Taiwan and The 'China Impact'

Challenges and Opportunities

Gunter Schubert

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781317369158
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

There can be no doubt that China's economic and political rise is having a stronger effect on Taiwan than on any other country, given the Chinese government's claim to sovereignty over Taiwan, and Taiwan's quest to maintain its democratic achievements and political identity as a sovereign state. Against this background, this volume deals with the 'bigger picture' of evolving relations across the Taiwan Strait, departing from the observation that China's impact on Taiwan has become stronger over the last 20 years.

This book analyses the 'China impact' on Taiwan in terms of its social, political and security space from both an empirical and conceptual point of view. It is the first comprehensive account of China's multifaceted impact on the politics and society of contemporary Taiwan, written by renowned scholars from Taiwan, Europe and the U.S. The book covers a wide range of topics including Taiwan's party alignment, elections, generational politics, cross-strait political economy, immigration policy and security. The contributors, political scientists and sociologists, highlight both the dangers and the opportunities of the 'China impact' for Taiwan and draw a realistic picture of the island republic's current situation and future options in the shadow of its giant neighbour.

Based on qualitative and quantitative data, this volume intends to fill a gap in the Taiwan studies field by studying the 'China impact' on Taiwan's politics and society systematically and from a comparative perspective. By doing so, it will be of great interest to students and scholars of Taiwan studies, and East Asian politics and society more generally.

1
Introduction

Gunter Schubert

Relations between Taiwan and China have seen remarkable changes since 2008, when the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang (KMT), regained power after eight years of Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) minority rule under the former independence activist and president, Chen Shui-Bian. The new KMT administration led by Ma Ying-Jiu immediately embarked on a new proactive China policy, which had been carefully prepared during informal talks with the Chinese leadership since the mid-2000s, by establishing an informal Economic Trade and Cultural Forum of the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to discuss practical matters of mutual concern and future cross-Strait policies.¹ New cross-Strait negotiations were set on track that have produced, to date, 20 bilateral agreements (xieyi) with far-reaching significance for the evolution of the cross-Strait relationship.² Most importantly, direct transportation, communication and trade links were established in late 2008, and in June 2010, the two sides signed an Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) to spur cross-Straittrade liberalization and economic integration (Chow 2013). Although Taiwan’s new China approach was sternly opposed by the DPP at first, the results of the presidential and legislative elections in January 2012 showed that the incumbent Ma administration had a fairly solid public mandate. After the defeat of the presidential hopeful, Tsai Ying-Wen, in that year, the DPP was forced to undertake some serious soul-searching concerning the question of whether, and to what extent, it would have to adjust its own China policy in order to stand a fair chance of winning important national elections again in the future (Schubert 2012a).

More than two years into the second Ma administration, as this introduction is being written, cross-Strait relations seem to have arrived at a crossroads. The Sunflower movement (Taiyanghua yundong), which paralysed political life in Taiwan between 18 March and 10 April 2014, put an end to the relatively smooth process of rapprochement between Taipei and Beijing that had been developing during the previous few years. On the surface, the demonstrations and public debates were targeting the Trade in Services Agreement (fumao xieyi), which was suddenly pushed through the legislative process by the KMT and signed in June 2013 by representatives of China and Taiwan after months of uncompromising bickering in committee deliberations between the ruling party and the opposition.³ There was, however, a more fundamental reason for the stand-off between the students and the government: to demonstrate open resistance to the China policy of the Ma administration, which was aimed at further liberalizing cross-Strait economic relations, allowing Chinese capital to enter Taiwan on a broad scale and, arguably, paving the way for cross-Strait ‘political talks’ to the detriment of Taiwan’s sovereignty and freedom. In fact, after the new leadership had been established under Xi Jinping in late November 2012, the Chinese government alluded to a necessary shift from ‘functional’ to political talks on various occasions, highlighting their unfulfilled desire to settle the ‘Taiwan issue’ once and for all. Today, the Ma administration is being forced to walk a political tightrope, since it has repeatedly declared that there is no alternative to further cross-Strait economic liberalization if Taiwan’s future well-being and solid integration in East Asian free trade regimes are to be ensured (see also Lin 2011). The critical question is how the government can reassure the Taiwan people that increasing exposure to Chinese trade competition, investment and labour migration, combined with political pressure reinforced by thousands of Chinese missiles targeting the island, will not pose a threat to Taiwan’s security in the middle and long term.

