The message was loud and clear. Speaking at the opening of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) congress this October, China’s supreme leader Xi Jinping vowed never to give up on the option of using force against Taiwan. He said ‘the wheels of history are rolling on towards China’s reunification and the rejuvenation of the Chinese nation’.

The same meeting amended the CCP’s constitution, committing the party to ‘resolutely oppose and contain Taiwanese independence’ and strengthen the military towards ‘unification of the motherland’. This was first time the party’s constitution has explicitly rejected Taiwan’s independence, and follow-up can be expected. Indeed, the following month, Xi told the army to ‘comprehensively strengthen military training in preparation for war’.

Before this, in August, China published a white paper saying that the ‘problem’ of Taiwan can’t ‘be passed down from one generation to the next’, and only unification could stop Taiwan being invaded by another country.

China’s rhetoric is escalating. The future of Taiwan – an island group with a population of almost 24 million people – has never seemed so uncertain. After a year in which Russia tore up the rule book to invade a country it couldn’t control, could something similar be on the cards in East Asia?

An ambiguous status quo

Despite Xi’s talk of reunification, Taiwan has never been part of Communist China. When the CCP took control of the mainland at the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the defeated government fled to Taiwan. Both governments insisted they were the legitimate rulers of the entire Chinese territory.

The government that established itself in Taiwan was a founding member of the United Nations (UN) and until 1971 held China’s seat. Most states initially recognised Taiwan rather than China but subsequently almost all of them switched, most of them in the 1970s after the USA established diplomatic relations with China. Only 13 UN member states currently recognise Taiwan, and there have been several recent changes of allegiance, including by Kiribati, Nicaragua and Solomon Islands, as China keeps up its campaign of encouraging states to switch their recognition.

Taiwan was long an autocracy under the rule of Chiang Kai-shek, who led the country with an iron fist until his death in 1975, and martial law remained in place until 1987. Since then, Taiwan has made a dramatic transformation into a flourishing democracy. It held its first direct presidential election in 1996 and since then elections have been held routinely every four years, with high turnout and routine peaceful changes of government, with both major parties having held power. It also now has a highly developed economy, assessed to be Asia’s eighth-largest, specialising in microchip manufacturing.

While Taiwan no longer claims to be the government of the whole of China, the CCP continues to maintain that Taiwan is part of China and must therefore come under its control. It has suggested that Taiwan could be incorporated under the ‘one country, two systems’ approach that supposedly applied to Hong Kong.

The possibility of such an arrangement derives from the so-called 1992 Consensus. While the precise outcome of this meeting between officials of both countries is disputed and it was only put forward some years after the meeting took place, its essence is the idea of ‘one China with different interpretations’, a formula that conveniently enables different emphases: China tends to stress the first part and Taiwan the second.

Over the years the relationship between China and Taiwan has ebbed and flowed, depending on the stance of the people in power. While CCP rule in China is a constant, much can depend on the personalities of its leaders. In Taiwan, relations have partly been influenced by which of the two main political parties is in power: the Kuomintang (KMT) or the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

The KMT, for many years the ruling party, has historically sought warmer relations with the mainland and opposed any move towards Taiwan formally declaring independence. But as its support has declined, it has moved away from talk of unification and recently distanced itself from the 1992 Consensus.

The DPP, the current ruling party, favours the promotion of a distinctly Taiwanese national identity. It holds that Taiwan is already an independent nation, which makes a declaration of independence unnecessary. President Tsai Ing-wen, who was re-elected by a landslide in 2020, opposes the 1992 Consensus.

While the debate in Taiwan is complex and nuanced, around 85 per cent of people want to maintain the country’s current status, as shown by a 2021 poll by the Mainland Affairs Council, the government agency responsible for relations with China. There is an independence movement and several political parties call for a referendum on the issue – a mechanism that since 2003 can be triggered by a citizens’ initiative – but they attracted little support in the 2020 parliamentary election.

One reason for this is that the cost of a formal declaration of independence would be unacceptably high: it would bring the wrath of China, almost certainly triggering military action.

As a result of the current situation, Taiwan remains locked out of the normal world of international relations: it can’t maintain conventional bilateral relations with most states, forcing it to adopt less formal forms of exchange and representation. It’s also denied membership of global bodies. This has been a source of particular frustration during the COVID-19 pandemic, with Taiwan denied even observer status at the World Health Organization at China’s insistence.

