Cuban missile crisis “in slow motion”: many have said this about the recurring tensions between North Korea and Washington and, more recently, about the war in Ukraine. Taiwan, whose voters are participating in critical elections on Saturday, does not escape the comparison, especially since the island is a stone’s throw from China as Cuba is from Florida. If the tensions do not have the nuclear content that they had in 1962 under Kennedy and Khrushchev, Taiwan is nonetheless the pawn, in the hands of two powers, of a slow and increasingly militarized crisis, born from the coming to power of Mao and the flight of the “generalissimo” Chiang Kai-shek, in 1949, to the island deoccupied by the Japanese after the Second World War.
It took twenty years for communist China to be recognized at the UN in 1971 and for it to enter the Security Council as a permanent member. It took thirty years before diplomatic relations were established with the United States in 1979. Eventually the autocracy of the Kuomintang (KMT) of Chiang Kai-shek faded, whose death in 1975 opened the door to the transition. Democratic Republic of Taiwan. A door into which the Taiwanese will rush, while in Beijing the efficient Deng Xiaoping, taking over from Mao who died in 1976, inaugurates the rise in economic and strategic power of the Chinese dictatorship, without ever giving up anything on the Beijing’s desire to “reunify” the island with the continent.
Over forty years, this democratization has forged its own Taiwanese identity. This is evidenced by the fact that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), in whose manifesto the independence project is included, has been in power since 2016. In addition, many are aware and worried today of the risk for the democratic development of the island of being trapped by the Sino-American rivalry – facing the China of the imperative President Xi Jinping, who openly floats the threat of a military invasion; facing the United States, which, without breaking with the “one China” policy, has ostensibly increased its military aid to the island’s government.
In these presidential and parliamentary elections, which promise to be close, tomorrow an electorate will vote which polls say essentially favors the status quo – read: a fragile de facto independence in the face of Beijing’s aggressive posture. In view of the methodical crushing of freedoms in Hong Kong, “reunification” is the wish of the smallest portion of public opinion. Advantage, in this sense, to the DPP, which now advocates this status quo in relations with China, tempering its sovereignist ardor. It could also be advantaged by the division of the so-called “pro-Chinese” vote after the failure, to the great dismay of China, of a proposed alliance between the presidential candidates of the ancestral KMT, which now defends a policy of rapprochement with Beijing, and a new party led by a loud-mouthed populist, Ko Wen-je, former mayor of Taipei.
Even though the DPP is suffering from the erosion of power and its candidate, who leads in voting intentions, but by a short lead, does not have the stature of the outgoing president, Tsai Ing-wen, who cannot represent under the provisions of the Constitution. Beyond the major geopolitical issues, there are then local and concrete bread and butter issues – inflation, access to housing, etc. – in the face of which the management of the Tsai government has disappointed. In a world where populism appeals everywhere, we can expect anything, including a breakthrough from Mr. Ko, a rising political star, particularly appreciated by young people for his “outspokenness”.
Beijing plays its soft power in this fragmented landscape where, yes, Taiwanese national identity is strengthened, but where the historical and cultural connection between the continent and the island is not necessarily abolished. In a long-term approach, Chinese propaganda invests social networks (TikTok and Xiaohongshu) and succeeds among the least politicized and most poorly informed Taiwanese in watering down its image, despite its actually degraded economic situation. Let the ballot boxes endorse the KMT and Beijing will obviously want to make it a victory for its reunification plan, the inevitability of which it advocates – “peacefully or by force”. Elections, in doing so, full of heartbreak, which above all risk sharpening, whatever the result, dynamics rooted in the rivalry between the United States and China. A multi-headed rivalry in which, on an economic level, the semiconductor sector, of which Taiwan is one of the world’s leading manufacturers, constitutes a major issue. All over the world, our societies face challenges to health and democratic sovereignty. The case of Taiwan is telling: its elections expose the relativity of the power that the Taiwanese have over their own future.