Taiwan’s Weakness in the Face of China
Lai Ching-te, Taiwan’s president-elect, addresses supporters on January 13th, 2024, shortly after being declared the winner of Taiwanese presidential election. Photo courtesy of Jonathan Dann.
On January 13, 2024, Taiwan’s citizens cast ballots across the country for their next president and legislators. As votes were tabulated, no one watched more closely than President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). After the election, Beijing continued to claim Taiwan as its own territory and accelerated its timeline to force Taiwan’s unification with China. Taiwan’s divided government poses a long-term risk to its sovereignty, enabling President Xi to foment gridlock, preventing Taiwan from maintaining critical components of defense against China. This new weakness gives Xi the opportunity to pursue long-term unification through economic pressure and international isolation. Indeed, the split government will likely prevent Taiwan from marshaling the resources and political resolve necessary to deter a future Chinese invasion.
Taiwan’s Weakened Government
In the face of growing Chinese aggression, the candidates for the presidency all had differing stances on Taiwanese independence, which shed light on their party’s future policy preferences toward China. The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) candidate, Lai Ching-te, supports maintaining the status quo while strengthening economic and security relations with Washington. This status quo represents a lack of change, as Lai emphasizes his willingness to both assert Taiwanese democratic independence. He also acccepts that the 1992 consensus, which concedes that there is only one China, with Taiwan as a territory. Meanwhile, the Kuomintang’s candidate, Hou You-yi, rejects independence, and instead advocates for open dialogue with China for business relations. Ko Wen-je of the Taiwan People’s Party supports co-existence with China, merely maintaining the status quo. As each of these parties maintain coexistence with one another, especially under divided government, each will have to negotiate a compromise that can win legislative votes and the president’s signature, including opening some communication between the two governments and trade, whilst maintaining the right of Taipei to rule over the island.
Taiwan didn’t give a resounding win to the DPP in the legislature is an omen of future dysfunction, which China is likely to weaponize to its advantage, the Kuomintang received 52 seats, the DPP received 51 seats, and the Taiwan People’s Party attained 8 seats, preventing any party from receiving a majority. Just several days after the result, however, the KMT’s candidate, Han Kuo-yu, won the speakership in the legislature, confirming Taiwan’s divided government. More importantly, the TPP voted for their own candidate for speaker and refused to form a coalition government, illustrating how all three parties refuse to cooperate with each other on policies related to the economy and sovereignty, highlighting larger legislative fights. For example, differences in economic policy between the KMT and DPP came on full display, as the DPP-controlled presidency rejected a free trade agreement that would facilitate increased trade into China. Meanwhile, candidate Hou Yu-ih of the KMT maintains that more trade with China and others is necessary for a successful economy, just as Ma Ying-jeou did with China, New Zealand, and Singapore in 2008. As all of these factors come into play, Taiwan’s election highlighted steep divisions, enabling further interference from China.
In addition to falling support internationally for its legitimacy as an independent state, Taiwan’s government faces additional domestic fissions that threaten to weaken it further. The split between the legislature and presidency means that negotiations have to be made between the two parties for different policies. This is likely to force President-elect Lai to moderate, ranging from domestic budgets to foreign policy. Lai campaigned on financial sustainability by increasing minimum wages and expanding national healthcare, but many are likely to end in compromise. As Taiwan will have to pass a new budget with defense spending, energy policy, and more, differences within the administration will highlight the new dysfunctional nature of the government. Though Taiwan has had a divided government in the past—such as in 2008, when the KMT’s Ma Ying-Jeou won the presidential election—polarization has continued to hit the country. For example, the percentage of voters believing they have a Taiwanese, and not Chinese, identity has skyrocketed to a record 67%, highlighting a changing country that is in support of its independence. Political infighting and divisions have changed the landscape of Taiwanese politics since 2008, and certainly will cause more dysfunction as a lack of consensus among the people demonstrates the lack of an ability to pass a well-supported defense policy to defend against China.
This national disunity is critically important in determining the future of Taiwan’s defense spending and strategy. The Taiwanese public is increasingly split on how they should spend money on defense; in just one recent poll, 35.4% of voters said that defense spending was too high, and 44.6% said it was right. The chasm widens across party lines, as 60% of DPP voters in the same poll said defense spending was at the right level, while 60% of KMT voters, and 43% of TPP voters, said defense spending was too high. As party differences over how to handle defense funds continue to widen, it becomes clear that the divided government may struggle to pass a defense budget that all sides would be satisfied with. This dysfunction would also be on display to the international community—especially to China—highlighting potential future weaknesses in Taiwan’s defense policy.
