By Chris Buckley and Amy Chang Chien
The long-smoldering tensions between China and Taiwan have been entering a more precarious phase. In recent months, Beijing has threatened to severely punish Taiwanese citizens who challenge China’s claim to the island. More Chinese jets have buzzed the skies near it. Chinese coast guard ships have sailed near Taiwan’s outer islands.
And both sides have dug deeper into their opposing political positions.
When Lai Ching-te became Taiwan’s president in May, he vowed to stick with the China policies of his predecessor, Tsai Ing-wen. Tsai sought to avoid confrontation even as she defended Taiwan’s right to self-rule and rejected Beijing’s assertion of sovereignty.
Yet Lai, while keeping Taiwan’s basic policy toward China unchanged, has been blunter in rebuffing its demands. Tsai, a former trade law specialist, chose her words about China with care. Lai, who rose as a more plain-spoken politician, sees a need to more sharply lay out Taiwan’s separate status.
“In his judgment, there’s nothing to be gained from being ambiguous — the conclusion is that Beijing is going to press them, no matter what,” said David Sacks, a fellow for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations who analyzes relations between Taiwan and China.
“For decades, cross-strait relations really lay on ambiguities and not saying what you really think, but I think that a lot of that is being eliminated,” Sacks said. “There’s less room for maneuverability.”
This shift does not mean that war or regional crisis looms. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, is focused on fixing its economy and has indicated that he wants to keep tensions with the United States, Taiwan’s security partner, in check. Chinese leaders also still hope to absorb Taiwan peacefully, and they have maintained contacts with the island’s opposition Nationalist Party, which favors closer ties with Beijing.
But China’s pressure tactics are likely to present Lai with hard choices about how and when to push back or exercise restraint.
“In this new chapter, it’s like the tensions become the norm,” Chen Kuan-ting, a lawmaker from Lai’s Democratic Progressive Party, said in an interview.
“Trying to contain us and squeeze us tighter, trying to get us like this,” Chen said, bracing his arms into a tightening hold. “It’s not a hug.”
Taiwan’s leader speaks his mind.
Lai is the second president in a row from the Democratic Progressive Party, which has turned to Western partners to hold China at bay.
A former mayor and lawmaker, Lai rose in the defiant traditions of his party. Even before Lai’s election, Beijing reviled him for describing himself in 2017 as a “pragmatic worker for Taiwan’s independence,” words meant to signal that he would defend Taiwan’s autonomy without pursuing formal independence.
Still, officials in Beijing seemed taken aback by how starkly he drew a line between Taiwan and China in his high-profile May inauguration speech, several analysts said.
In the speech, Lai asserted that dialogue with Beijing is only possible if the two sides negotiate as separate equals, not — as Beijing wants — based on the idea that each side accepts that it is part of one Chinese nation.
Past Taiwanese presidents have also said that China and Taiwan should treat each other as distinct equals. But Beijing took more umbrage this time, partly because he said so in his inauguration speech, a manifesto for his four-year term, said Bonnie S. Glaser, an analyst of Taiwan and China at the German Marshall Fund of the United States.
“He just wanted to convey clearly that the two sides of the strait — they’re two separate states,” Glaser said. “He wants to, basically, begin his four years setting that as the base line, and telling the Chinese that they have to accept it.”
In an interview with Time magazine, Lai set out his position: “According to international law, we are already a sovereign and independent country.”
He wants Taiwan’s military to be better prepared.
Lai’s supporters say his clearer position is part of an effort to bring more urgency to building up Taiwan’s resilience against threats from China.
His new defense minister, Wellington Koo, has signaled that he wants to shake up the armed forces. He started by putting an end to ceremonial formalities like goose-step marching in parades.
Lai has vowed to continue Taiwan’s military buildup, and some experts argue that the island should lengthen conscription — already extended recently to 12 months — to amass enough well-trained troops to deter Beijing.
While China’s leader, Xi, has dismissed speculation that he has a plan to invade Taiwan in the coming years, many Taiwanese officials are convinced that their island will be vulnerable unless it quickly steps up preparedness. The upcoming presidential election in the United States adds another element of unpredictability to the tensions.
“The situation is heading in the direction of greater conflict,” I-Chung Lai, the president of the Prospect Foundation, a think tank affiliated with the Taiwanese government, said at a seminar in Taipei this month. “Fundamentally, we can’t see any final balancing point.”
China is putting the squeeze on Taiwan.
More than 300 Chinese military aircraft flew near Taiwan in June, the second-highest monthly count since Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense began regularly issuing such data in 2020, according to PLATracker, a site that analyzes the data.
China has sent groups of coast guard ships into waters off Kinmen, a Taiwan-controlled island near the Chinese coast, more than 30 times in recent months, eroding a long-standing understanding against such incursions. The forays began after two Chinese fishermen died in the area in February, when their boat capsized as they tried to flee the Taiwanese coast guard.
Chinese military officials have said that they will not be letting up.
“If Taiwan independence tries to take one step forward, we‘ll take one step forward with our retaliatory measures, until full unification of the motherland is achieved,” Senior Col. Wu Qian, a spokesperson for China’s Ministry of National Defense, said in a brief interview last month in Singapore.
For all that military swagger, Chinese leaders seem concerned that their warnings are not having the desired effect on opinion in Taiwan, said Lyle J. Morris, a senior fellow in the Center for China Analysis under the Asia Society. “I see increasing worry that Beijing’s levers of influence over Taiwan are narrowing,” he said, citing comments from Chinese officials.
That anxiety, Morris added, seemed to partly motivate China’s release of legal guidelines last month that raised the threat of imprisonment — even execution, in extreme cases — for people deemed to be “Taiwan independence die-hards.”
Chinese law had already banned pro-independence activity, but the new guidelines went into greater detail about the prohibited conduct and the potential punishments.
In response, Taiwan warned its citizens not to travel to China unless necessary. Lai also spoke out about the new rules.
“Democracy is not a crime; autocracy is what’s truly malicious,” he wrote on social media. “Once again, I urge China to choose dialogue with Taiwan’s democratically elected government.”
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