TAIPEI, Taiwan — Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping would invade Taiwan if authorities in Taipei stop referring to their government as the Republic of China, analysts and Taiwanese officials believe.
Those three small words have proven capacious enough to accommodate both the Chinese Communist Party’s intention to subjugate Taiwan and the aspirations of a Taiwanese political movement hostile to rulers from Beijing — be they communist or nationalist ROC forces led to Taiwan by Chiang Kai-shek after the Chinese Communist victory in 1949. The paradoxical importance that both sides now attach to that defeated power’s name is crucial to preserving a so-called status quo and avoiding a conflict that could trigger an unprecedented clash between the United States and a nuclear-armed adversary.
“Taiwan, with the formal name of the Republic of China, and People’s Republic of China — you know, the other side — are not subordinated to each other,” Taiwan’s Catherine Y. M. Hsu, who leads her Ministry of Foreign Affairs’s international information services department, told reporters. “The policy of the government is not moving towards an immediate declaration of Taiwan independence.”
That near-doublethink is in the mold of Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen’s statement following her reelection in 2020. “We don’t have a need to declare ourselves an independent state. We are an independent country already, and we call ourselves the Republic of China, Taiwan. We have a separate identity, and we’re a country of our own. We deserve respect from China,” she said.
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That statement attempts to strike an artful balance between the political heritage of the Democratic Progressive Party that powered Tsai’s rise to high office and the danger posed by the regime across the strait.
“There are a series of red lines, but the clearest one is a de jure declaration of independence,” the American Enterprise Institute’s Zack Cooper said.“What China wants is to have this option for ‘peaceful reunification,’ as they would call it. So that has to mean that Taiwan can’t be formally independent, or else, things would be going the wrong direction.”
Chinese Communist officials claim sovereignty over Taiwan despite never having ruled there.
“They had a civil war, they formed the PRC, but they didn’t wipe out [the] ROC,” as another senior Taiwanese official, speaking on condition of anonymity, put it. “So we’re still here.”
Their survival has depended, in part, on assistance from the U.S. through a period of official and “unofficial” relations. The Republic of China was formed in 1912, one year after the collapse of the imperial Qing dynasty. The ROC and the U.S. formed an alliance against Japan during World War II, which continued for decades after Chiang withdrew to Taiwan.
The U.S. cut diplomatic relations with the ROC in 1979, as Cold War priorities heightened the appeal of having an embassy in Beijing, and the Chinese Communist authorities took that diplomatic victory as a boost to their goal of ruling all the territory held by the late Qing dynasty. They outlined a proposal in which “the ROC would disappear,” as Richard C. Bush has written, subsumed into the PRC, and reserved the right to use military force in service of that objective if Taiwanese officials (Chiang’s military dictatorship, known as the Kuomintang) refused to acquiesce.
In parallel, a “pro-independence” movement of Taiwanese dissidents formed against the Chiang regime and grew over the years into the DPP.
“It was always there to counter Chiang Kai-shek’s hold on power,” the senior Taiwanese official said, adding that they regarded the ROC autocrat as “a foreigner” to Taiwan. “But eventually, they became a force, and the KMT had to yield power, and they became a democracy.”
The transition to democracy occurred only after a meeting in Hong Kong, then ruled by the United Kingdom, between KMT and Chinese Communist officials that had ambiguous, if not controversial, results. This meeting is the origin of the so-called 1992 Consensus that “there is only one China,” as KMT officials acknowledged, with the caveat that “the two sides of the Strait have different opinions as to the meaning of ‘one China.'” For Taipei, that “one China” remained the ROC, while Chinese Communist officials took the statement as a watershed acknowledgment that Taiwan ought to be subject to Beijing’s authority.
“Taiwan is an inalienable part of China’s territory, and the Government of the People’s Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China,” the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Aug. 2 in a protest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan. “The Taiwan authorities have kept seeking U.S. support for their independence agenda. They refuse to recognize the 1992 Consensus, go all out to push forward ‘de-sinicization,’ and promote ‘incremental independence.’”
DPP officials have never accepted the 1992 Consensus. U.S. efforts to avoid a conflict in the Taiwan Strait have involved a balancing act between deterring China, supporting Taiwan’s democracy, and restraining the pro-independence impulses of the DPP. George W. Bush, who pledged in 2001 to do “whatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself” from a Chinese Communist invasion, nevertheless opposed a DPP-favored referendum to seek membership in the United Nations.
“The PRC has always said, ‘Oh, they’re [separatists]’ — ‘they’ meaning the DPP — because they’ve always wanted to form a Republic of Taiwan, not [Republic of] China, but Taiwan. But DPP people here have also evolved,” the senior Taiwanese official said. “The [DPP] notion is that we don’t really need to declare independence [as] Republic of Taiwan because Taiwan, as Republic of China, is actually already a political entity that is away from mainland China. And by not declaring a new name, it’s actually pretty safe because we’ve always called ourselves Republic of China.”
So the two sides have competing definitions of the “status quo,” but the continued use of the “Republic of China” name helps enable the Chinese Communist and Taiwanese definitions of the status quo to coexist.
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“There’s no good resolution to this. The question is, can you extend the existing status quo so that you avoid a conflict?” said Cooper, the AEI scholar. “A core part of that status quo is that none of us actually agree on what the status quo is. … And so, some of this nuanced stuff is actually part of allowing everyone to disagree about the status quo, but not feel like they have to forcibly make the other sides get on the same page.”