International support for Taiwan’s defense against a PRC invasion is also in peril, as Taipei’s allies struggle to pass their own defense budgets. In the United States, funding struggles continue as the Republican-controlled House of Representatives failed to put together a full-year budget that would include Taiwan’s need for $5 billion of support from the United States in the case of an invasion. As military support becomes unstable, Taiwan is further imperiled and exposed the PRC’s coercion.
Beijing’s Winning Policy
For Beijing, pushing for unification between China and Taiwan has been a shadow war of economic and diplomatic coercion. Notwithstanding the policy of peaceful unification, China has been preparing its People’s Liberation Army (PLA) for a potential use of armed forces by 2027, as evidenced by increased military drills over the Taiwan Strait. These actions, however, have as of yet to be followed by direct military aggression, but their continued use will mean that China will not stray away from elements of military intimidation.
Instead, China has been pursuing a policy of international isolation through strategic diplomacy, where Beijing slowly chips away at Taiwan’s allies through economic inducements. Under the One China policy, Taiwan is currently recognized only by a small number of countries in Latin America, such as El Salvador, who recognize its government as the official government of China. However, those supporters have dwindled in recent years. Since 2016, nine countries—more than one-third of those with whom Taiwan has formal diplomatic ties—have severed ties with Taipei in favor of Beijing, starting when Honduras cut ties to gain economic support from China amid the nation’s worsening debt crisis. Additionally, the international reaction to President Lai’s election last month led Nauru to also sever ties with Taiwan mere days after the election. Now, Taiwan only has formal recognition from 12 countries worldwide, accounting for just 0.17% of the world’s economy and 0.5% of the world’s population. In addition, the United Nations does not recognize Taiwan, denying it an international platform. China’s current policies are working to chip away at Taiwan’s critical international support, and it may push the island into further isolation as Beijing flexes its economic weight abroad.
Chinese Economic Pressure
Though China’s reaction to Lai’s win in Taiwan was quite harsh, the reaction has yet to produce any real military incursion. In fact, in the lead up to the election, Beijing visibly reduced military activity in Taiwan temporarily in hopes that the pro-independence candidate would not be supported out of fear, similar to 2020 with President Tsai’s re-election. However, Taiwan is still at risk of getting negatively influenced by China through its use of more indirect measures to control the economy.
One likely future course of action is a continuation in the use of economic inducements to chip away at Taiwan’s diplomatic allies as well as economic coercion to deter support for Taiwan. In 2019, for example, China lured the small country of Kiribati and the Solomon Islands away from Taiwanese alliance to Chinese alliance, using the promise of increasing logging industries and providing opportunities that Taiwan and the United States could not match. These economic tactics pull away more Taiwanese allies, isolating the island from any international support, as it is outspent by the government in Beijing. Further, ahead of the election, China made use of tariffs, tightening restrictions on chemical imports and sanctioning US defense companies and freezing their assets, both in an attempt to choke US support for Taiwan and paint the ruling DPP administration as hurting Taiwan’s economy through its push for sovereignty. Though the DPP’s candidate won the election, continued use of these tactics in the future provide another opportunity for Beijing to score wins economically from Taiwan, and force its hand to gain lucrative trade and diplomatic agreements that chip away at sovereignty, until Taiwan becomes part of China in the long future.
China’s Next Move
Though China doesn’t appear to have invasion planned in the near future, China has gained immense coercive power through its economic strength as well as the relative weakness of Taiwan, particularly as the island nation loses allies internationally and political fissions form within the national government. China continues to threaten invasion, especially with military drills to assert territorial claims, but has yet to act on it. Instead, the coercive tactics that China wields further poses a risk to the already-strained relationship. The PRC has a new opportunity to progress towards unification, and though President Xi has not used military incursions yet, he wields powerful coercive tactics that could open the possibility to it. Thus, the split government in Taiwan will prevent them from committing resources and demonstrating political resolve that is necessary to deter China.
Andrew Chung (CC ’27) is a staff writer at CPR majoring in computer science and political science. When not writing for CPR, he’s writing for CULR or enjoying a ride downtown on the 1 train. He can be reached at andrew.chung@columbia.edu.