On the menu today: I’m now in Taipei, Taiwan, and will begin the week with a broad, detailed look at why this island off the coast of Communist China is such contested real estate, the significant military threat of invasion, the psychological deadline in place, the complicated legacy of Chang Kai-shek, and whether a policy of deterrence can be maintained indefinitely.
The Contested Real Estate of Taiwan
TAIPEI, Taiwan — Back in August, when I spent about a week reporting from Ukraine, a reader who was disgruntled with my coverage wrote something along the lines of, “Why doesn’t Jim travel and report from someplace really important, like Taiwan?”
Well . . . here I am!
No, this journey was not spurred by that reader’s comment. Around the beginning of the year, the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office in New York — part of Taiwan’s de facto embassy in the U.S. — invited me to visit the country and meet with government officials and private-sector leaders to discuss a variety of topics, as you’ll read in the week ahead. I’m traveling with a group of international reporters.
We all know the score: The Taiwanese government invited me, hoping that I will write nice things about Taiwan, so that the U.S. will do everything possible to ensure the country does not disappear one day, absorbed into mainland Communist China and at the mercy of Beijing. As luck would have it, I already like Taiwan, and I want the Taiwanese people to remain free and to chart their own course for many, many years to come.
The Taiwanese are good people. And I don’t mean that they’re good because they’re good at manufacturing semiconductor chips, and that they’re only worth defending “until the U.S. achieves semiconductor independence,” as Vivek Ramaswamy contends.
They’re good because they have successfully transitioned from a one-party state operating under martial law, with some truly ugly periods of brutality in the early chapters of their short history, to a modern, thriving, multiparty democracy. Over in the United States, we tend to only notice that Taiwan has a parliament when they get into fistfights in the chamber or throw water balloons at each other. (Don’t get any ideas, Gaetz Eight!) No doubt, Taiwan’s version of democracy can be raucous, noisy, and messy. But by just about every measure, Taiwan is a free country.
Freedom House rates Taiwan a 94 out of a possible 100 in human rights, noting that the government operates with openness and transparency; citizens enjoy a free and independent media; individuals are free to practice and express their religious faith or nonbelief in public and private; scholars, researchers, and professors enjoy academic freedom; and the educational system is free from extensive political indoctrination. Individuals are free to express their personal views on political or other sensitive topics without fear of surveillance or retribution. The people of Taiwan enjoy freedom of assembly, freedom for nongovernmental organizations (although they’re required to register with the government), and an independent judiciary, and due process prevails in civil and criminal matters.
Meanwhile, that big country across the strait, the People’s Republic of China, scores a nine out of a possible 100. Couldn’t even hit double digits.
In its most recent annual report on human rights, the only complaints that the U.S. State Department had about Taiwan were about its libel and slander laws potentially chilling freedom of expression, and the number of officials indicted on corruption charges.
That freer and more open society has paid off for the Taiwanese. According to the International Monetary Fund, Taiwan’s gross domestic product per capita is about $32,000; China’s is about $12,500. Taiwan’s most recent infant-mortality rate is 3.225 deaths per 1,000 live births; China’s is 8.397 deaths per 1,000 live births. The average lifespan in Taiwan is 81 years; the average lifespan in China is about 77.5 years. And as mentioned, Taiwan is the world leader in semiconductor-chip production. Taiwan produces more than 60 percent of the world’s semiconductors and over 90 percent of the most advanced ones.
But not all is well in Taiwan.
Back in 2021, The Economist called Taiwan “the most dangerous place on earth.” (In its defense, Russia hadn’t invaded Ukraine yet, and the bloodthirsty bastards of Hamas were relatively quiet then.) The magazine called the status quo at that moment a “roiling, seething source of neurosis and doubt,” and pointed to a massive arms buildup by the Chinese military. The Pentagon reports that the Chinese military regularly conducts exercises and drills simulating the steps and operations that would be involved in an invasion of Taiwan.
Almost everyone who looks at the issue agrees that the U.S. fighting a war in the Taiwanese Strait would be enormously costly in blood and treasure for all sides, and that a Taiwanese–U.S. victory would not be guaranteed. The only true victory for the U.S. and its Taiwanese allies would be to deter the invasion from ever starting.
