Beijing’s Taiwan policy after the island’s elections
Beijing’s Taiwan policy after the island’s elections
WRITTEN BY DR LIN GANG
15 March 2024
During Taiwan’s elections for its chief executive and legislature on 13 January 2024, Lai Ching-te, candidate of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), won the executive power with a plurality of votes (40.05 per cent), defeating the Kuomintang (KMT)’s Hou Yu-ih (33.49 per cent) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP)’s Ko Wen-je (26.46 per cent). However, Lai’s party lost 10 seats in the legislature, thus degrading it to the second-largest party in the organ. This outcome is next to the worst scenario for Beijing, which would involve the DPP dominating administrative and legislative organs with a majority of seats and pursuing its policy goals without being constrained by the opposition. Therefore, Beijing will likely continue approaching Taiwan with a combination of hard and soft tactics to achieve China’s unification. Among them, promoting integrated development across the Taiwan Strait to remain as an essential effort on the part of the mainland.
Combining hard tactics with soft measures
Given the previous elections in 2016 and 2020 that led to the DPP’s domination over the two branches of government with clear majorities but failed to reshape Beijing’s reunification strategy, it is less likely that the mainland will give up its long-held policy toward Taiwan. On the one hand, military means are relied upon to prevent Taiwan from legally separating from the mainland or being controlled by foreign forces, as specified in the Anti-Secession Law promulgated in 2005. On the other hand, economic and cultural exchanges across the Taiwan Strait are always considered useful antidotes against the strengthening of the Taiwanese national identity on the island due to social change and political manipulation by the pro-independence DPP over there.
Despite the developmental gap between the two societies, Beijing believes its preferential policies towards newcomers from Taiwan, particularly the youth, are appealing and productive.
Both hard and soft tactics are part of Beijing’s general strategy of national unification. From the mainland’s perspective, its growing military power may be insufficient to compel Taiwan to accept Beijing’s proposal of unification under the one country, two systems formula, but is necessary and robust enough to deter the island from drifting away. This is indicated by the statement of DPP’s former Chairman, Shih Ming-Teh, in the mid-1990s that if his party came to power, it “would not need to announce Taiwanese independence” as Taiwan was already independent. Such a self-justification for an ambiguous policy position was followed by the Chen Shui-bian and Tsai Ing-wen administrations; both maintained, however reluctantly, the Republic of China's national title and its constitution that legally defines both the mainland and Taiwan as Chinese territories. Given Lai’s weaker power base and Beijing’s increased military capacity and pressure demonstrated by frequent drills around the island, it is less likely that he could cross the mainland’s red line, compared with Chen and Tsai. As Spokesman Wu Qian of the PRC Department of National Defence observed in early February 2024, the outcome of two-in-one elections in Taiwan has suggested that the DPP cannot represent the mainstream view on the island and change the historical trend of China’s eventual unification.
Promoting integrated development
As long as the status quo is maintainable, Beijing has reason to believe that time is on its side, given the growing gap across the Taiwan Strait favouring the mainland in economic, political, diplomatic and military spheres and the narrowing gap between the United States and China in national capacities in general and military deployment in the Asia-Pacific in particular. Therefore, Beijing’s general strategy for resolving the Taiwan issue is to complete China’s final unification in the rejuvenation process of the Chinese nation. This means that the mainland will strive to increase its economic, scientific/technological, and military capacities and achieve the ideal of peaceful unification with strategic determination and patience. While Beijing will not renounce military means, it is mainly targeted at the Taiwanese independence movement and foreign interference in the Strait affairs.
Promoting integrated development in all fields across the Strait is a logical requirement of peaceful unification. The idea of integrated development was initiated under Xi Jinping’s leadership, starting from the economic and social spheres and expanding to other dimensions. Xi elaborated on the concept in his 2 January 2019 speech and proposed the Fujian provincial deal that year to explore a new way of integrating development between the Taiwan Strait's two sides. Consequently, Fujian Province was the first to construct a demonstration zone for integrated development in a circular jointly issued by the Communist Party of China Central Committee and the State Council in September 2023.
As the September 2023 decision was made before Taiwan’s 2024 elections, described by Beijing as a choice between peace and war for Taiwanese voters, outsiders cannot help but wonder about the logic between war rhetoric and peace gestures that co-occurred. From the mainland’s perspective, however, the rhetoric of war or peace did not necessarily suggest that military conflict between the two sides would be inevitable once the DPP won the elections again. Its exact signal was that the DPP’s supremacy in the Taiwanese domestic power structure would increase the likelihood of war while the KMT’s return to power could indeed increase the possibility of peace. The complex and soft rhetoric reflects Beijing’s mindset of preparing for the worst and striving for the best. As people on the two sides live under different social systems and are used to their ways of life, they must understand and accommodate each other. Integrated development aims to win over public opinion on the island in support of unification.
Beijing’s rationale
The idea of integrated development is drawn from European integration experiences and assumes that economic integration will eventually lead to political integration. In practice, while Beijing understands that most people in Taiwan today cannot accept its unification formula, they still want peace, development, and mutual exchange with the mainland. Although the DPP is inclined towards reducing Taiwan’s economic overreliance on the mainland market and prefers stronger economic, political, and military ties with the United States and Japan, the KMT and the TPP want to maintain regular exchanges with the mainland.
Since Tsai Ing-wen took office, particularly in the wake of COVID-19, the DPP administration has adopted a series of policies to limit people-to-people exchange across the Taiwan Strait, including implementing the Anti-infiltration Act that created an atmosphere of hostility between the two sides. In addition, cross-strait trade and investment have also decreased in recent years. According to the mainland’s figures, trade between the two sides decreased by 15.6 per cent in 2023, much more than the previous year when it decreased by 2.5 per cent. Figures published by Taiwan also demonstrated that the amount of Taiwanese investment on the mainland shrank by 39.8 per cent in 2023, with a value of USD 3 billion, accounting for 11.4 per cent of Taiwan’s foreign investment, compared with 83.8 per cent back in 2010.
Constructing the demonstration zone for integrated development is a unilateral effort on the part of the mainland, targeting those Taiwanese who are willing to come to the mainland for better education, career, and business opportunities. Despite the developmental gap between the two societies, Beijing believes its preferential policies towards newcomers from Taiwan, particularly the youth, are appealing and productive. If those newcomers can have lower thresholds for entering good universities and higher-paying jobs while getting similar and even the same resident rights as their mainland counterparts, they will hopefully become supporters of China’s goal of reunification. If they can stay long-term in the mainland under one system, why not accept a “two systems” arrangement for a unified China in the future? This is the rationale for Beijing’s unilateral promotion of integrated development on the mainland.
In brief, Beijing will follow its policy orbit after Taiwan’s elections as the ruling DPP is under more constraint from the opposition KMT and TPP and, therefore, cannot realise the goal of de jure Taiwan independence, even though it is indicated in the party constitution. The political atmosphere across the Taiwan Strait will remain tense but short of an uncontrollable crisis, which has justified Beijing’s unification strategy combining hard and soft tactics. The exact effectiveness of the integrated development across the Strait unilaterally promoted by the mainland is worthy of further observation.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Dr. Lin Gang is a distinguished professor at the Centre for Fujian-Taiwan Area Studies, Fujian Normal University. Previously, he was director of the Centre for Taiwan Studies at Shanghai Jiao Tong University. His research interests include comparative politics, Chinese politics, democratic theory, Sino-US relations, and Taiwan. Image credit: DSC_4298/Flickr (cropped).