There can be no doubt that China’s economic and political rise is having a stronger effect on Taiwan than on any other country, given the Chinese government’s claim to sovereignty over Taiwan and Taiwan’s quest to maintain its democratic achievements and political identity as a sovereign state, however that state might be named.⁴ Against this background, this volume deals with the ‘bigger picture’ of evolving relations across the Taiwan Strait, taking as a starting point the observation that China’s impact on Taiwan has become continuously stronger over the last 20 years. This relates not only to the economy but also to Taiwan’s domestic politics, society and so-called international space, i.e. Taiwan’s leeway for becoming a recognized entity that is allowed to play a respected and effective role in regional and global politics.

A survey of the scholarly field reveals that numerous studies have dealt with the economic consequences of the China impact by examining Taiwanese capital flows and the relocation of Taiwanese factories to the Chinese mainland that started in the late 1980s and continued to intensify thereafter. This has triggered a long-standing debate on Taiwan’s rising trade dependency on China and the ‘hollowing out’ of the Taiwanese economy (Tanner 2007; Fuller 2008) as well as, more recently, on the impact of Chinese capital gaining access to Taiwan’s domestic markets – allegedly leading, among other things, to soaring prices in the real-estate sector, a depressed labour market and declining food security (Cheng and Mo 2006). From a different perspective, many studies have also gauged the China impact on Taiwan’s economic security in more general terms, coming to different conclusions that have often been informed by a more fundamental stance on the opportunities and dangers of cross-Strait integration and globalization for Taiwan (Dent 2001; Ho and Leng 2004; Lee 2008). Taiwan’s military security ‘in the shadow of China’ has been an issue of constant concern for Taiwan scholars observing the modernization of China’s armed forces and US–Taiwan relations (Zhang 2011; Gelsing 2012; Bush 2013). In this context, an alarming debate has arisen in the US in recent years on the proposal to launch a new policy that would eventually lead to Taiwan’s being abandoned in order to remove the most difficult obstacle to amicable US–China relations (Mearsheimer 2014). Interestingly enough, this debate was triggered by the post-2008 détente in the Taiwan Strait, because some US scholars and politicians felt that Washington was no longer bound to support Taiwan and that the China policy premises should be redefined. At the same time, China has been exerting pressure on other states not to accommodate Taiwan’s quest for more international space and persistently limits Taiwan’s room for manoeuvre in those international organizations where Taiwan has already gained representation of some kind (Lindemann 2014).

Fewer studies, at least in Western languages, have discussed the China impact in terms of the long-term consequences for Taiwan’s society. The useful volume edited by Kuei-Fen Chiu, Dafydd Fell and Ping Lin (2014) gives a good overview of the state of the field and includes some chapters that consider the consequences of Chinese migration to Taiwan, discussing, among other topics, the impact on official immigration policies, the formation of a mainland spouses’ rights movement, and changing family patterns under the influence of cross-Strait marriages. In terms of party politics, a few Taiwan scholars have discussed the China policy dilemma that is facing the DPP as a result of the China impact, i.e. the search for a new approach to reconcile the quest for Taiwan’s independence with the goal of winning elections, reflecting the pressure placed on the DPP to accommodate Taiwan’s inevitable escape from the ‘Chinese orbit’ (Schubert 2012b). Many more studies could be cited which, to different degrees, have touched on the China impact on Taiwan’s politics and society, but this topic has not yet been studied systematically or even considered from a comparative perspective. This volume is intended to fill this gap in the field of Taiwan studies.

As a joint undertaking by the European Research Centre on Contemporary Taiwan and the Institute of Sociology at Academia Sinica in Taipei,⁵ political scientists and sociologists, including many from Taiwan, were invited to a conference held in Tübingen in July 2012 to examine and discuss the China impact on Taiwan in both empirical and conceptual terms.⁶ More precisely, the participants in this conference were asked to respond to the following research questions:

• What precisely is the ‘China impact’ on Taiwan in the research area they are concerned with? How can this impact be measured?
• To what extent is Taiwan’s political and social space constrained and/or enlarged by the ‘China impact’?
• What kinds of challenges and/or opportunities arise from the ‘China impact’ for Taiwan’s future, and how should Taiwan respond to them?

