Taiwan’s democratic sovereignty “Resilience improving: US official. DETERRING CHINA: The Pentagon has made strides in developing a new concept of operations to address challenges in the western Pacific region, Ely Ratner said,” Taipei Times. Taiwan Republic 台灣国, national identity, and geostrategery classrooms. Sooner or later – and given the radical policies pursued by the Chinese communists and its anti-democracy and anti-Taiwan allies inside Taiwan and beyond, sooner – policymakers in Taipei, Tokyo, DC, and other capitals in the Free World will have to reckon with whether Taiwan’s democratic sovereignty is real. As of 2024, the Biden administration is working mightily to give Taiwan’s democratic sovereignty greater resilience while holding onto the geostrategery fiction cobbled together between DC, the Chinese communists, and the dictatorial China KMT. The last of this fiction is in Secretary Ratner’s comments:
The United Front position of the Chinese Communist Party, the China KMT, and the China People’s Party is that Taiwan does not have democratic sovereignty. Unlike in the 1960s, 1980s, or the 2010s, wherein the dictatorial China KMT maintained linguistic barriers between what remains of the “RoC/Free China” and “PRC/Communist Bandits” – China KMT’s former chair Ma, its legislators in the Taiwanese parliament, have negated Taiwan’s democratic sovereignty vis-a-vis China/PRC. Similar to dictator Putin’s declaration on the eve of the latest Russian invasion of Ukraine that a sovereign independent nation-state of Ukraine “did not exist,” this is the united front position of the Chinese communists and its allies inside Taiwan.
Interestingly, some Western IR analysts-scholars have proposed ‘softer’ but functionally similar positions to the Chinese communists and the China KMT – that Taiwan’s alleged historical destiny is to be annexed by the Chinese communists; or, again similar to what Ukraine has experienced, Western analysts using the threat of nucular war/world was as the reason to force Taiwan to “compromise/negotiate/make concessions” – all slightly softer ways of arguing Taiwan should surrender its democratic sovereignty.
The historical reasons that enabled the “status quo in the Taiwan Strait” fiction have run their course. From 1949, when the latest Chinese civil war ended, to recently, the communist dictators of China lacked the military ability to invade Taiwan. From 1949 to 1996 when the China KMT colonized and occupied Taiwan with their brutal dictatorship, Taiwan lacked a genuine voice and did not possess democratic sovereignty. From 1949 to 2019 the US and the Free World saw communist China as a “card” to play against the USSR during the Cold War, and subsequently, as a major source of cheap labor and a significant market for consumer goods. By 2024, none of those conditions are true – although policymakers in Western democracies have been slow to react and adjust. Moreover, the fantasy that if the US and the Free World would just “give” democratic Taiwan to the Chinese communists a sustainable peace could be had persists – again the echo with Ukraine, I am certain that even two years after the Russian invasion began, there are still similar voices inside Western capitals regarding abandoning democratic Ukraine to the Russian dictator “for peace in our time”.
The reality of 2024 is that there is a new status quo. A new status quo where the Chinese communists and their anti-democracy and anti-Taiwan allies inside Taiwan, such as the China KMT, have become radicalized and militant. Beijing has formed a strategic-military global alliance with Moscow and other bad actors to subvert the world order. China is no longer a reliable provider of cheap labor. Taiwan has become a democracy – with one citizen one vote – since 1996. On a purely political theory basis, the democratically elected government of Taiwan has more legitimacy to claim national status than the dictators of China – ask Western theorists on what basis should we consider dictator Putin and dictator Xi legitimate leaders of their nations for your own amusement. The sooner the Free World faces this new status quo honestly and makes concrete preparations – with Taiwan’s democratic sovereignty as the core – the safer the world becomes. Leaving Taiwan’s democratic sovereignty ambiguous creates room for military adventurists in Beijing to temptation – the temptation to imagine that Chinese communist and China KMT aggression against Taiwanese democracy in all forms (military, gray zone, economic coercion, assault against Taiwan’s democratic institutions, information warfare, and so on) will be accepted by global democracies. As we should have learned from Ukraine and many historical precedents – the more ambivalent liberal democracies are, the longer the Free World waits, the more aggressive autocracies become. Which ultimately means the higher the price the world has to pay. 27.7.2024
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