China's recent military bravado in the Taiwan Strait represents the end state of a failed strategy

The drums of war are growing louder in the Taiwan Strait. In the last month, at least 50 People’s Liberation Army (PLA) aircraft have entered Taiwan’s airspace. The volume of threatening language directed at Taiwan from sources in China, both official and unofficial, has reached a crescendo, and the headlines in the news grow more alarmingeach month. In the United States, mainstream foreign policy voices are now openly debating whether the U.S. should abandon strategic ambiguity and openly commit to defend Taiwan in the case of an attack — an idea advocated not so long ago by only a radical fringe.

​But these dire headlines are misleading: Beijing is not gearing up for an attack on Taiwan. It still has neither the capacity to launch a successful full-scale invasion, nor the motive to risk a conflict with the United States. In reality, the increasingly bellicose language coming from China is a sign of weakness, not strength, and a cover for the failure of its own Taiwan policy. Having thrown away most of its non-military leverage in a fruitless effort to compel Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen to endorse its one China principle, Beijing has now been reduced to counter-productive saber-rattling to express its discontent at U.S. arms sales and high-level diplomatic visits, while Taiwan races to strengthen its own defenses and reorient its economy away from overdependence on mainland China. In short, Xi Jinping’s approach to the “Taiwan issue” has turned into a strategic fiasco — one that may take years for Beijing to recover from...

It's alive! This book volume on Taiwan politics during the Ma Ying-jeou years (2008-2016), which I've edited with Chu Yun-han and Larry Diamond, just arrived in the mail from Lynne Rienner Publishers this weekend.

This is our attempt at a deep dive into various aspects of Ma-era politics, including party politics and elections, political institutions and governance challenges, trends in public opinion and democratic values, civil society and social movements, and cross-Strait and US-Taiwan-PRC relations. This look at the Ma years parallels somewhat our earlier book on the Chen Shui-bian era.

We were fortunate to be able to assemble a great group of contributors for this book--about half based in Taiwan and half abroad--who offer a variety of perspectives on the politics of the Ma years. The scholarship here draws on years of conferences, papers, and conversations that started even before President Ma left office, including with some of the key participants in and outside of the Ma administration. (Chapter 15, for instance, is by Szu-yin Ho, who served for two years as deputy Secretary-General of Ma's National Security Council.) This sort of cross-national collaboration is less common than it should be (in part because it's logistically hard to pull off!), but I am convinced the final product is much stronger for it.  

Among the many great contributions here, let me especially highlight three that provide original, provocative answers to important questions about the Ma era:

• In Chapter 3, Austin Wang explains how Tsai Ing-wen emerged from obscurity as unrivaled leader of the DPP during its years in opposition, despite having never previously held elected office;
• In Chapter 4, Nathan Batto shows how President Ma's recurrent troubles with the legislature had more to do with deep divides within the ruling KMT than they did with the obstructionist tactics of the opposition DPP and with Ma's party rival, Speaker Wang Jin-pyng;
• In Chapter 7, Isaac Shih-hao Huang and Shing-yuan Sheng demonstrate that having a majority in the Legislative Yuan does not mean a party has complete control over the Legislative Yuan, and that the legislature's decentralized law-making process makes it challenging for the executive branch to get high-priority legislation approved, whether or not the president's party holds a majority. 

For more thoughts on those issues and a broader overview of the book, check out the introductory chapter, which is available ungated from the publisher's website. 

I have a piece out in the latest issue of the Journal of Democracy on Chinese efforts to influence Taiwan politics, and why they failed in the January 2020 elections. After the DPP lost badly in the 2018 local elections, there was a lot of speculation (see, e.g. here, here, here, here, and here) that Beijing would be emboldened by these results and expand its efforts to sway the 2020 campaign and turn President Tsai Ing-wen and the DPP out of office, or failing that, would find ways to delegitimize the results and destabilize Taiwan's democracy. In the end, that didn't happen: Tsai recovered from a politically shaky first term to win an even larger share of the vote than in 2016, the DPP held onto its legislative majority, and Tsai's main opponent, Han Kuo-yu of the KMT, openly conceded defeat on election night.

In the article, I lay out several reasons why these fears did not come to pass in 2020, and why Taiwan's democracy has repeatedly proven resilient to PRC pressure campaigns. 

1. The CCP is still pretty bad at influencing public opinion: Beijing's covert influence operations have been surprisingly clumsy, badly disguised, and at odds with the long-term goals of Taiwan policy under Xi Jinping.
2. Partisanship can be a good thing: The high salience of the China factor and Taiwan's partisan divides make it hard to execute the kind of United Front-led, covert and coercive activities that the CCP favors for most of its influence operations elsewhere in the world.
3. State capacity lives: The Taiwanese state is still quite capable of responding effectively to the threat of foreign interference in elections when it takes them seriously, and the 2018 elections provided a belated wake-up call to this danger.
4. A free society helps: Taiwanese civil society, including parts of the media and NGOs, as well as private social media companies, managed to mitigate the impact of disinformation. Facebook, for instance, took down over a hundred Han Kuo-yu fan pages the month before the election for "inauthentic activity."  
5. Low-tech elections are an important backstop for democracy: Taiwan's election management system is very low-tech, but it is also transparent, accurate, efficient, fast, and fair. (For more details, see here.) Nobody disputed the election results, shocking as they were to some of Han Kuo-yu's core supporters who had believed the polls were fake and that Tsai would lose. The high trust in the voting and counting process had a lot to do with that.   

The full article is available via Project Muse, and access is free through August 15, 2020.

If Tsai Ing-wen is superstitious, she should be worried: second term presidents in Taiwan appear to be cursed. Much like President Tsai, her predecessor Ma Ying-jeou started his second term on a confident and triumphant note. But over the next four years, he faced a relentless series of political crises, including an intraparty power struggle with Legislative Yuan Speaker Wang Jin-pyng, massive protests against the death of a military conscript and construction of a nuclear power plant, and of course the Sunflower Movement occupation of the legislature, which effectively halted cross-Strait rapprochement with Beijing. President Ma’s approval ratings bottomed out at record lows, and he stepped down in 2016 on the heels of a sweeping electoral defeat of the ruling Kuomintang (KMT), ultimately having accomplished little in his last years in office.

Somehow, Chen Shui-bian’s second term was even worse. The controversy around his re-election victory in 2004 robbed him of whatever political momentum he might have enjoyed, and he spent most of his remaining tenure fending off vicious partisan attacks, anti-corruption accusations in the press, massive street rallies by his opponents, and impeachment attempts in the legislature. In his attempt to keep core pro-independence supporters on his side, President Chen pursued a brash symbolic agenda that deliberately provoked the pan-Blue opposition, infuriated Beijing, alienated even potential allies in Washington, and left him politically isolated. In the 2008 elections, his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) paid a steep electoral price, and after his term was finally over, Chen ended up in handcuffs: the corruption accusations turned out to be true, and he was sentenced to a long prison term.

The rest of this piece continues at Taiwan Insight.