Asia's Cauldron (24 page)

But here in the south of the island there is a local history distinct from that of the mainland, providing Taiwan with a foundation myth. Fort Zeelandia—which I had come to see, the purpose of my train journey—consists of three levels of walls made of brick that the Dutch brought from Batavia, the modern-day Jakarta, in Indonesia. The bricks and lime are mottled with age and graced with frangipani and pollarded banyan trees alongside them, with bronze Dutch cannons all about. Banyan limbs even climb up the fort walls themselves creating a beautiful calligraphy. The fort was actually refurbished by the Japanese occupation forces in honor of its conqueror's—Koxinga's—Japanese mother. Statues of Koxinga are ever present here in Tainan City, where the heavy, humid air and sleepy ambience is evocative of Southeast Asia. It is clear by the statues of Chiang Kai-shek that he saw himself as the new Koxinga, who also came from the mainland.

Fort Zeelandia no longer stands sentinel against the sea, but is surrounded by narrow downtown streets, the product of reclaimed land, so that much of its magic is lost. And yet, to judge by the hordes of Taiwanese young and old passing through its bastions, the fort retains its power as a symbol of a history unique to the island. It leads
one to pose the question, Just how strong now is Taiwanese identity? Given how prosperous they have become, would Taiwanese actually fight and sacrifice for their independence from the mainland, if it ever came to that? Or would they allow themselves to be subsumed by Beijing, if only their freedom and not their living standards were compromised? The diplomats and defense officials I met in Taipei are trying to craft a strategy so that these questions never need to get answered.

Henry C. K. Liu is the deputy director general of Taiwan's National Security Council. As an upper-middle-level official, it is at his rank—as I knew from Washington—that the real work and thinking of any administration gets done. “The longer we survive,” he told me, “the more likely that political changes will happen in mainland China itself.”
We can buy time, it is all about playing a weak hand well
was what I heard throughout Taipei. In the meantime, Liu said, “we must try our best to maintain the status quo” through creative diplomacy and hard military power. “We can only try, through our own defense capabilities, to make those on the mainland see that the use of military force is unthinkable.” He quoted Sun Tzu, the great Chinese philosopher of antiquity, that “the greatest strategy is never having to fight.”

Liu had his worries. How reliable was the United States over the long term? The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been a shock for Taiwanese officials. Though they officially supported the American military efforts, they were chilled by just how much events in the Middle East had diverted the United States from its responsibilities in Asia. Then there was the inexorable march of Chinese military power itself, which might through the combination of such assets as land-based missiles, submarines, space-based surveillance systems, cyber-attacks, over-the-horizon radar, unmanned aerial vehicles, and small craft disguised as commercial vessels create an anti-access bubble complicating the American military's ability to approach the Chinese mainland, including the Taiwan Strait.
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Finally there was an awareness
that three quiet and predictable decades in Beijing—ever since Deng Xiaoping's consolidation of power—were giving way to more political turmoil on the mainland. Indeed, things were about to get more interesting for Taiwan.

It was even possible that despite the hopes for political liberalization in Beijing, the current group of elite communist technocrats constituted the friendliest government on the mainland that Taiwan was going to get at least in the short run. As Professor Szu-yin Ho of Taipei's National Chengchi University explained to me: “Democracies may not fight each other, but that may not be true of a country in the early phases of democratization.” For the loosening of central control in Beijing could unleash more unruly and nationalistic forces, as each new party and faction competes to be more patriotic than the next one. This was Taiwan's nightmare. “The benign period on the mainland may be ending,” Professor Ho said.

In fact, as he argued, the Communist Party establishment in Beijing needed Taiwan for its own economic policies. For the People's Republic of China measured itself against Taiwan the same way Malaysia measured itself against Singapore. It was the competition that the Taiwanese economic model offered that spurred Beijing's rulers to want to improve living standards for their own people.

