Why Taiwan Matters to Us All

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen speaks during a news conference with the incoming Taiwan Premier Chen Chien-jen and outgoing Taiwan Premier Su Tseng-chang at the presidential office in Taipei, Taiwan, on Jan. 27, 2023. Carlos Garcia Rawlins/Reuters

Commentary

Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen is meeting with U.S. House Speaker McCarthy on April 5 before travelling to Latin America. European states like the Czech Republic, Lithuania, and the United Kingdom are also continuing to deepen political engagement with the independent island.

At the same time, we’re getting another round of fire and brimstone from Chinese state media and foreign ministry spokespeople threatening others for daring to talk or meet with President Tsai.

China’s military is ratcheting up its military intimidation around Taiwan. And in the dance for diplomatic recognition, Beijing has convinced Honduras to switch, while outgoing Micronesian President David Panuelo has raised the prospect of shifting back to recognising Taiwan.

Out of all this, it’s important for Australian public debate to understand what’s at stake if Beijing succeeds in isolating Taiwan, using a combination of propaganda and military intimidation to set the conditions for it to act unopposed against it.

One simple outcome of isolation would be to make an invasion of Taiwan more likely, with a broader war being a disturbingly credible consequence.

This is made more real because of the drive Chinese leader Xi Jinping seems to have brought to efforts to control Taiwan.

And there’s a personal element here for Xi: achieving this historic goal of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) during his time in leadership would catapult him beyond Mao in the Party pantheon.

Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen and New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy attend an event with members of the Taiwanese community in New York in a handout picture released on March 30, 2023. Taiwan Presidential Office/Handout via Reuters

Some observers have said that the United States has fewer core interests in Taiwan than Beijing, and so it won’t fight over the island—they also tell us that if the United States has no core interests there, Australia and other U.S. allies should have fewer.

This belief, unfortunately, aligns well with two key planks of the narrative that Beijing seeks to promote: its relentless determination to “reunify” the island with the mainland, by force if necessary, and its portrayal of U.S. power as unreliable or weak.

The 4 Reasons Why We Must Defend Taiwan

So, why is Taiwan a core security and political issue for Australia, as it is for the United States and partners like South Korea and Japan?

There are four key reasons: geography, the fate of 24 million people living in a democracy, control of foundational elements of our digital world, and lastly, the strategic effect of a successful Chinese invasion.

On geography, by remaining outside Beijing’s control, Taiwan’s strategic location and size matter. It complicates the Chinese military’s ability to project power and provides advantages to Beijing’s potential adversaries during a conflict.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army controlling and using Taiwan as a base would undercut Japanese and South Korean security and help the Chinese military oppose U.S. access and cooperation with its allies.

This would be detrimental to Australian security interests and to the stability of Northeast Asia.

In simple human terms, Taiwan is an island of around 23 million people in the Indo-Pacific that serves as an example to 1.4 billion mainland Chinese that a democratic system of government is possible for them.

If an island democracy of 23 million is not significant enough for the United States, Australia, and other partners to help protect, then why would Australia have any confidence that allies and partners would help defend Australia?

If Beijing were to invade Taiwan successfully, U.S. inaction would profoundly undercut U.S. power and show that America and its allies and partners—including Australia—cannot act together to secure important common interests in the face of CCP action.

Taiwan is also a critical source of high technology, including much of the global production capacity for semiconductors.

An engineer holds a chip at the Taiwan Semiconductor Research Institute in Hsinchu, Taiwan, on Feb. 11, 2022. Ann Wang/Reuters

If controlled by Beijing, Taiwan’s advantages would tip the military, technological, and economic power balance in the CCP’s favour and close enduring gaps in the Chinese economy and state’s technological capability.

“Digital decoupling” would accelerate, but in ways not to Australia or other liberal democracies’ advantage.

Further, analysts who assert that Taiwan is strategically insignificant to the U.S. and allied strategy and power in the Indo-Pacific, are eerily reminiscent of those who back in the early 2010s dismissed the importance of Chinese island-building in the South China Sea as “just a pile of rocks” or “targets.”

The strategic effect of China’s island-building and development of Chinese military capabilities in the South China Sea, combined with the ineffectual response from claimant states, Australia, the United States, and other like-minded partners, has increased Chinese power in North and Southeast Asia. Taiwan is a much more significant piece of real estate than any of these rocks.

Time to Stop Getting Distracted

As we see Taiwan make new rounds in reaching out to partners in our region and Europe, accompanied by threats from Beijing, it’s sensible to think about what Australian politicians and officials might do to help prevent the CCP from politically isolating and demoralising Taiwan and its people.

It’s important to signal Australia’s clear interest in the status of Taiwan not being changed by force—as our government has.

But it’s equally as important to work on deterrence strategies and plans with its partners, while increasing political, economic, and people-to-people engagement with the like-minded, vibrant democracy of Taiwan and its people.

Australia’s public debate uncritically repeating Beijing’s narratives or getting side-tracked on whether domestic voices are simply stoking anxiety is the time taken away from working to understand what’s at stake—and what can be done to make Beijing’s use of force against the people of Taiwan less likely.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.