CIA director Robert Burns, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley have publicly said that China’s ruler, Xi Jinping, instructed China’s military to be prepared to attack and conquer Taiwan by 2027.
This is not quite an open announcement that China intends to invade Taiwan in 2027. But Xi wants to have that option available fewer than four years from now, and if you are the Taiwanese, you have to treat that as a realistic, or even likely, scenario. Taiwan’s foreign minister, Joseph Wu, said earlier this year, “We are taking the Chinese military threat very seriously. . . . I think 2027 is the year that we need to be serious about.”
Taiwan also faces tough questions about whether it is spending enough money on defense considering the scale of the threat. The good news is that Taiwan is now spending a record amount on defense. The bad news is that the record sum adds up to $19.1 billion annually, or 2.6 percent of the country’s gross domestic product. The U.S. estimates that China spends about $700 billion per year on defense instead of the publicly stated $300 billion, and some analysts argue the official numbers are a dramatic understatement. Heritage Foundation analyst Wilson Beaver wrote earlier this year, “The widely circulating figures are misleading, not least because they don’t take into account China’s far lower domestic costs for wages, weapons, facilities, and other budget items. Because of these lower costs, China literally gets more bang for the buck.”
As of 2022, Taiwan had 89,000 ground forces, while China had 416,000, just in the areas around the Taiwan Strait. China has about 150 ships, cruisers, destroyers, landing ships, and submarines, including one aircraft carrier, in the region. Taiwan has about 60, with no aircraft carriers, cruisers, or corvettes, and just two submarines. In a potential air battle, China has 700 fighter aircraft and 250 bombers in the region. Taiwan has just 300 fighter aircraft.
The presence and capacities of the U.S. Navy and Air Force would dramatically alter that balance, but note that the U.S. is not treaty-bound to defend Taiwan. We have longstanding diplomatic and military ties, and a policy of staunchly opposing any attempt to resolve the issue through military force. President Biden has habitually said that the U.S. would defend Taiwan from a Chinese invasion, and his staff keeps insisting that despite what the president just said, U.S. policies have not changed. Perhaps the dueling messages from the president and his own staffers are a new triumph of “strategic ambiguity.”
There are those who argue that the threat of a Chinese invasion is somewhat overblown. Retired U.S. Air Force colonel Mike Pietrucha wrote at War on the Rocks in 2022 that the Chinese People’s Liberation Army and PLA Navy (PLAN)* have never experienced anything remotely like the kind of large-scale operation that an invasion of Taiwan would be, and just don’t have enough ships and equipment to pull off a successful conquest:
When we look at the Chinese equivalent, it becomes clear that the Chinese military simply does not have the naval assets or the auxiliary forces necessary to execute an amphibious operation on the necessary scale. The count of every PLAN amphibious ship currently operational or known to be under construction, plus naval troop-carrying auxiliaries, totals up to 128 ships of 744,370 tons, but their aggregate personnel, cargo, and vehicle capacity are less than half that of the older WWII vessels. Adding on the older PLA tank landing ships not owned by the Navy does not nearly make up the difference. Furthermore, the total PRC inventory of small landing craft is less than half of what the Americans had embarked off Sicily, limiting the size and number of landing waves. While the PLAN has helicopters ad Operation Husky did not, the PLAN is in the unenviable position of having fewer navalized transport helicopters than the theoretical capacity of their existing and planned fleet. Helicopters will not substitute for the personnel landing craft, although they can deliver payloads beyond the shoreline — in a benign environment.
Then again, Russia’s army was under-equipped and under-prepared in February 2022, and Vladimir Putin went ahead with a brutal, bloody war of conquest anyway. It looks like everybody heeds the late Donald Rumsfeld’s assessment that you “go to war with the army you have.”
If I told you that the Chinese military intended to be prepared to invade Hawaii, or Alaska, or your hometown by 2027, you would want those places to be as prepared as possible.
Taiwan is functionally independent. It has defined and clear borders and exercises control over the territory within those borders. Its president and legislature make their own decisions; they do not answer to Xi Jinping or anyone else in the government in Beijing. They are elected by the Taiwanese people, not by the people in the mainland. Taiwan has its own constitution, adopted in 1946. Taiwan has its own currency, issues its own passports, salutes its own flag, sings its own national anthem, and competes as “Chinese Taipei” in the Olympics and World Cup. But the United Nations refers to Taiwan as “Taiwan, Province of China.” (The country has gradually moved away from using the name “Republic of China” to avoid confusion with that other China.)
