Foreign Policy Research Institute
Date: August 13, 2018
By: June Teufel Dreyer
Much overlooked in continuing discussions about arms sales and what kind of strategy Taiwan should employ to counter an invasion by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is the reality that the Beijing government’s real aim is to force unification without firing a shot—by forcing its government to capitulate. In what might be called an anaconda strategy, the target is squeezed until it cannot resist, then swallowed whole.
During the administration of former Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou (2008-2016), this gradual constriction was achieved through a series of agreements cunningly described as economic rather than political. As all good Marxists know, economics is the foundation upon which all else in society, including politics, rests. No economic agreement is ever without political implications. In this case, the quid pro quo from Beijing may have been a tacit understanding that it would not seek to further reduce the number of countries that accorded diplomatic recognition to the Republic of China (ROC), i.e. Taiwan. As a case in point, even after the Gambia, a small African state almost entirely surrounded by Senegal, broke relations with Taiwan in 2013, China did not reciprocate. Beijing also allowed Taiwan observer status in the United Nations World Health Assembly, albeit on a year-to-year approval basis that relegated Taiwan to a status below that of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region of the PRC.
Ma, meanwhile, ignored rising public dissatisfaction with his trade agreements, which came to a head in 2014 when his efforts to force through a Cross-Strait Service Trade Agreement triggered the Sunflower Movement, whereby critics—primarily young people and students—occupied Taiwan’s national legislature, as well as protests that led to his Kuomintang (KMT) party’s devastating defeat in the next election. Beijing then demanded that newly elected President Tsai Ing-wen and her Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) accept a so-called 1992 Consensus in which each side agreed that there was but one China while having different interpretations of the one China. The DPP, not having been part of the negotiations and pointing out that the term 1992 Consensus had been invented by a KMT spokesperson eight years after the meeting took place, declined to do so.
Slowly, the pace of the anaconda strategy was stepped up, in across the spectrum moves that included diplomatic, economic, and military efforts as well as attempts to destabilize Taiwan society from within. [FULL STORY]