The struggle for Taiwan

The stand-off between China and the US is at serious risk of escalating

Compared with Ukraine, or Phillip Schofield, Taiwan still gets little coverage in the British media. Also, as a source of worry about the End of the World, it barely ranks with climate change or Artificial Intelligence (AI). Yet the situation around the 180x180km box of sea that separates China from what was, under Japanese rule (1895-1948), Formosa, is if anything more dangerous than that in Donetsk. No war has been declared. But a war of words between the US and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been going on for several years, and military manoeuvres by both sides, and Washington’s allies, now threaten incendiary accidents, if not outright war.

Not in the next 10 months, one hopes. But war in the next 10 years? Don’t rule it out.

Though Beijing would dearly like to get its hands on the world’s No 1 chip foundry, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), it knows that that enterprise might well be destroyed in the process. Yet war is not a rational exercise. We cannot say how a shooting one might develop – involving, as it could well do, missiles, fighters, drones vs drones, amphibious assaults by Chinese troops, and the deployment of US naval forces stationed in Yokusuka and Okinawa, Japan. But as insults, feints, arms build-ups and outright provocations multiply, so the drive toward war has an inexorable logic of its own.

From Beijing’s point of view, getting back Taiwan is not just a matter of national pride, but also of domestic political legitimacy for the CCP. With Taiwan, Chinese President Xi Jinping has given a series of hostages to fortune. In 2019 he declared that the Taiwan ‘problem’ should not be allowed to be ‘passed down from one generation to the next’. In 2021, while holding fast to the long-held principle of ‘peaceful national reunification’, he insisted that ‘China’s complete reunification is a historic mission and an unshakable commitment … We must take resolute action to utterly defeat any attempt toward “Taiwan independence”… No one should underestimate the resolve, the will, and the ability of the Chinese people to defend their national sovereignty and territorial integrity’.

For Spiked, Taiwan’s nationhood, and its right to self-determination, are matters of principle. Taiwan is a democracy consisting of more than 20m souls, holds proper elections, and has a vigorous sense of national culture and identity. For Xi, though, the island exists mainly as a standing challenge to his prestige. He has had a win in Hong Kong, but is under diplomatic and sanctions pressure over Xinjiang. Labour unrest at home, both among white-collar workers and in manufacturing, is not going away. So: after the CCP’s vicious lockdowns during Covid, endless and imperious requisitioning of workers’ and farmers’ property, and its recent attempt – vigorously resisted by thousands of Muslims – to ‘sinicise’ yet another mosque (in Yunnan, southern China), Xi cannot easily back down against Taipei.

He has refused to rule out the use of military means to achieve ‘reunification’. Thus, in a March conference this year and to loud applause, he proclaimed that China ‘should actively oppose the external forces and secessionist activities of Taiwan independence’.

Through his bellicose oratory, Xi has continually raised the stakes. But alongside the domestic survival of the CCP, he and his 97m fellow members are also naturally exercised by Washington’s lumbering, not always intentional postures – not just around Taiwan, but also in terms of tightening a noose around China. For the fundamental culprit behind tensions over Taiwan lies in American decline, and especially its decline compared with the overall dynamism of Asia. As the Financial Times has observed, ‘One US official sighs that America cannot compete with the kind of money that Beijing can throw about in south-east Asia. And China’s influence stretches much further afield than its near abroad. Chinese companies are currently constructing metro systems in the capitals of Egypt and Colombia’. By flexing its superior military muscles in East Asia, Washington hopes, consciously or unconsciously, to compensate for its debt, and for the palpable decay of many of its major cities.

Paradoxically, another example of decline lies with America’s Nvidia. The world’s most valuable listed semiconductor company, with a market capitalisation of $1trillion, Nvidia relies on TSMC for inexpensive fabrication of the major chips in its AI systems. At the same time, however, the US government is in a ruckus with TSMC. The company plans to complete two factories near Phoenix, Arizona to make semiconductors just four and even three nanometres wide – even smaller, faster and more energy-efficient than its state-of-the-art 5nm products upon which not just Nvidia, but also Apple, Qualcomm and Intel depend. The price tag for TSMC’s new plants? A cool $40bn. The ruckus? TSMC has demanded a subsidy of $15bn from the US government. In return, Washington wants a share of the firm’s profits, as well as disclosure of detailed information about its operations.

That didn’t go down too well in Taipei. Indeed, TSMC might go for a second ‘fab’ in Japan, or one in Germany, to supply the European car industry. For it, neither Phoenix, nor Washington, is the only game in town.

Blundering his way out of US decline explains, in part, why President Joe Biden has added four new naval and air bases to the five it already has in the Philippines, and has gone ahead with the Australia-UK-US submarines alliance Aukus. It is also the reason why the US is always claiming the legal right to send warships through the Taiwan Strait, invoking the 1994 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea – despite never ratifying that treaty.

Nevertheless, the CCP’s conduct has also been reprehensible, not just over the air defence identification zone (ADIZ) of Taiwan, but also in building and annexing islands throughout the South China Sea and elsewhere. Rattled, Biden ordered CIA director Bill Burns to meet his counterparts in China last month to try to cool things down – only for defence secretary Lloyd Austin to slam Beijing for not engaging in ‘dialogue’ with the US military.

Like America’s sanctions against the export of chips to China, and a recent trade deal it has concluded with Taipei, its constant rearmament of Taiwan carries dangers of its own. So does the increasing number of violations of Taiwanese airspace by Chinese jets. On top of this, Japan and Australia have committed to substantial rearmament, while both Tokyo (with reservations) and South Korea (with fewer) have, in recent months, sided with Taiwan against China. Meanwhile, two regional wild cards exist in Russia (still technically at war with Japan over the latter’s Northern Territories, four islands which it seized in 1945), and North Korea (still technically at war with South Korea). Last, relatively impotent European states have made new gestures in favour of Taiwan: Germany will deploy two navy vessels in the Indo-Pacific next year, and Rishi Sunak, having signed a defence deal with Japan, has committed a carrier strike group to same region in 2025.

Things don’t look good for Taipei. CIA director Burns has added to antagonisms by calling 2027 as the date by which Xi Jinping wants readiness for an invasion to be complete. Yet if Taiwan didn’t exist as the most likely potential flashpoint between Beijing and Washington, the latter would gravitate toward another one soon enough. 

For the present, there’s not a whole lot that democrats in Britain can do to avert war in the Taiwan Straits. But we can at least be vigilant, increase our understanding of the issues, and uphold the right of the Taiwanese people, not foreign powers, to decide their own future.

Photo: File ID 179731540 | © Ngchiyui | Dreamstime.com