserters and ruffians, therefore, there is nothing to gain from retaining it,” said one report to the Qing emperor. But the emperor chose otherwise, annexing Taiwan to keep it from falling back into the hands of the Dutch. As historian Jonathan Manthorpe writes, Taiwan was brought into the empire in 1684 but treated as a place “of no consequence.”8
The Qing dynasty expanded and contracted, beginning a drawn-out decline in the mid-nineteenth century, much like Ottoman Turkey during the same period. In 1895, a dynamic Japan, internally powered by the Meiji Restoration, grabbed Taiwan, seeing it as a stepping-stone to Southeast Asia and the South China Sea, as well as key to the control of the Yellow and East China seas. Though the Japanese occupied Taiwan for fifty years, they were not subsequently hated on the island like they were elsewhere in East Asia, which fell under Japanese fascist rule in the 1930s and 1940s, for the regimentation and demonstrations of racial superiority were coupled with clean government and the development of institutions that fostered Taiwanese modern identity, as well as making the Taiwanese the most highly educated people in Asia. Compared with the decrepitude of the late Qing dynasty and the plunder and thuggery of Chiang Kai-shek’s Guomindang at least in its early years, the experience with the Japanese was more than tolerable. The Japanese brought medicine, agriculture, roads, and railways: order and modernity, in other words.
Taiwan was the only place in Asia where the defeat of the Japanese fascists did not in the short run necessarily lead to better government. So repressive was Chiang Kai-shek’s rule at first that the Americans might have deserted him had it not been for the Korean and Vietnam wars, a time when Washington was afraid of Taiwan falling into communist hands; Taiwan also proved to be a geographically convenient staging base for bombing North Vietnam as well as a rest and recreation center for U.S. troops. The result, starting in the 1950s, was massive U.S. economic aid, which, coupled with a successful land reform program, resulted in a light industrial revolution as farmers now had the money to invest in small factories. The high level of education th
at had been the fruit of Japanese occupation, combined with American money and a regime that while not democratic, was not communist or totalitarian either, was the vital mix that would eventually make for one of the Third World’s most successful democracies beginning in the 1990s. Together with rapid development came Taiwanization: a distinctive flowering of island culture in the arts, media, and universities that featured the rise of a local dialect, Minnan, and the fading of Mandarin, which the Guomindang had brought from the mainland.
Taiwan’s 1996 presidential election proved a coming-out party not only for democracy here, but for the naked assertion of American military power. In the run-up to that election, mainland China’s regime resorted to missile tests and a mock invasion in the area of the Taiwan Strait as a way to show force—the Taiwanese, in the midst of the hurly-burly of a presidential campaign, should not get any ideas about declaring independence! President Bill Clinton responded by sending not one, but two aircraft carrier strike groups, the Independence and the Nimitz, into nearby waters. Suddenly Beijing looked impotent, and saw that a massive defense buildup on its part would be necessary if American air and naval hegemony were ever to be checked in the Western Pacific. So began China’s rapid acquisition of submarines, fighter jets, and antiaircraft and antiship cruise missiles, as well as electronic listening posts—thus would China impede the American Navy’s access to coastal Asia without aircraft carriers of its own. America’s response has been undeniable. Whereas in the past, 60 percent of its naval forces had been oriented toward the Atlantic, by 2005, 60 percent were oriented toward the Pacific.9
The confrontation will continue to have a long life span. For China simply will not budge. Leaders in Beijing know that Japan colonized Taiwan at the same time that Great Britain took Hong Kong, that Portugal took Macau, and other Western powers and Russia took Treaty Ports and other Chinese land. Later on, at the conclusion of the Chinese civil war, Chiang Kai-shek set up the Republic of China on Taiwan as a rival government for all of the Middle Kingdom, and was recognized as such by the United States and many other countries until Nixon and Kissinger’s diplomacy in 1972. In Beijing’s eyes, therefore, the return of Taiwan is essential in order to erase this entire humiliating history.10
But here in the south of the island there is a local history distinct from that of the mainland, providing Taiwan with a foundation myth. Fort Zeelandia—which I had come to see, the purpose of my train journey—consists of three levels of walls made of brick that the Dutch brought from Batavia, the modern-day Jakarta, in Indonesia. The bricks and lime are mottled with age and graced with frangipani and pollarded banyan trees alongside them, with bronze Dutch cannons all about. Banyan limbs even climb up the fort walls themselves creating a beautiful calligraphy. The fort was actually refurbished by the Japanese occupation forces in honor of its conqueror’s—Koxinga’s—Japanese mother. Statues of Koxinga are ever present here in Tainan City, where the heavy, humid air and sleepy ambience is evocative of Southeast Asia. It is clear by the statues of Chiang Kai-shek that he saw himself as the new Koxinga, who also came from the mainland.
Fort Zeelandia no longer stands sentinel against the sea, but is surrounded by narrow downtown streets, the product of reclaimed land, so that much of its magic is lost. And yet, to judge by the hordes of Taiwanese young and old passing through its bastions, the fort retains its power as a symbol of a history unique to the island. It leads one to pose the question, Just how strong now is Taiwanese identity? Given how prosperous they have become, would Taiwanese actually fight and sacrifice for their independence from the mainland, if it ever came to that? Or would they allow themselves to be subsumed by Beijing, if only their freedom and not their living standards were compromised? The diplomats and defense officials I met in Taipei are trying to craft a strategy so that these questions never need to get answered.
