The ‘Great Power’ Mindset That Taiwan Must Not Overlook

By this time next year, we will have elected our next president and a new Legislative Yuan. As opposed to local elections, the focus of the central elections must extend to matters beyond Taiwan’s Flight Information Region, because that is where the key to truly influencing the country’s survival and development lies.

Due to Taiwan’s long isolation, the public has long been unaware of the enormous impact the external environment has on the country’s security and safety and has, therefore, paid little attention to the major challenges posed to Taiwan by the profound changes in the international power landscape. Where general political commentary is concerned, the bulk of analysis and online discussion of presidential elections is often reduced to the attack or defense of domestic political parties and people’s degree of preference for political figures.

Taiwan’s situation is actually comparable to that of Ukraine, and this serves as a major warning to the international community and the media. Tacit agreement on the Taiwan Strait median line is gone for good — a grim reality of the geostrategic confrontation between the United States and China.

The election campaign, which will span this entire year, has placed a wholly different set of demands on Taiwanese voters. They cannot just consider their own party preferences or their own appraisals of the candidates’ merits and demerits; instead, they must change their perspective, take the long and broad view, and look at the presidential election from the outside in in terms of national survival and security over the next five to 10 years.

Just over two months ago, during his first face-to-face head of state meeting with President Joe Biden on the eve of the Group of 20 Leaders Summit in Bali, Xi Jinping said, “There is plenty of room on the planet for China and the United States to develop and prosper together.” Compare this to “The Pacific is vast enough to accommodate China and the United States, the two great powers,” which is what he said in a written interview with The Washington Post 10 years earlier, before his visit to the United States in his capacity as vice president. Beijing’s great power mindset has expanded from the Pacific to encompass the entire world.

The power struggle between China and the United States is already under way, and it will be a long and bumpy road. Small amounts of “win-win cooperation” or the periodic easing of tensions will do little to ease the full range of competition and confrontation, from the economy, trade and finance, to technology, security and military affairs. When it comes to China, a heretofore unseen No. 2 on the road to American superpowerdom and coming into prominence on all fronts, the more apparent the collective anxieties of the Washington and Wall Street elite become, the more reflective they are of extreme concerns over slogans such as “the East is rising, the West declining” and “time and momentum are on our side.”

When considering the U.S.-China-Taiwan relationship, what are the key issues Taiwan should pay attention to? Some people are worried about whether or when the mainland will use force against Taiwan. Others are deeply concerned about whether the United States and its allies will send troops to save Taiwan in case of trouble in the Taiwan Strait. This is a very Taiwanese way of framing things, and it seems that people want answers to only these two questions. Another approach is to look at the changes in the tripartite U.S.-China-Russia relationship to see what cards Washington and Beijing want to play in the Taiwan Strait; and, indeed, what cards they are able to play.

The two powers are playing chess based on a great power mindset, and if Taiwan sees only the differences between either party, it will naturally recall the familiar saying, “the confrontation between democracy and autocracy is the conflict between freedom and oppression.” However, in the context of the international power landscape and seen from the standpoint of “the way of hegemony” and cyclical theories of the rise and fall of nations, the great powers are actually very similar. It is only by considering the differences of China-U.S. confrontation and the similarities in their power struggles in an even-handed manner that we can better understand the policies of Washington and Beijing toward Taiwan.

Caught between the two powers that are China and the United States, most of our research has pertained to cross-strait relations rather than mainland issues, and to Taiwan-U.S. interactions rather than U.S. politics. If we look only at the mainland’s and the United States’ policy toward Taiwan, we are not just putting the cart before the horse — we are getting our priorities entirely wrong.

Between the two powers, if we were to list just one of Beijing’s greatest concerns, it should be the U.S. executive and legislative branches’ various and progressive moves to obscure and hollow out the One China [principle], which shook the fundamental basis for the normalization of U.S.-China relations half a century ago. Between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait, if we were to list only one of Beijing’s major concerns, it would be the varied and progressive actions taken by Taiwan to promote de-Sinicization, dispelling the imagery of ties that unite (“that which has long been divided must unify”). Of course, Taiwan has been the first to bear the brunt, and the challenges are enormous -- this year in particular.

Now that the presidential election is underway, Taiwan should look into the great power mindsets in this game between the two powers, but it should take the long and broad view. That means being less preoccupied with its domestic political squabbles about which the powers don’t care, and more with the global situation in the next 10 years, so as to endure in silence, militarily and nationally intact.

In this year of the Water Rabbit, one cannot help but think of the Chinese idiom, “As still as a maiden, as brisk as a fleeing hare.” Between stillness and briskness, we should, as Sun Tzu tells us in “The Art of War,” “Move when it is to your advantage; remain in place when it is not.”

The author is an associate professor at Tamkang University’s Graduate Institute of International Affairs & Strategic Studies and chairman of the nonprofit think tank, the Council on Strategic & Wargaming Studies, Taiwan.