台湾的未来The Future of Taiwan

At 6:49 this evening, I got the news.

Voting in the 2016 election for the leader of the Taiwan region has closed, and the DPP's candidates, Tsai Ing-wen and Chen Chien-jen, declared victory ahead of the final count with a commanding lead of more than 3 million votes.

(Figure in original.)

In his concession speech, Eric Chu congratulated Tsai on her win, saying he hoped Chairwoman Tsai and the DPP, having won, would lead Taiwan toward a happier and brighter future.

In the study room, the first thing my buddy Tian said the moment he saw me was: Tsai Ing-wen won.

A lot of people are watching the Taiwan election. A lot of people feel Taiwan's economy is flagging, that it's lost the glory of its Asian-Tiger days and been left in the mainland's dust.

But when it comes to the mainland, we shouldn't be blindly confident or blindly optimistic either. The road ahead for the mainland is hard, too, and stretched too thin across too many fronts, it could easily lose on one while gaining on another. The South China Sea is the main battlefield; the economy is a big problem. And the Green camp's vote share right now is frankly staggering. Tsai could easily play the game of "keep the status quo when weak, declare independence when strong" — picking whatever moment the mainland can least afford to be distracted to make her move: say, a clash with U.S. forces in the South China Sea, or a wobble in the economy. The initiative would be on Tsai's side, because the mainland can hardly turn around and shout "I'll sanction you" while she's still doing her KMT impression of "maintaining the status quo." Of course, the days of playing the meek little brother and handing over concessions would be over.

But a Taiwan plunged into all-out crisis certainly won't suddenly warm to the mainland — quite the opposite. Public sentiment in a crisis is at its most volatile. The key is that, from start to finish, this lose-lose war would be fought right on our own doorstep, while the U.S. and Japan get to sit across the water and laugh. And if the mainland reunifies by force, so much the better for them — the mainland would have swallowed a powder keg.

Thinking back now on the Xi-Ma meeting, there seems to be a hint of deeper intent in it. If General Secretary Xi felt Tsai Ing-wen was someone he could communicate with, then why hold the Xi-Ma meeting right as Ma Ying-jeou was about to leave office? Ma is political poison right now.

Let's first look at a chart showing how the Taiwan side views cross-strait relations.

(Figure in original: an infographic titled "What Taiwanese people are thinking about cross-strait relations," with data on willingness to engage across the strait, attitudes toward cross-strait trade and economic exchange, the share favoring the status quo, and shifts in Taiwanese identity under Blue versus Green rule.)

Analyzed carefully, the politicians in Taiwan are definitely unwilling to reunify. The Blue and Green camps' basic tone is largely the same; it's just that the Greens are more radical, while the Blues want to extract greater benefits.

The Taiwanese public has no broad consensus on independence versus reunification, but most don't want to reunify — because the current situation best serves everyone's interests. The reason the public doesn't want reunification but doesn't want independence either is that independence would invite military punishment from the mainland, and that's an outcome they don't want. Taiwan's economy is developed and its politics are free — genuinely better than the mainland's.

(Figure in original: "the cross-strait relations scale" and "the cross-strait friend-or-foe gauge.")

And from the perspective of ordinary townsfolk, the Taiwanese public has kept the attitude of a city dweller looking at a country cousin: happy enough to shoot the breeze day to day, but when it comes to anything serious, few are willing to actually marry into this poor relative's family.

There's still a small minority who favor reunification — Taiwan's old veterans, for instance, out of something like blood being thicker than water. But their numbers are negligible; the veterans have gradually faded away, and by now their voices carry no weight and have been drowned out.

Some of the businesspeople engaged in cross-strait trade are quite willing to reunify — the perpetually stalled policies keep them from growing and expanding. Not out of patriotism, but out of commercial interest.

In Taiwan you can decline to support independence, but you can't support reunification — in their eyes, that's selling out Taiwan.

So what does Taiwan's future look like?

To sum up, it comes down to four possibilities:

1. Independence

2. Maintaining the status quo

3. Reunification by force (all variants included — successful unification, successful unification but with lasting unrest, failure, and so on)

4. Peaceful reunification

As for independence: given the mainland's current military strength, if U.S. forces stay out, taking Taiwan in a week to 10 days really wouldn't be a problem. If U.S. forces get involved, that's another matter. The arc here is that Taiwan started out able to defend itself with nothing but the natural barrier of the strait, then slowly evolved into needing to rely on the U.S. just to survive; and the situation now is that even with moderate U.S. involvement, so long as the U.S. doesn't commit its full might and go to the mat with the mainland, Taiwan is increasingly unable to defend itself militarily.

If it wants independence, force will surely have to come into play — but that's something neither side wants to see.

And based on a deeper reckoning with China, the U.S. is shrewd: its interests with the mainland far outweigh those with Taiwan. Taiwan can only be used to keep the mainland in check, not to trigger an all-out falling-out. The U.S. is not about to brazenly back Taiwan's independence.

Independence and reunification by force would play out in roughly similar ways — both are outcomes no one wishes to take or to witness.

Maintaining the status quo is the middle path, the compromise.

So what about peaceful reunification?

The root reason most Taiwanese today don't identify with the mainland is that, in both soft power (cultural atmosphere and the like) and hard power (the economy), China — though it has already surpassed Taiwan by a wide margin — still has a long road ahead.

If the mainland's per capita income reaches or surpasses Taiwan's, who's still going to lecture you about democracy, about freedom, about ideology? It'll all be moot. By then it'll come naturally — nobody kicks up a fuss, and unification just happens. But that's a story for later. The road really is long, the outlook isn't all that clear, and it won't be an easy path to walk.

When China truly rises, the theories that currently prop up Taiwanese independence will struggle to win Taiwanese hearts anymore. By then — and this is just my own wishful daydreaming, so don't come at me if you don't like it — one very real possibility is that Taiwanese people will want reunification, will want to join the People's Republic of China. Just as, today, places like Mexico and Puerto Rico all supposedly wish they could join the United States.

The America of that day may well object, too. But the situation then will surely be far better and simply not comparable to now. Just how many people will keep heeding and following the wind that America blows in from across the distant Pacific — that's genuinely hard to say.

Still, as the earliest mainlanders who came to Taiwan gradually pass away, and with Taiwan's ongoing de-Sinicization education and the coming-of-age of the younger generation, the share of Taiwanese who support reunification will keep falling over the next decade.

And the status quo across the strait — no war and no peace, no unification and no independence — is bound to change along with it.

I don't have much in the way of political positions myself. Speaking purely for myself, based on my own firsthand experience and understanding, I hope for the status quo to hold. And I hope this beautiful, wonderful island — this treasure island — has a brighter tomorrow.