Taiwan maintains these expressions of independence in the face of China bringing all kinds of pressure upon other countries to not treat Taiwan as a separate, independent country. Earlier this year, Honduras abandoned its formal ties to Taiwan and established diplomatic ties with Beijing. The remaining countries that recognize Taiwan are Belize, Guatemala, Haiti, the Holy See, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, Paraguay, St Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Eswatini, and Tuvalu. No offense intended to any of those countries, but they are not exactly an all-star team of geopolitical power.
You notice the United States is not on that list. The U.S. has a “One China” policy, which declares that the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government of China, acknowledges that the PRC insists Taiwan is part of its territory but does not affirm that claim, and asserts that cross-strait differences must be resolved peacefully. We reserve the right to send Taiwan arms to ensure that the dispute is not resolved with military force, and year by year, we sell the Taiwanese billions of dollars’ worth of weapons.
The State Department describes itself as having “a robust unofficial relationship” with Taiwan, which makes it sound like we’re seeing them on the down low.
Since 1979, when the U.S. officially recognized Communist China, no U.S. president has visited Taiwan. (Dwight Eisenhower made a state visit in 1960.) This is why it was a big deal when former speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi visited in 2022, and when then-speaker Kevin McCarthy welcomed Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, in a meeting in California earlier this year. Because the U.S. does not recognize Taiwan as an independent state, these are not state-to-state visits and are characterized as private visits.
This island, once called Isla Formosa, Portuguese for “beautiful island,” was part of the Japanese empire from 1895 to the end of World War II. General Order Number One said: “The senior Japanese Commanders and all ground, sea, air and auxiliary forces within China, (excluding Manchuria). Formosa and French Indo-China North of 16 degrees North latitude, shall surrender to Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek,” making the island part of the Republic of China.
China’s Civil War started way back in 1927, paused during World War II and the Japanese invasion, and then restarted after Japan surrendered. On one side were the Chinese Nationalists, led by Chiang Kai-shek, and on the other side were the Communists, led by Mao Zedong. After four years of bloody fighting, the Communists gained the upper hand, and the Nationalists fled to Formosa.
Chang Kai-shek’s legacy is . . . complicated. Any man who fought Mao spent his life standing up against an indisputable evil, but his rule in Taiwan until 1975 included its own abrogation of human rights, suppression of dissent, brutal crackdowns and political purges, and innocent lives cut way too short. But he was a staunch ally of the U.S., and also oversaw remarkable economic development and prosperity.
(My dad shook Chang Kai-shek’s hand while he was serving in the U.S. Navy, under Admiral Thomas Moorer, and judging from the frequency with which I have heard that story, that is the most important event in Taiwanese history.) From the 1970s to the 1990s, Taiwan underwent a long and slow — but ultimately successful — transition to democracy.
And just like the Kennedys and Bushes and Clintons in the U.S., Taiwan has its own political dynasties. Chiang Wan-an, the current mayor of Taipei, is Chiang Kai-shek’s great-grandson.
On paper, Communist China and its military were always much larger than Taiwan and its military. But Taiwan has always had enough arms and determination to make any attempted conquest of its territory a likely pyrrhic victory — China would lose ungodly sums of men and materiel, only to possess a charred wreck of an island at the end. It was something akin to mutually assured destruction; China could only win the war at a price that even the most nationalist, foolhardy, or aggressive leader in Beijing would realize was far too high to pay.
One of the biggest questions facing the entire world is whether that deterrence will continue in the years to come.
*Yes, technically the Chinese navy is called “the People’s Liberation Army Navy” and the Chinese army is referred to as the “People’s Liberation Army Army (PLAA)” in certain U.S. military documents.
ADDENDUM: All things related to China and Taiwan are usually Jimmy Quinn’s beat, and Jimmy was a great help in preparing me for this trip. His coverage of his own trip to Taiwan last year is worth reading; there is an interesting comparison between Taiwan’s ongoing civil-defense training and the Ukrainian civil-defense training described to me a few weeks ago