‘Beijing’s Plan to Crush Taiwan Under the “Wheels of History”’
This highlights the complex risk calculus for conflict in the Taiwan Strait. Given the CCP’s ideological necessities, it was predictable that Beijing would continue its methodical military and diplomatic escalation directed at Taiwan punctuated by opportunistic displays of state and military power. But it’s been simultaneously much more difficult to predict whether Beijing would consider a full-scale invasion and occupation of Taiwan, given the enormous risks and inevitably devastating outcomes.
Escalation and invasion have presented distinct and, in terms of the CCP’s ideological project, even contradictory geopolitical risk regimes. Invasion could be argued to represent a failure of the CCP’s Marxist teleology in the sense that such drastic action shouldn’t be necessary if unification is indeed unfolding in accordance with history’s laws.
The 10 August white paper can be read as an attempt to reconcile these contradictions by building an argument for the unfettered use of state power to achieve unification. It includes a statement of Beijing’s position that Taiwan is Chinese territory, including a reinterpretation of the 1971 UN resolution that recognized Beijing and excluded the ‘representatives of Chiang Kai-shek’. It describes the absolute necessity of unification to realise China’s ‘great rejuvenation’. The white paper also states Beijing’s commitment to ‘peaceful reunification’, but, against the longstanding opposition of the Taiwanese people and the lack of any viable roadmap from Beijing, this claim becomes a pretext to focus on the forces that stand, in the party’s view, against history—separatists and the ‘external forces’—which serves to justify achieving unification through ‘all necessary measures’.
The white paper’s hard message has been promoted by China’s representatives around the world. In Australia, the Chinese ambassador, Xiao Qian, described the chilling prospects of ‘re-educating’ the Taiwanese people and punishing so-called separatists. It was a stark statement of what unification actually means: it would criminalise the people of Taiwan for being Taiwanese, and destroy Taiwanese society as it is today, with shocking connotations for human rights and uncontainable effects on regional security.
At the United Nations General Assembly on Saturday, Foreign Minister Wang Yi used a new metaphor: ‘Any move to obstruct China’s cause of reunification is bound to be crushed by the wheels of history’. There’s no talk of passively waiting for history’s ‘tide’ to naturally submerge Taiwan.
US President Joe Biden appears to understand these implications in his repeated statements about US military defence of Taiwan premised on Washington’s commitments to Beijing from the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, US support for Taiwan validates the CCP’s ideological position on ‘external forces’, creating a dangerous dynamic in which Washington’s efforts to maintain the status quo are used by Beijing as justification for actions against Taiwan.
It will require policy discipline from the US and its allies to manage this intrinsically escalatory dynamic. The Australian government has so far called for maintaining the status quo but not articulated an argument about what this means (maintaining Taiwan’s de facto sovereignty) and why this is in Australia’s interests. Policy analysis in Australia’s public life tends to see Taiwan as nothing more than a proxy of American power, not as a unique society of 24 million people to which Australia’s interests are directly tied.
As the white paper signals Beijing’s priorities following next month’s national party congress, it shows that Australia has a great deal of policy work to do to develop a properly informed position on Taiwan that is both robust and finessed and supported with domestic political legitimacy.
Mark Harrison is a senior lecturer at the University of Tasmania.This article was originally published 26 September 2022, and it is published courtesy of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
