On the menu today: a smorgasbord as I enter the final days of my visit to Taiwan, including noting how the Taiwanese military enjoys portraying Chinese ruler Xi Jinping as Winnie the Pooh; the growing ties between Ukraine and Taiwan; how Taiwan’s security situation is affected by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the Israeli war against Hamas; whether it would do any good for Taiwan to formally declare independence; and the inevitability of the “militarization of the Pacific.” Plus, a quick note about how countries choose to remember the uglier chapters of their pasts.
Punching Out Winnie the Pooh, or Why It’s All One Big Global Battlefield
TAIPEI, Taiwan — In the Taiwan Foreign Ministry, in the hallway outside the foreign minister’s office, there is a display showcasing the country’s support for, and perhaps deep emotional connection with, Ukraine.
The Taiwanese know what it’s like to have a larger, more powerful, aggressive, nuclear-armed neighbor run by an authoritarian that looks at your country and believes it is destined to be under his control.
The display includes a Taiwanese Air Force patch depicting the Formosan Black Bear punching out Winnie the Pooh, symbolizing Xi Jinping.
For those who have forgotten, Winnie the Pooh turned into a symbol of Xi, one that he and his regime absolutely detest; they suppress that image of the honey-hunting bear whenever possible:
The connection between Chinese leader Xi and Pooh can be traced back to 2013, when people on social media compared a photo of Xi and former President Barack Obama walking side by side to an image of Pooh and Tigger. The meme took off and for several years, government critics appropriated the character to make fun of Xi or lambaste his policies.
That prompted Beijing to censor the Chinese name for Winnie the Pooh and animated gifs of the chubby, somewhat dopey bear on social media platforms in 2017.
[Rongbin Han, an associate professor of international affairs at the University of Georgia] explained that it’s not Pooh that’s objectionable to Xi and the authoritarian regime, but the fact that critics are using the bear as a stand-in to denounce the government’s policies.
The Taiwan–Ukraine relationship is evolving from rhetorical sympathy to a growing partnership. As of June 2022, ten Taiwanese soldiers had joined the Ukrainian Foreign Legion; one, Tseng Sheng-guang, died in November 2022 in Lyman, part of the contested Luhansk region. This past April, Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy posthumously awarded Tseng the Order for Courage of the third class for “the personal courage shown in the defense of the state sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine.”
Ukraine is using Taiwan-made Revolver 860 combat drones, although apparently no one wants to talk about how those Taiwanese combat drones are ending up in the hands of the Ukrainian army: “A representative for DronesVision told Taiwan News that the company only ships to customers in Poland, and it cannot comment on where those firms may later send the drones as it has signed non-disclosure agreements with its clients. . . . Purchases of the drones picked up in Poland in March, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, and have steadily increased since.”
(Hey, you know what else is in Poland? Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, which used to be a relatively sleepy local airport, but is now a massive and heavily secured NATO air base and logistical support center that is used to ship weapons and equipment to Ukraine.)
And Taiwan has made all kinds of aid donations to Ukraine since the start of the war — almost $35 million in combined government aid and personal donations from Taiwanese citizens in the first month of the war, $2.5 million toward repair of a bridge in Kyiv, $4 million for rural areas this summer, 48 retired emergency vehicles like ambulances last month, and more.
In all the briefings this week, my traveling journalist colleagues have asked the Taiwanese officials variations of one question over and over again: How is your situation influenced by the war in Ukraine and the Israeli war against Hamas? The answers are generally cautious, noting that both conflicts are still ongoing. But you get the sense that some Taiwanese see the blatant, unprovoked aggression of Russia as a useful wake-up call to the world, reminding free societies around the globe that large-scale invasions for territorial conquest can still happen, even in this allegedly civilized 21st century.
“Both Taiwan and China have learned a great deal from the war in Ukraine,” Deputy Minister Jyh-horng Jan of the Mainland Affairs Council told us. The Mainland Affairs Council is the main cabinet agency that maintains diplomatic relations with Beijing, or more accurately attempts to maintain diplomatic relations with Beijing, because the Chinese regime isn’t talking much these days.
“One of the things we have learned is that we will never give them a casus belli, or cause for war,” Jan said.
Every now and then, Taiwanese society and its government officials return to the question of whether Taiwan should formally declare independence from China. There’s less support for this idea than you might expect, because in the eyes of many Taiwanese, they’re already independent from China, and there’s nothing new to declare. That’s the perspective of the country’s current president, Tsai Ing-wen, and the ruling Democratic Progressive Party. As some put it, Taiwan already is “a de facto independent state that lacks de jure statehood” — Taiwan is factually, self-evidently, and obviously independent, but is not recognized as independent under the law of . . . well, lots of places, as discussed all this week.
The other legitimate question is what Taiwan would gain from a formal declaration of independence — because the risks are clear. In June, China’s defense minster — you know, the one who later disappeared — warned U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin that China would not hesitate to launch a war if Taiwan declared its independence. Specifically, Chinese state media said that China would “smash to smithereens any ‘Taiwan independence’ plot and resolutely uphold the unification of the motherland.” China has a ludicrously broad definition of what a “provocation” is, but there’s little dispute that Beijing would treat a declaration of independence as the most outrageous provocation imaginable.
By the way, you will sometimes see Chinese or Western media refer to the potential “reunification” of China and Taiwan. Taiwanese political scientists are quick to point out that the regime in Beijing and Taiwan’s democratically elected counterpart in Taipei have never been unified, so this is unification, not re-unification. The use of the term reunification implies a unity that never existed. Mainland China used to be under the control of the Nationalist Party of China, or Kuomintang (KMT), but Taiwan/Formosa has never been under the control of the Chinese Communist Party.
