Taipei, Taiwan — Coffee might not be at the top of anyone’s hierarchy of needs after close to 24 consecutive hours of travel from one side of the planet Earth to its antipode, but it’s hardly an afterthought.
Among the innovations I was first confronted with upon arrival to Taiwan’s Grand Hotel — an imposing 500-room imperial-style behemoth that can be seen from the promontory on which it is situated from much of the city — was one of the better hotel room coffee offerings I’ve ever encountered. This is no mere packet or even a pod. It’s a device you fasten to either side of your mug. Once fixed, the user gently opens the top of the packet and introduces hot water by hand. It’s the closest approximation to a pour-over coffee carafe you can get in a hotel room, and the taste of the finished product presents a reasonable facsimile. But there is an engineering problem here. Once you’ve accomplished your task, you’re left with an unwieldy, soggy bag that cannot be transported to a trash receptacle without getting hot coffee either on your hands or the floor. Suddenly, those suboptimal sacks you load into a tray at your local Courtyard Marriot make a lot more sense.
If it sounds like I’m groping for a metaphor, you’re a perceptive reader. Taipei is a city of innovative drip-coffee contraptions. It’s a sprawling metropolitan festooned with luxury. Its citizens live at the cutting edge of technology. But it has the feel of the last round before closing time. The pedestrian shopping district that blared with all the unintelligible noises and pachinko music of a Japanese salon didn’t skip a beat when four jet fighters roared in tight formation over us, maybe 300 feet above the deck. There were no signs in their demeanor of the dispute with the mainland that could end in cataclysm. No signs, that is, save the signs.
“Taiwan self-determination: Establish a sovereign state,” they read. “Ending the administration of the foreign republic of China. Terminating the commissioned World War II Allied occupation.” One of the banners advertising Taipei’s frustrations with the treaty that consigned Taiwan to Beijing’s dominion after Formosa was stripped from Japan’s imperial grasp was adorned in LGBT rainbows. Like the coffee sacks, modernity and nationalism occasionally make for an ungainly pair.
There is no shortage of resolve among Taiwan’s political class to see their national project through to fruition. For the better part of a decade, the political winds have blown into the faces of Taiwanese candidates who are apprehensive about the prospect of a direct confrontation with the mainland. January’s presidential elections demonstrated that the consensus against placidly lurching toward reunification is durable. But there are few illusions about what that confrontation might entail.
Taiwan is losing the battle for diplomatic recognition overseas, The Prospect Foundation’s president, I-Chung Lai, confessed. The island nation cannot compete with China’s “checkbook diplomacy,” preferring instead to await the day when the foreign beneficiaries of Beijing’s largess recognize the substandard services they’re purchasing and see for themselves the point of diminishing returns. Repeatedly, our interlocutors invoked the condition in which Israel finds itself: a people confronted by an “eliminationist” program. That was likely a sincere parallel rather than a mere sop to American attitudes toward the Jewish state since I was one of only two Americans in our delegation. Like the Israelis, the Taiwanese have nothing to trade for peace with their land-hungry neighbor. They have nowhere else to go.
But what’s in it for us, I asked our interlocutors, summoning all the parochial dispassion evinced by those Americans who do not see foreign entanglements as vampiric drains on the treasury. What do Americans get out of Taiwan’s sovereignty save a few nifty consumer electronics? The question was designed to elicit disdain, and that’s what it got. Americans have often viewed its relationship with the government that fled the Chinese Communist insurgency in transactional ways. In the 1950s, with the end of the Korean War and again in the 1970s following the end of what was freely described as Chiang Kai-sheck’s “authoritarian” regime, Washington treated Taiwan as a chip to be traded away. But greater geostrategic interests have always prevailed over “tangible” considerations. The Taiwanese people “can sustain themselves.”
That is no small task. Sure, China’s problems are deep-seated. Prospects for its young people are “not very bright,” Lai added. The country’s recommitment to Marxian economic theories under Xi Jinping has limited its prospects for sustainable growth. Its population is aging and surplus, its model is unattractive to states in its periphery, and its conflicts with its neighbors are spiraling. In the long run, that’s good news for the market economies that ring the nominally communist People’s Republic. In the short term, however, the portrait our guides painted was one of a power in decline with a short window of opportunity to secure its expansionist goals.
The starkness of the situation was laid bare for us upon our arrival at a defense policy think tank — a conspicuous sort of talk shop guarded by soldiers armed with rifles in a gated compound laced with concertina wire. No one we spoke with disputed the foreign analysts who have warned that Beijing will mount a kinetic operation to retake the island before the end of the decade (perhaps as soon as next year), although the precise timing of that prospect was the subject of dispute.
But what if the invasion scenarios do not take the form of a D-Day-style amphibious invasion — a scenario that would struggle to overcome Taiwan’s many fortress-like geographic advantages? What if Xi borrows a page from the Russian playbook, introducing paratroopers into the country’s airfields and quickly flooding them with ground troops in concert with an assault on the beaches, I asked? The Institute for National Defense and Security Research’s Dr. Pei-Shiue Hsieh deemed this the “Beijing model.” In that scenario, Chinese soldiers link up with a domestic “fifth column,” requisition the nation’s communication nodes and seize its command-and-control elements. A puppet regime quickly takes form, declares its intention to surrender to its CCP overlords, and throws the nation’s resistance into chaos.
There were few assurances in his expression that this was a far-fetched scenario. But there is solace in the fact that I had to poke and prod to pry a sense of insecurity from the Taiwanese defense establishment. Self-confidence comes easy to this accomplished island, which has not just endured but thrived despite the odds. And I returned to the Grand Hotel to find the attentive staff had replenished my stock of coffee clings. Tomorrow promises a tour of the means by which Taiwan has made itself into an indispensable commercial and technological powerhouse, the loss of which will not be absorbed by the civilized world. I suspect I will be convinced.