Taiwan Is More Than a Piece on a Chessboard

The Struggle for Taiwan: A History of America, China, and the Island Caught Between, by Sulmaan Wasif Khan (Basic Books, 331 pages, $32)

S ometimes an author makes a good case for something she or he did not quite intend. Sulmaan Khan’s book The Struggle for Taiwan leaves me with a new and deeper respect for the viewpoints of people who live on Taiwan and wishing that analysts would stop viewing them as pawns in other people’s chess games.

As of the mid-17th century, about 100,000 people of Austronesian ethnicity were living on Taiwan. During the next 50 years they came to be outnumbered by Han Chinese who immigrated across the Taiwan Strait from southern China. In the late 1940s, refugees from the civil war between the Nationalists and the Communists added a third group to the population. Known as “mainlanders,” they came from all over China, not just the south. In the 1950s through the 1980s, the three layers of population were hierarchical, their social and political power standing in inverse order to their time of arrival. Relations among the three were difficult and sometimes violent. Today’s population of 24 million is roughly 2.5 percent Austronesian, 86 percent early Han immigrants, and 11.5 percent recent “mainlander” Han.

But in recent decades, and especially with the growth of democracy, these borderlines have blurred. A younger generation has begun to cover over the crevices that had separated their elders and to identify simply as “Taiwan people.” The looming threat from the Communist mainland to “unify” with them by force has strengthened their solidarity. For years, public-opinion polls have shown that only a small minority of Taiwan people favor immediate unification with the mainland. At the other end of the spectrum, only a small minority favor declaring independence, because such a move could trigger a brutal attack. To pollsters, most people say, “Status quo, please.”

Only occasionally does Sulmaan Khan see matters from the viewpoint of ordinary Taiwan people. He notes that the earliest seeds of the Taiwan independence movement can be found in the late 1940s in popular revulsion at murderous acts by mainlanders — not Communists but Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. That’s a fair point, but in his accounts of the time since the 1950s, Khan does not investigate or even try to imagine the feelings of Taiwan people as they have learned, over those years, about the record of their giant neighbor to the north: At least 30 million died in a politically driven famine (early 1960s); many more were killed, and Chinese moral values were viciously assaulted, during a “cultural revolution” (late 1960s); in recent times, millions more have been persecuted and killed in repressions of Tibetans, Mongolians, Falun Gong believers, and Uyghurs; the free and vibrant city of Hong Kong is being eviscerated.

Mainstream Chinese have been affected, too: Electronic surveillance reaches everywhere, and a “social credit” system rewards and punishes citizens according to government assessments of the “quality” of their behavior. People on Taiwan, whether silently or in public, have to ask themselves: Do we want this regime?

Khan’s focus is not at that level. He concentrates on the political and military maneuvers among political capitals in Beijing, Washington, and Taipei. He shows us the “strait crises” of 1954, 1958, and 1995, the building of U.S.–China diplomatic relations in the 1970s, the leap in trade and international investment in the 1990s, and the sharpening of conflicts after Xi Jinping’s rise in 2012.

Word duels among the three governments get close attention. Other voices in the societies — from competing political parties, NGOs, public intellectuals, and the like — appear in Khan’s analyses of the U.S. and Taiwan, but this can’t be done for China, where other voices are not audible. Khan pushes forward with his analyses by taking “China” to be only the black box from which the government’s voice issues. Aside from the univocality, an equally acute problem is that no one (not Khan, not Perry Link, not even people high in the Communist Party of China) can see inside the black box — to a place where a fateful turn for the world’s largest nation can result from thoughts of a single person.

Decades of CCP history show that the private calculations of top leaders are dominated by a concern to hold onto their own power. The question “Should I invade Taiwan?” involves geopolitics, trade, military strength, pride in the “motherland,” and so on, but all these are embedded within the overarching question of “Will my action strengthen or weaken my position against my rivals, actual and potential?”

Politicians everywhere ask such questions, to be sure, and it would be unfair to suggest that Khan is not aware that this is so. But far too often, he writes as if the political systems in Washington and Beijing were comparable counterparts. He sees “two great powers” playing geopolitical games and pursuing their interests in parallel ways. Both have left their people “mired in jingoism and confusion” on the question of Taiwan. In China, “an almost religious fervor” about Taiwan has set in; in the U.S., “a nationalistic fury targeting China” has appeared. For the present, Khan writes, the world must hope that the American and Chinese governments can survive their “tiffs” and get back to normal. In his view the U.S. side has been, on balance, more belligerent than the Chinese side. Chinese leaders Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao for two decades acted as “responsible stakeholders”; recently, on the other hand, “American pundits” have “waxed lyrical about how they would fight a war with China.”

Khan argues that Washington missed two opportunities to solve the Taiwan problem in the 1970s. In 1972, “Nixon’s visit to China was Washington’s best chance to return the island to PRC control,” because at that point American domestic opinion was amenable to such a move. (Khan’s phrase “return to PRC control” is not historically accurate. The Communists have never ruled in Taiwan. Elsewhere, to be fair, he does use the word “unification,” not “reunification.”). Another chance at permanent solution, for Kahn, came in 1979, when Washington could have been “perfect” in its rapprochement with Beijing by handing Taiwan over.

What might the people on Taiwan have felt if that handover had happened? Khan argues that in the 1970s the Taiwanese were still living in a “cruel, dictatorial state” and that their “absorption by another cruel, dictatorial state would have excited interest but not sorrow.” One might also ask: Would a hiker walking through a whirlwind find engulfment in a tornado to be “interesting”? The number of people dead from political campaigns in the PRC is more than double the entire population of Taiwan today. Sulmaan Khan, studying geopolitical games in which three regimes are coequal players and little more, fails to see immense differences of degree at the level of daily life. To imagine that unification under Beijing’s rule would — at any point — cause Taiwan people to feel “interest but not sorrow” reveals an elemental misconception in an author who in other ways has written a fluent and well-researched book.