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The Taiwan Story: How a Small Island will Dictate the Global Future

The Taiwan Story: How a Small Island will Dictate the Global Future


Kerry Brown is Professor of Chinese Studies and Director of the Lau China Institute at King’s College, London. He is the author of the newly published book The Taiwan Story.

In mid-October 2024, the second occurrence of military exercises around the coast of Taiwan, which the Chinese call `Joint Sword’, have apparently just concluded. The first happened in May. Both were connected to the position of the newly elected president, William Lai Ching-te on the island’s status. In his inauguration speech on 20 May, Lai told Beijing to stop threatening Taiwan and accept its existence as a democracy.  In early October, he repeated the sentiments, demanding that attempts to `encroach on Taiwan’s sovereignty’ be resisted and stop. Beijing’s response was to show its wounded feelings through deploying its navy.

Lai was never going to be a leader to Beijing’s taste. A longstanding member of the Democratic Progressive Party, created in the mid-1980s as the first organised opposition to the ruling Nationalists, Lai is viewed as someone on the side of harder support for autonomy and independence. And while he has steered away since his election in January, and coming to office in May from overtly supporting a total move to sever links with Beijing, it is clear that he remains distrusted and his every word pored over by the People’s Republic. More often than not, as the events in October showed, they find something to take offence at.

Lai is undoubtedly sincere in his support for Taiwan’s clearer international status and the ways it preserves its security. But no one today should be complacent about how things might turn out if the situation veers out of control and he misjudges the situation. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 prompted some to compare this with what might happen in the South China Sea if China itself launched an attack on a place it has long claimed is part of its own legitimate territory. But trying to draw parallels only goes so far. Russia’s brutal and violent assault on its neighbour was bad. But if China and Taiwan come to blows, we will be looking not at a regional but a global conflict of multiple levels more destructiveness and severity.

That is because this war, if it ever happened, would not be about two parties, but drag in everyone else on the planet. The US will be pushed to decide if it should take action, and would find it hard to stay out. Taiwan is not a formal treaty ally, because since 1979 Washington has recognised the People’s Republic as the sole government of China rather than the Republic of Taiwan. But it committed as far as it could in an Act of Congress that year to safeguarding Taipei’s defence and security, and over the years has sold military technology and kit to it. And since Taiwan’s adoption of democracy in the 1990s, the links between the superpower and what Beijing continues to call a `renegade province’ have deepened. It would feel under immense moral and political pressure to involve itself.

Conflict across the Taiwan Strait therefore stands a high likelihood of bringing the US and China in direct conflict with each other. The two largest military powers that have ever existed, the world’s first and second largest economies, with their respective but very different alliance systems, would face each other in an unprecedented situation. One does not need to be a military specialist to know that two ideologically opposed, antagonistic, nuclear armed powers fighting with each other offers nothing but bad news.

Today, the costs politically, economically and diplomatically for China were it to engage in a full-on embargo or an amphibious assault on Taiwan are dizzyingly high. That at least provides some level of restraint to its behaviour. The moment that China did take concerted action, we would cross from a world of phoney superpower wars to one of real-life fight. Important supply routes would be blocked. Taiwan currently supplies many of the world’s highest tech superconductors. The lack of those would cause a great part of the global economy to slow down. The geopolitical implications of China and the US now struggling with each other in a war scenario would create a new world – one where both powers would move from symbolic contestation and grievance with each other to outright conflict and opposition.

Taiwan matters because it is the single most likely cause of the US and China being unable to manage their current long list of issues with each other and coming to blows. The lack of overt physical clashes in recent decades might have lulled the world into a false sense of security. But the brute fact today is that issues have never been more tense and uncertain for how the Taiwan challenge is managed. Twenty-three million people on the island live in perpetual uncertainty and tension. While they see themselves as Taiwanese in identity, according to surveys they mostly also support the status quo, where the situation of ambiguity and vagueness around the One China policy at least preserves a level of agency and security for them.

However well intended, the involvement of foreign politicians and observers in this issue is sometimes as much a problem as a help. Standing by Taiwan to the extent that it comes across almost as trying to instrumentalise the issue to antagonise and push back against China is a dangerous game. However unexciting, neutrality and observing the commitment to `One China’ constructed painstakingly in the 1970s, which left enough space for Taiwan to exist with a special status and at least survive, for half a century have preserved a kind if peace, and allowed Taiwan to politically, economically and socially develop.

`The Taiwan Story’ (`Why Taiwan Matters’ in the US) is an attempt to set out why Taiwan as an issue has happened, and where it stands today. It starts from looking at what Taiwan is in itself, as a society with rich diversity and much uniqueness, and then how its history, economy and politics have developed over the decades. The book also contains an assessment of what a scenario would look like were China ever to try to resolve the issue, and why everything has to be done to ensure this moment is never reached. In a world where military figures in the US, Asia and elsewhere are talking of 2027 being the moment when something might happen, I hope my book contributes a little to trying to push that date back as far in the future as possible. In October 2024, the military drills around the island stopped after a few days. Let’s hope we will never see a time when they carry on to the point where they escalate into a war. That would be a tragedy for Taiwan, for China, and for the world. It must never happen, and my book tries to explain as clearly as it can why that is.


The opinions expressed are those of the contributor, not of the RSAA.


New release from Professor Kerry Brown –

The Taiwan Story: How a Small Island Will Dictate the Global Future
When the bloody Chinese Civil War concluded in 1949, two Chinas were born. Mao’s Communists won and took China’s mainland; Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists fled to Taiwan island. Since then, China and Taiwan have drifted into being separate political and cultural entities.

Taiwan is now a flourishing democracy and an economic success story. It is a free and vibrant society. For the United States and the West, the island is a bastion of freedom against China’s assertive presence in the region. And yet China, increasingly bellicose under Xi Jinping, insists Taiwan is part of its territory and must be returned to it. Should China blockade the island and mount an invasion, it would set off a chain reaction that would pitch it against the US – escalating a regional war into a global one. Taiwan is thus a geopolitical powder keg.

The Taiwan Story helps us understand how and why we’ve arrived at this dangerous moment in history. With unparalleled access to Taiwan’s political leaders and a deep understanding of the island’s history and culture, Professor Kerry Brown provides a new reading of Taiwan, its twenty-three million people, and how they navigate being caught in this frightening geopolitical standoff. This is the essential book delving into Taiwan’s unique story, buried beneath the headlines, told in an accessible, expert and urgent way.

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