The real danger for Taiwan, I posited to Professor Ho, was Finlandization by China. The combination of 1,500 land-based missiles aimed at Taiwan from the mainland, even as hundreds of commercial flights a week linked the mainland with the island, meant that Taiwan would quietly be captured by China without the latter needing to invade. But he strongly disagreed. He pointed out that Finland's independence during the Cold War was compromised by the Soviet Union because the two nations shared a long land border, enabling Soviet intimidation. Vietnam, too, has a significant land border with China so it also can be Finlandized. “But we have the Taiwan Strait,” he explained, which as narrow as it is nevertheless is almost five times as wide as the English Channel. Ho and I then both recalled University of Chicago Professor John Mearsheimer's theory of the “stopping power of water.”
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Navies could land on beachheads, Mearsheimer
wrote, but sending a land force inland to permanently occupy a subject population across the seas was exceedingly difficult. And so China's military would continue to both enlarge and improve, with more and better submarines, surface warships, and fighter jets—and better-trained crews to man them. A day might even come in the foreseeable future when the United States Navy and Air Force would be unable to deter an attack on Taiwan. But Beijing would still have the problem of occupying the island. And that problem would persist even in the face of a new correlation of forces in the Western Pacific, in which American military unipolarity gave way to a bipolar order with China.

Might Taiwan become like Hong Kong, a part of China that was nevertheless allowed a large degree of self-governance along with a singular identity? Again, the answer was no. Ho explained that besides Taiwan's island geography, Taiwan had another advantage that Hong Kong lacked: “political symbolism,” which was the product of a specific nation-building myth. The Guomindang had waged an epic struggle against Mao's communists and lost, and then retreated across the sea to Taiwan, where, with all hope seemingly gone, it built a dynamic society. Hong Kong was merely a trading post with no such story to inspire a local defense.

Lastly, Taiwan survived through feverish, innovative diplomacy. It may have had diplomatic relations with only about two dozen countries thanks to Chinese intimidation, so that many serving foreign diplomats around the world perforce avoid the island altogether. But Taiwan assiduously cultivated past and future diplomats in many countries, knowing that they still wielded influence in their respective capitals. It constantly invited journalists like myself for visits where intensive rounds of one-on-one meetings were offered. More isolated than the Israelis, the Taiwanese were less bitter about it. No one in Taipei had chips on their shoulder. It was a place you instantly liked. And the Taiwanese were sly: such charm was part of their strategy.

“In the Melian Dialogue,” Ho said, paraphrasing Thucydides, “the Athenians told the inhabitants of Milos that
the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must
. But that brutal law of
nature does not operate to the same extent in a globalized world of intense interconnectivity, where Taiwan is not alone and therefore not as vulnerable as Milos was.”

Yet with all the smiles, courtesy, small gifts provided me, and talk of the “soft power of persuasion,” there was a tough, inflexible, and steely edge to Taiwanese policy.
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Andrew Yang, the vice minister of national defense, had a massive map in his office of Taiwan, the Taiwan Strait, and the nearby mainland. He pointed out a wide, semicircular arc reaching deep into the mainland that constituted the air defense identification zone over which Taiwan conducted twenty-four-hour surveillance. “We have been doing this for decades. Our mantra is air defense and sea control. There will be no blockades, no amphibious landings to our detriment. If they bomb our runways, our fighter jets will use our superhighways.” One of his aides pointed out to me the fewer than a handful of places on the Taiwanese coast where the mainland Chinese could attempt amphibious landings. “They have few options because of geography. If they tried, they would have the same horrible experience of U.S. Marines assaulting Japanese-held islands in the Pacific in World War II. We will be the defenders, and the defenders have the advantage.”

Referring to a 2009 study by the RAND Corporation, suggesting that by 2020 the United States might no longer be able to militarily defend Taiwan, Yang called the report “too much arithmetic.” It left out the intangibles of just what would be required to conquer the island. Again, there was a reference to Mearsheimer: holding a beachhead and then moving large forces inland is just plain hard. Then there was the North Korea factor, which few spoke about these days in connection to Taiwan. It was the Korean War of 1950–1953, and China's epic military involvement in it, that saved Taiwan from an invasion by the mainland at a time when Chiang Kai-shek's new regime was at its most vulnerable. If over the next quarter century the regime in Pyongyang falters, in whatever way, China would be too tied down with problems in the Korean Peninsula to even contemplate an invasion of Taiwan.