One thorny issue, of course, is measurement. With regard to economic relations between Taiwan and China, impact can be measured fairly accurately by, for example, Taiwan’s evolving trade dependency on China or the changes in the relative percentage of Taiwanese investment flowing into China. The measuring process is much trickier, however, for political and social relations across the Taiwan Strait. For instance, the purely numeric increases in the number of mainland Chinese tourists who visit Taiwan every year and in the number of Taiwanese citizens who migrate to China to work and reside there more or less permanently does not tell us much about the long-term economic, social and political consequences in Taiwan proper. There is no authoritative methodology for measuring political and social impact, but – as the chapters in this volume show – there are a number of routes to impact assessment, based on quantitative survey data and/or qualitative interviews, and, most importantly, informed interpretation. This issue will be addressed again in the concluding chapter, where the general insights provided by the contributors to the volume will be discussed and the direction of future research will be laid out. First of all, however, brief summaries of the different chapters will give the reader a general idea of the direction in which this research is heading.

Starting with China’s impact on Taiwan’s domestic politics, Jih-Wen Lin draws on a modified version of Putnam’s ‘two-level game’ model to explain how the Chinese government has become an important player in Taiwanese domestic politics by employing material incentives to influence the voting behaviour and change the ideological beliefs of the general public in Taiwan, primarily among the crucial constituency of ‘undecided voters’. At the same time, the author shows how economic payoffs impact on the political alternatives of negotiators on both sides under specific circumstances: Beijing would offer the Taiwanese people more if there were an independence-leaning president who was facing increasing trade dependence on China. However, economic incentives – such as the ECFA, signed in mid-2010 – could negatively rebound on Beijing because any extra benefits for Taiwanese voters would be levelled off by market forces in Taiwan in the long term and this could have the effect of enhancing support for independence. On the other hand, Taipei is constrained by the consequences of increasing economic integration across the Taiwan Strait and the threat of military conflict if the issue of independence is pushed too far. An independence-leaning government would thus safely be able to allow more cross-Strait trade liberalization and hold Beijing hostage to its economic promises to Taiwan, but this would incur the risk of increasing dependency and political pressure. In the end, Beijing has to consider the possibility that the DPP may regain power in Taiwan, even if overall support for the ‘pan-green’ camp (those parties favouring a Chinese identity and links with China) is lower than that for the ‘pan-blue’ parties (those leaning towards independence from China). Only with a non-independence government in power is there a chance that the negative long-term effects on Taiwanese voters of the levelling off of material benefits by cross-Strait trade liberalization will not translate into even stronger support for the pro-independence camp. For this reason, Beijing has every reason to do what it can to keep the KMT in power.

Hsuan-Yun Ted Chen and Chung-Li Wu discuss the China impact on negative campaigning in Taiwan politics. They find that ‘China’ is an ‘easy issue’ because China-related claims provoke ‘gut responses’ from the Taiwanese public; political opponents can therefore deploy such claims to attack each other without having to concern themselves with providing evidence in support of the claims being made. Relying on a dataset of television and newspaper campaign advertisements from four Taiwanese presidential elections, the authors show that the evidence rate for issues related to China is significantly lower than that for all other issues. This quantitative finding is buttressed by three qualitative case studies, in which anti-China sentiments were incited by politicians who attacked opponents and were then taken to court. In each of the cases, the supporting evidence was weak or even nonexistent. Unsubstantiated negative campaigning illustrates the high level of mistrust that exists in Taiwan’s society with respect to ‘China’ and poses the question of the extent to which Taiwan’s democratic political culture is compromised by invoking ‘China’ as a threat (or as an opportunity).

