Monday bee: The US, Japan and Taiwan

My weekly release of bees from my bonnet

For those new to these emails, a brief explanation. I have taken to using this Substack newsletter service for three purposes: as a way to put down my thoughts roughly every Monday on a topic in the news that is bothering me, generally in global affairs broadly defined; to share the English originals of my articles published in translation in Japan (chiefly Mainichi Shimbun and Nikkei Business) and Italy (chiefly La Stampa and Avanti!); and sometimes to distribute the blog I write as chair of the Japan Society of the UK, if it looks to be of wider interest. Comments and criticisms would be more than welcome, whether publicly or privately, since for every topic I write about there will be many people on this mailing list far more expert on it than I am. I will probably have added you to the mailing list for exactly that reason, when writing about something I know you specialise on. From now on I plan to devote this Monday “bees in my bonnet”email to just one topic at a time, given how full all our inboxes are. But if anyone decides their inbox is just too full, do please feel free to unsubscribe.

The fate of the Strait

This week, Taiwan is on my mind. That island nation of nearly 24 million people, the 21st-largest economy in the world and among the top 20 in terms of GDP-per-capita, is a paragon of liberal values. Not only has it been the world’s most successful country in terms of controlling COVID-19 (by April 17th it had had a total of just 1,072 cases and 11 deaths during the by then more than 16 months during which it had been dealing with a virus that it was among the first to detect emerging from China), it also in 2020 succeeded in achieving growth in real GDP of more than 3%, faster even than China. This was despite having kept its borders closed to foreign travellers for almost the whole year. Not least, Taiwan is a vibrant democracy that has managed also to have a vibrant cyber-sphere without the worst excesses of disinformation and hate speech seen elsewhere.

So here is my question: why has this successful, peaceful paragon, one that generally appears in the international media only when something untoward happens such as the recent train disaster, suddenly found itself mentioned in an official statement following a meeting between a US president and the Japanese prime minister for the first time since 1969?

That mention in the official statement by President Joe Biden and Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga of their April 16th summit was fairly bland, as such statements generally are:

We underscore the importance of peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait and encourage the peaceful resolution of cross-Strait issues. 

Who could object to that? The Taiwanese government does not seem to have asked for it, but naturally expressed approval of those sentiments. No one could really object, of course, except the government in Beijing to whom this and accompanying messages about other sensitive topics were directed and who, entirely predictably, responded in terms conveying melodramatic outrage. There’s nothing wrong or surprising in directing messages at Beijing, for sure, even tough messages, when necessary. What I am wondering, rather, is why the Americans insisted particularly on including Taiwan among those messages from a US-Japan summit.

It isn’t as if there is any doubt as to what the government of Japan’s attitude is to Taiwan, the island which it held as a colony from 1895 until 1945. Japan has close commercial and political relations with the Taiwanese, and ever since 1945 relations between the former occupier and occupied have been far warmer in Taiwan’s case than they have with South Korea. Japan isn’t in the habit of shouting about those warm relations from the rooftops, given its always very scratchy relations with China. But then Japan hasn’t been in the habit of shouting very much in diplomatic terms over the past seven decades. For all those reasons, it is reported unsurprisingly that the Japanese government was quite reluctant to agree to a mention of Taiwan in the Suga-Biden statement, but nevertheless gave way when it became clear how important it was to the White House.

But why, really, was this so important to President Biden and his team? One explanation could be that it is a response to Chinese aggression against Taiwan. But there hasn’t been any, at least nothing exceptional. China has flown fighter planes through Taiwan’s air defence zone and sailed naval ships through the Taiwan Strait, but there’s nothing big, new and concerning about that. Searching The Economist, which surely should be a reliable guide at least to this, the only story I can find about Chinese intimidation of Taiwan dates from almost exactly a year ago. The one real recent warning about a Chinese attempt to violate that “peace and stability’ has come not from Taipei, not from Beijing, and certainly not from Tokyo, but rather from the American navy: specifically, a much-quoted claim made in early March in evidence to the Senate Armed Services Committee by Admiral Philip Davidson, head of the US Indo-Pacific Command, that Chinese military action over Taiwan could come much sooner than we realise, even during the next five to six years. Admiral Davidson cited no particular evidence for this, just that it might happen.

Of course, none of us can say that he is wrong. But the real issue is not whether such a forecast is or is not plausible, nor whether President Xi Jinping would or would not be inclined to take what on any objective calculation would be the gigantic risk of ordering an invasion, nor even whether or not the US and other countries would do well to prepare for the prospect. The real issue is why America wants to make this issue more prominent right now, as it did with the Suga-Biden summit, and whether doing so makes sense.

As far as I can see, what America is doing is deliberately tweaking the Chinese dragon’s tail. It is saying these things knowing that they will annoy China, and persuading its allies to join in, presumably in the aim simply of showing that it can. Under Donald Trump and now Joe Biden, the US has chosen in a series of small but diplomatically significant ways — president-to-president phone calls, visits by senior officials — to treat Taiwan overtly as if it were an independent country with a government that is recognised as legitimate by the US, rather than the country residing in a permanently grey area that Taiwan has been in since President Nixon’s famous visit to China half a century ago this year. Since that 1971 US-China rapprochement, Taiwan has been the Schrödinger’s Cat of countries: both a country and not a country at the very same time.

This does make a certain sort of sense. Taiwan is, as I said at the outset, an admirable place, a paragon of liberal values, which it wasn’t in the 1970s or indeed the 1980s until it began its successful transition to democracy under the leadership of the Japanese-speaking Lee Teng-hui (who died last July). It is a place to be cherished and protected. But there isn’t really any doubt that America stands by Taiwan, even though it is not obliged to do so by any law or treaty (just, under the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 to sell it arms, when needed) and has stuck until now to a position of deliberate strategic ambiguity. In reality, there is no greater doubt over American willingness to fight China over Taiwan than there is over other faraway places in Asia, including even South Korea and Japan with whom the US has security alliances.

So we are left with the question of whether, among the many ways in which the US could and arguably in some cases should, tweak the dragon’s tail, it is wise and right for it to do so over Taiwan. The steps it has taken so far have not been truly outrageous, but they are steps in a certain direction, and I find myself hoping that the US doesn’t plan more such steps.

Taiwan’s current status, as a Schrödinger’s Country, is the consequence of at least one strategic mistake made by the United States in the post-1945 decades, to which it is possible that future historians will add another. The first was the American refusal to recognise Mao’s government as the legitimate government of China in 1949-50, unlike India and the UK, and instead to maintain the fiction that the Republic of China on Taiwan was the legitimate government for the next two decades. With the Cold War just beginning, this was a big strategic error because it destroyed any chance, even if it was small, of using China as leverage against the Soviet Union. This did admittedly become far harder to reverse once the US and China had fought the Korean War on opposing sides. But as Winston Churchill said in a speech in the House of Commons in 1949, “The reason for having diplomatic relations is not to confer a compliment but to secure a convenience.” The US forewent that convenience. The second mistake future historians might, it seems to me, add is that in 1971 when Nixon and Kissinger made their overtures to China they did not bargain harder about Taiwan’s future status, instead resting on the “one China” formula and in effect leaving Taiwan as an issue for the future to solve.

In the circumstances, this is rather more forgiveable than the 1949-50 error, but how forgiveable will depend on what the future indeed does to solve this. By now tweaking the dragon’s tail over Taiwan for no evident benefit, my worry is that the US might, for quite short-term reasons, be making it even more difficult for the future to be able to fulfil this task peaceably.