Of course, there were many other scenarios short of an actual invasion in which China could overwhelm Taiwan, thus forcing a political capitulation of sorts by Taipei. For example, a protracted campaign of Chinese cyber-warfare aimed at Taiwan's power grids and other infrastructure could undermine morale on the island. Yang understood all this, yet continued to talk about indigenous air defense, Patriot missile batteries, Taiwan's desperate need for the United States to retrofit its F-16A/B fighter jets, as well as sell Taiwan the more powerful F-16C/Ds. What Taiwan really required, he told me, was the new vertical launch F-35Bs, thereby undermining China's strategy of bombing the island's runways. He and other officials complained to me about their thirty-five-year-old F-5s, which were quite literally ready for museums.

The numbers were daunting, with the mainland's armed forces increasingly outpacing those of the island. Taiwan had 430 fighter jets; mainland China thousands, with seven hundred of them assigned to coastal areas near Taiwan. But with Taiwan's economy growing at only 3 to 5 percent annually in recent years, Taipei in any case was having trouble paying for arms purchases, and that's if it could arrange them in the first place. Most countries would incur Beijing's wrath by selling Taiwan weapons and transferring the latest military technology to Taipei. Even the United States had exquisite diplomatic calculations to make: just how much could Washington sell Taipei—and what quality of hardware and software could it pass on to the Taiwanese military—without fundamentally damaging its relations with Beijing, with which it had far more equities at risk.

The Taiwanese, Yang told me, also needed more underwater mines to deter Chinese amphibious ships from approaching the island, as well as new submarines to replace their 1970s subs from the Netherlands. But who would sell it to them? The United States manufactured only nuclear-powered subs; not the ultra-quiet diesel-electric ones in which Taiwan was interested. As far as third countries were concerned, again there was the problem of incurring Beijing's ire. Meanwhile, the Taiwanese legislature had recently levied funds to field a squadron of Hsun Hai fast patrol boats, the kind that could hide in caves and shelters around the island's rough coast, in order to
conduct independent operations in “wolf packs” against enemy shipping.
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It was a decidedly mixed picture, if not a bit dreary, as far as Taiwan's defense was concerned. What Taiwan wanted and what it had were two different things. But through it all, the message I got was that Taiwan would remain just militarily formidable enough to make any kind of armed intervention from the mainland fanciful. And yet, the question remained:

Given Beijing's seemingly inexorable air and naval buildup in the Western Pacific, was there a point where Taiwan—though not as geographically vulnerable as Finland during the Cold War—would still have to politically accommodate the mainland more than it already was doing? Could the Chinese in the future be able to exercise an invisible veto power over who is elected to run Taiwan? Could certain prospective candidates and ministers be excluded from office because they are judged too hostile to China? In other words, Beijing could have a larger and larger vote in future Taiwanese elections. The United States undermined China's attempt at intimidation during the 1996 Taiwanese elections through a show of force. But China's own growing capabilities make that less likely in the future. With 40 percent of Taiwanese exports going to the mainland, was Taiwan's de facto independence already slipping away?
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Taiwanese president Ma Ying-jeou was presently upholding the status quo with his dictum: no unification with the mainland, but no declaration of independence by Taiwan. Yet would China, in the face of its rising military power, always have to be satisfied with that?

The most vivid symbol of national and cultural pride in Taipei is the National Palace Museum. The thousands of objects here represent the material inheritance of Chinese dynasties stretching back to early antiquity. In 1948, as Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang contemplated defeat at the hands of Mao's communists, items from the Palace Museum in Beijing, the rare books from the Beijing Central Library, and artifacts from the Institute of History and Philology at the Academia Sinica were selected for removal by air and sea to Taiwan. By 1949,
almost 250,000 objects had arrived on the island in crates. It represented only about a fifth of the masterpieces in Beijing, but it was the “cream of the collection.”
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The inventory wasn't completed until 1954, with a new museum sturdily built into a pitch-dark green mountainside, and completed in 1965. The ownership of much of the material legacy of an entire civilization—however outrageous the theft from the mainland—coupled with the signal fact of Taiwanese democracy, provides Taiwan with a certain legitimacy that its lack of diplomatic relations with the outside world cannot take away.