Henry C. K. Liu is the deputy director general of Taiwan’s National Security Council. As an upper-middle-level official, it is at his rank—as I knew from Washington—that the real work and thinking of any administration gets done. “The longer we survive,” he told me, “the more likely that political changes will happen in mainland China itself.” We can buy time, it is all about playing a weak hand well was what I heard throughout Taipei. In the meantime, Liu said, “we must try our best to maintain the status quo” through creative diplomacy and hard military power. “We can only try, through our own defense capabilities, to make those on the mainland see that the use of military force is unthinkable.” He quoted Sun Tzu, the great Chinese philosopher of antiquity, that “the greatest strategy is never having to fight.”
Liu had his worries. How reliable was the United States over the long term? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been a shock for Taiwanese officials. Though they officially supported the American military efforts, they were chilled by just how much events in the Middle East had diverted the United States from its responsibilities in Asia. Then there was the inexorable march of Chinese military power itself, which might through the combination of such assets as land-based missiles, submarines, space-based surveillance systems, cyber-attacks, over-the-horizon radar, unmanned aerial vehicles, and small craft disguised as commercial vessels create an anti-access bubble complicating the American military’s ability to approach the Chinese mainland, including the Taiwan Strait.11 Finally there was an awareness that three quiet and predictable decades in Beijing—ever since Deng Xiaoping’s consolidation of power—were giving way to more political turmoil on the mainland. Indeed, things were about to get more interesting for Taiwan.
It was even possible that despite the hopes for political liberalization in Beijing, the current group of elite communist technocrats constituted the friendliest government on the mainland that Taiwan was going to get at least in the short run. As Professor Szu-yin Ho of Taipei’s National Chengchi University explained to me: “Democracies may not fight each other, but that may not be true of a country in the early phases of democratization.” For the loosening of central control in Beijing could unleash more unruly and nationalistic forces, as each new party and faction competes to be more patriotic than the next one. This was Taiwan’s nightmare. “The benign period on the mainland may be ending,” Professor Ho said.
In fact, as he argued, the Communist Party establishment in Beijing needed Taiwan for its own economic policies. For the People’s Republic of China measured itself against Taiwan the same way Malaysia measured itself against Singapore. It was the competition that the Taiwanese economic model offered that spurred Beijing’s rulers to want to improve living standards for their own people.
The real danger for Taiwan, I posited to Professor Ho, was Finlandization by China. The combination of 1,500 land-based missiles aimed at Taiwan from the mainland, even as hundreds of commercial flights a week linked the mainland with the island, meant that Taiwan would quietly be captured by China without the latter needing to invade. But he strongly disagreed. He pointed out that Finland’s independence during the Cold War was compromised by the Soviet Union because the two nations shared a long land border, enabling Soviet intimidation. Vietnam, too, has a significant land border with China so it also can be Finlandized. “But we have the Taiwan Strait,” he explained, which as narrow as it is nevertheless is almost five times as wide as the English Channel. Ho and I then both recalled University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer’s theory of the “stopping power of water.”12 Navies could land on beachheads, Mearsheimer wrote, but sending a land force inland to permanently occupy a subject population across the seas was exceedingly difficult. And so China’s military would continue to both enlarge and improve, with more and better submarines, surface warships, and fighter jets—and better-trained crews to man them. A day might even come in the foreseeable future when the United States Navy and Air Force would be unable to deter an attack on Taiwan. But Beijing would still have the problem of occupying the island. And that problem would persist even in the face of a new correlation of forces in the Western P
acific, in which American military unipolarity gave way to a bipolar order with China.
Might Taiwan become like Hong Kong, a part of China that was nevertheless allowed a large degree of self-governance along with a singular identity? Again, the answer was no. Ho explained that besides Taiwan’s island geography, Taiwan had another advantage that Hong Kong lacked: “political symbolism,” which was the product of a specific nation-building myth. The Guomindang had waged an epic struggle against Mao’s communists and lost, and then retreated across the sea to Taiwan, where, with all hope seemingly gone, it built a dynamic society. Hong Kong was merely a trading post with no such story to inspire a local defense.
Lastly, Taiwan survived through feverish, innovative diplomacy. It may have had diplomatic relations with only about two dozen countries thanks to Chinese intimidation, so that many serving foreign diplomats around the world perforce avoid the island altogether. But Taiwan assiduously cultivated past and future diplomats in many countries, knowing that they still wielded influence in their respective capitals. It constantly invited journalists like myself for visits where intensive rounds of one-on-one meetings were offered. More isolated than the Israelis, the Taiwanese were less bitter about it. No one in Taipei had chips on their shoulder. It was a place you instantly liked. And the Taiwanese were sly: such charm was part of their strategy.
“In the Melian Dialogue,” Ho said, paraphrasing Thucydides, “the Athenians told the inhabitants of Milos that the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must. But that brutal law of nature does not operate to the same extent in a globalized world of intense interconnectivity, where Taiwan is not alone and therefore not as vulnerable as Milos was.”
Asia's Cauldron Page 17