It is fascinating to see the number of U.S. defense analysts who perceive Ukraine and Taiwan as some sort of conflicting rivals on the American priority list, because if the Taiwanese see Ukraine as a competitor for scarce U.S. defense resources, they’re hiding it well. (They are expecting those U.S. arms sales to be honored, and that seems fair, because as mentioned yesterday, they’ve already paid for them.)
“In the last few years, indeed, China has been changing,” Taiwanese foreign minister Joseph Wu told us. “They’ve become economically, politically, and militarily more powerful than before, despite the effect of their economy slowing down. Their political influence and their military power do not seem to be affected by the ongoing slowdown so far. So we are still dealing with a very powerful China, very assertive in its territorial claims, and still trying to expand its power and influence not just in vicinity but also beyond the First Island Chain.”
(The First Island Chain stretches from the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia, down through Japan, over to Taiwan, down to the northern islands of the Philippines, and over to the Malay Peninsula, including Malaysia, Thailand, and Singapore.)
Wu indicated the Taiwanese were pleased to see the rest of America’s democratic allies in Asia grasping the potential threat of Chinese military aggression, and were particularly pleased to see the Biden administration hosting a joint summit at Camp David with Japanese prime minister Fumio Kishida and South Korean president Yoon Suk Yeol. There’s a lot of bad blood between those two U.S. allies going back to World War II, but the potential threat of China means it is time to put that aside and focus on the here and now.
Back at the Singapore Defense Summit in June, Japanese prime minister Kishida issued a stark warning that “Ukraine today may be East Asia tomorrow,” and that the world must be “prepared for the emergence of an entity that tramples on the peace and security of other countries by force or threat without honoring the rules.” No one had to guess which entity Kishida had in mind.
Wu, Jan, and other Taiwanese officials are quick to emphasize that all they want to do is maintain the status quo. Right now, Taiwan is prosperous and at peace — other than those frequent incursions into its side of the Taiwanese Strait and related airspace, which thankfully so far have not involved any shooting incidents. And China, even with a somewhat slowing economy, is still prosperous and at peace. The world has access to a steady supply of advanced semiconductors from TSMI, the flow of trade through the Taiwan Strait is uninterrupted, and life goes on. The world has a good thing going, but one decision by Xi Jinping could bring it all crashing down.
Similarly, Ukraine is fighting to restore the status quo of its borders at the start of 2014, before the occupation of Crimea. (The Ukrainians say they won’t settle for anything less than the return of Crimea. As an American, it’s not my role to tell the Ukrainians what their military objectives ought to be, but my sense is that they should worry about getting back all the territory they lost in the February 2022 invasion before seeing how they feel about reacquiring Crimea.)
And Israel wants to preserve the status quo of its own existence.
Russia, Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, China — all of these regimes and factions want to disrupt the status quo, wiping existing free, democratic, U.S.-aligned countries off the map. Ukraine, Taiwan, Israel — these are not aggressors or troublemakers; they are each full of citizens who just want to live their lives, make a living, raise their families.
One of my colleagues asked a Taiwanese official whether U.S. arms sales to Taiwan were leading to “the militarization of the Pacific.” This correspondent is a good guy, but I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the Pacific is already militarized; China has the largest navy in the world, and it’s working to make it even bigger:
[The Pentagon] states that China’s navy “is the largest navy in the world with a battle force of approximately 340 platforms, including major surface combatants, submarines, ocean-going amphibious ships, mine warfare ships, aircraft carriers, and fleet auxiliaries. . . . This figure does not include approximately 85 patrol combatants and craft that carry anti-ship cruise missiles (ASCM). The . . . overall battle force [of China’s navy] is expected to grow to 400 ships by 2025 and 440 ships by 2030.” The U.S. Navy, by comparison, included 290 battle force ships as of October 5, 2023, and the Navy’s FY2024 budget submission projects that the Navy will include 290 battle force ships by the end of FY2030.
The Pacific is going to be “militarized,” no matter what we do and whether we like it or not. The question is whether we want the good guys to have some guns, too.
ADDENDUM: One of the other places the Taiwanese Foreign Ministry hosts took us to was the Taiwanese National Human Rights Museum and Jing-Mei White Terror Memorial Park. It is one thing to hear or read that during the era of Chiang Kai-Shek, Taiwan’s martial law led to scores of unjust imprisonments, brutal interrogations and torture, coerced confessions, draconian punishments, and indefensible executions. It is another thing to walk through the prisons, stand in the courtrooms and cells, and see paintings of their methods of torture by the former victims.
I think it says something about the government of Taiwan that it wanted foreign journalists to see this museum and memorial, showcasing the absolutely horrific brutality of those years. I can’t say this was a particularly enjoyable place to visit, but I think it speaks volumes about how a country as inhumane and authoritarian as Taiwan was during those decades can evolve, grow, and change into a thriving democracy where human rights and dissent are respected.
You can love your country and still think of it as a good place, while looking unflinchingly at its worst moments and the times it has not lived up to its values. In the United States, our history has no shortage of ugly chapters — slavery and segregation, the near-elimination of the Native-American populations, and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, to name a few. Not just acknowledging those ugly chapters but studying them and educating future generations about them are signs that you love your country despite its flaws, not signs that you hate your country.