Dafydd J. Fell deals with the China impact on Taiwan’s electoral politics and the significance of cross-Strait economic relations as a campaign issue after Taiwan’s democratic transition. He finds that the political parties have been paying increasing attention to economic interaction across the Taiwan Strait since the early 1990s, which reflects the growing importance of China’s market transformation for Taiwan’s economic well-being. Whereas the New Party (NP) and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) have remained consistent in their treatment of the issue, the KMT and the DPP, for their part, vacillated considerably before starting to converge on cross-Strait economic issues after the ECFA debate came to a temporary halt in 2012. Today, the DPP no longer opposes the ECFA and cross-Strait economic integration, and the KMT has taken a firm pro-integration stance in accordance with much earlier NP campaign rhetoric. The author holds that Taiwan’s political parties have generally been responsive to, and have learned from, the challenges stemming from China’s economic rise, making Taiwan’s democracy appear in much better shape than is usually suggested.

Shelley Rigger presents an analysis of the distinctive attitudinal patterns of Taiwanese citizens that reflect the influence of formative events in the island republic’s post-war history on the mindsets of the Taiwanese people, including their thinking on China and cross-Strait relations. She distinguishes between five generations which have been shaped by such events: those born before 1932, who were born during the Japanese colonial era and witnessed the KMT arriving in Taiwan and installing its regime; those born between 1932 and 1953, who were socialized at a time when ideological rigidity, ethnic tension and political repression were at a peak; those born between 1954 and 1968, who grew up during the years when authoritarianism was increasingly being challenged; those born between 1968 and 1982, who lived through an era of rapid political change; and finally those born after 1982, who experienced the first coming to power of a DPP government and a new phase of democratic politics in Taiwan, as well as a changing cross-Strait relationship against the background of China’s rise. Rigger is particularly interested in this latter generation of young Taiwanese, who were most intensely exposed to the China impact, and finds that their attitudes defy the ‘established wisdom’ that Taiwanese identity correlates with scepticism, if not outright hostility, towards China. On the contrary, fifth-generation Taiwanese easily identify themselves as Taiwanese but are ready to engage with China at the same time. They are optimistic about future economic integration and seldom express concern about military tensions across the Taiwan Strait – findings that are, however, challenged by the recent Sunflower movement with its China-sceptical outlook.

Gunter Schubert investigates the capacity of Taiwanese entrepreneurs with investments on the Chinese mainland (Taishang) to influence Taiwan’s domestic politics and China policy-making. His analysis focuses on the Taishang’s influence as a voter bloc in important national elections; as a lobby group that sponsors Taiwanese politicians and political parties, working through business associations in both China and Taiwan as well as through informal networks which have links to Taiwanese policy-makers at local and national levels; and as manipulators of public opinion, most notably through the acquisition of substantial commercial stakes in the Taiwanese media market. Schubert finds that the Taishang with investments on the Chinese mainland do not really have sufficient organizational power to exert strong influence within Taiwan, although their informal power is substantial. In addition to this, since the Taishang have not yet developed a collective identity, more coordinated action is required for them to realize their common interests, which converge in continuous market liberalization and economic integration across the Taiwan Strait. As a Chinese ‘impact factor’ they are much less effective than is generally perceived in Taiwan, although a number of powerful ‘tycoons’ suggest otherwise.

Hans H. Tung and Yun-Han Chu, in their theoretical chapter, propose a political-economy model to explain the conditions under which the Ma government would be able to send out a credible message to the international community to the effect that it has adopted a conciliatory approach towards mainland China. The signing of the ECFA, the authors argue, was a ‘costly signal’ that indeed generated this credibility, informing China that Taiwan was ready for increasing mainland investment and informing the world that it was determined to restore its economic and political relations beyond China. By arguing that the ECFA has the potential to succeed in gaining international trust in Taiwan’s policy agenda, the authors underline the possibility that the ECFA can impact positively on Taiwan’s economy and further world market integration. Although they do not take sides in the debate between the protagonists and critics of the ECFA, which has been ongoing since the negotiations started in 2009, they clearly underline the potential of trade agreements with China to strengthen Taiwan’s global economic appeal.

In his survey analysis of China’s impact on the 2012 presidential elections, Nai-Teh Wu focuses on the group of ‘independent ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Foreword
• 1 Introduction
• PART I The China impact on Taiwan’s domestic politics
• PART II The China impact on Taiwanese society
• PART III The China impact on Taiwan’s security
• Index