It’s clearly unfair that a democratic country is denied self-determination out of fear of the reaction of a powerful authoritarian state. China reacts to the slightest political shift in Taiwan with a hostility that inhibits full discussion of the country’s future. But despite the challenges, for many Taiwanese people, the status quo represents the best available option.

Taiwan’s allies want to uphold the status quo too. The USA has increasingly moved towards high-level relations with Taiwan and supplies most of its arms under a law that obliges it to ensure Taiwan has the means to defend itself. In September US President Joe Biden repeated his statement that the USA would defend Taiwan if China invaded it. But clearly the USA has no wish to get into a destructive war with China. Its policy is deliberately ambiguous, recognising the Chinese government as the sole government of China while also seeking to engage constructively with Taiwan.

The problem is that one powerful force is profoundly dissatisfied with the status quo and is pushing to change it: the government of China.

What’s in it for China?

China has never given up its claim to Taiwan, but under Xi the issue has grown in priority, and the possibility of a forced annexation can’t be ruled out. China has several self-interested objectives to weigh against the global outrage this would trigger. For a start, it would absorb a smaller but particularly high-performing and technologically advanced economy.

Control of Taiwan’s islands would also have important strategic advantages. It would give China a new base at a crucial gateway between the East China and South China seas, and a spearhead into the Philippine Sea. China is involved in a series of territorial disputes with other Asian states, including Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines and Vietnam. Control of Taiwan and its surrounding waters could give China power over key shipping routes through which around a third of the world’s trade passes. It would disrupt a key concept in the USA’s regional security policy, the ‘island chain strategy’, in which a series of islands act as a barrier between China and the Pacific.

China’s sense of itself as a superpower is also undermined by its inability to control all of the territory that it asserts to be China. The continued existence of an independent Taiwan represents an embarrassing rebuke to the Chinese model. On its doorstep, it suggests another China is possible: one with both a thriving democracy and economy, where people are free to change the president and ruling party. Across the strait from an authoritarian state that is currently cracking down on human rights is one that is extending them: one that in 2019 became the first Asian country to recognise same-sex marriage.

Of course, life in Taiwan isn’t perfect. Underneath its ‘economic miracle’ lie serious challenges of poverty, economic inequality and the denial of labour rights, particularly for migrant workers. Its Indigenous population has long been subject to discrimination. But people are free to take action to demand these issues be addressed. Recent years have seen multiple protests, including by labour groups, which along with strikes have succeeded in winning concessions from employers. This kind of concerted public action is unimaginable in China.

Under Xi’s control, China has become even more authoritarian. Xi has recently taken total control of all levers of power and filled key agencies – including the military – with loyalists. He has moved to eradicate not only political dissent but also any potential rival form of identity other than loyalty to the CCP and its leader.

Evidence of this is the brutal treatment of China’s Xinjiang region, where a largely Muslim majority once enjoyed a distinct way of life. Xi has acted to brutally suppress it through an industrial-level programme of mass incarceration and re-education in labour camps. Expressions of Islamic identity have been banned and CCP supporters imported into the region. This is the further application of an approach tested in Tibet.

Xi’s plan can be further seen in the repression of Hong Kong’s democracy movement. Hong Kong’s distinct way of life – once much more open than on the mainland, with people far more able to speak freely, express dissent and protest – has been brought to a brutal end. Democracy campaigners have been handed long jail sentences or forced to flee. Laws have been changed to integrate Hong Kong with the mainland. The education system now only offers China’s version of history and imposes the mainland’s Mandarin language over local Cantonese. As a result, Hong Kong is increasingly indistinguishable from China.

When the UK handed Hong Kong over to China in 1997, it was under an agreement that the country would progress towards universal suffrage. Under the ‘one country, two systems’ slogan China now offers Taiwan, its special status was supposedly guaranteed for 50 years. But China unilaterally swept it away.

Taiwan represents Xi’s big piece of unfinished business. His great project of ‘rejuvenation’ is incomplete without it becoming part of China. It was described as a requirement in Xi’s report to the CCP congress.

Recent flashpoints

The latest event that raised the stakes was the visit in August by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives. Pelosi paid Taiwan a brief, largely symbolic visit as part of a tour of several Asian countries. China’s response was a show of military force. It held military exercises involving live fire in the seas around Taiwan, along with a simulated blockade. Incursions across the median line – an unofficial boundary between the two countries – used to be rare, but during the week of the visit Chinese planes crossed it more than 100 times.

China saw Pelosi’s visit as a provocation. But there’s little it doesn’t see that way. These were far from its first military exercises. Last August it did similar, following what it referred to as provocations – including the establishment of an office representing Taiwan in Lithuania. Further multiple incursions into the buffer zone came around 1 October 2021, China’s national day, following the launch of a joint defence partnership between Australia, the UK and the USA.

The relationship has been further strained over the question of membership of the regional trade deal, the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, which last year both China and Taiwan applied to join, and by Taiwan’s inclusion in the USA’s Summit for Democracy in December 2021. Any time Taiwan acts as an independent nation it brings a frosty response from China.

Military exercises and incursions are in danger of becoming routine, presumably aimed at eroding Taiwanese morale and grinding people into seeing submission as inevitable. The hope may even be to create a crisis that enables military escalation.

The Taiwanese government has accused China of using ‘grey zone’ tactics, including drone incursions, in an attempt at intimidation. In September, for the first time Taiwan shot down a Chinese drone, which had entered the airspace over a Taiwanese islet close to China’s coast.

China also targets a vast array of disinformation and propaganda at Taiwanese people. Taiwan tops the Digital Society Project’s global ranking of countries that receive online false news. Messaging apps are on the frontline of the disinformation war, spreading misleading claims about the current government and president, particularly around elections, where there is also evidence of intensive efforts to put pro-China candidates into office. During the pandemic, Chinese efforts have also sought to foster mistrust about the Taiwanese government’s COVID-19 response.

Taiwan’s civil society has become skilled at exposing Chinese propaganda efforts and mounting responses to disinformation, including by offering fact-checking services and efforts to develop media literacy.

At the same time, all the disinformation in the world hasn’t been able to disguise China’s repression of Hong Kong. This more than any other development has helped push people, including politicians and other public figures, away from China.

This March, Taiwan’s box office records were broken not by the latest Hollywood blockbuster, but by a documentary on Hong Kong’s democracy movement. Previously a supporter of unification, business leader Robert Tsao is now spending millions training people in civil defence, the fate of Hong Kong having changed his mind. Support for unification has fallen, not least because people broadly express support for Taiwan’s democratic system and see that it wouldn’t last long under China’s rule.

The will of the people

The question of Taiwan’s future is often seen through the lens of the global struggle for influence between China and the USA. China suspended some cooperation following Pelosi’s visit, including on climate change. Much attention focused on the recent meeting between Xi and Biden ahead of the G20 summit, where both leaders continued to disagree on Taiwan. But there’s a danger of losing sight of Taiwan’s people and their hopes and wishes for the future.

Since Pelosi’s visit a steady stream of politicians have made their way from the USA to Taiwan, raising the suspicion that they see it as little other than a photo opportunity useful in their election campaigns. Meanwhile Xi has insisted this is a purely domestic matter, blaming ‘foreign interference’ for rising tensions around Taiwan and warning the USA about the potential for military conflict. Countering US interference may become an eventual pretext for invasion. Xi has also appealed to the ‘majority of Taiwanese compatriots’ to get behind his plan – even though it’s clear no such majority exists.

In Taiwan’s upcoming midterm elections, later this month, people will elect a variety of city mayors, municipal politicians and other local officials. It offers a further reminder of what would be impossible under unification. Most of these posts are currently held by KMT politicians, so any switching of support towards the KPP may indicate approval for the government’s China policy.

A simultaneous referendum, if carried, will lower the voting age to 18 from 20, potentially further empowering a generation that is particularly sceptical about the prospect of closer links with China. A generational shift seems to be underway as more young people compared to older people identify themselves as exclusively and distinctly Taiwanese and reject the idea of unification. Young people also tend to have a more negative view of the Chinese government.

Whatever the outcomes of the voting in November, what is crystal clear is that people don’t want to be on the receiving end of a military invasion. This may still seem unlikely, at least in the short term – but this time last year, few were convinced that Vladimir Putin would really launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

The fierce resistance the Ukraine war has encountered and the difficulties Putin has experienced since should offer a warning. But would Xi be able to hear it? Having surrounded himself with an echo chamber of loyalists in party and military structures, there may be no one left who can argue him out of a bad idea, should he decide that force is the only way to complete his project of ‘rejuvenation’.

The possibility of this scenario is another argument for precisely what Xi opposes, and what Taiwan has and should be allowed to keep – checks and balances on power, the chance to debate and express dissent, and the right to protest when bad decisions are made.