What's Really Bothering Beijing?

By Gerrit van der Wees

Almost every day, Taiwan is feeling the heat of China's aggression: Beijing's military threat and intimidation, more than 1,000 missiles aimed its way, constant attempts to isolate it internationally and a failure to accept Taiwan as a friendly neighbor.

What is China fighting against? What is driving China's leaders in their obsession with Taiwan? When we go back in history, we see three main reasons.

One is the Chinese Civil War, which the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) fought against the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). This struggle was deeply ingrained in the minds of older leaders of the CCP, and still plays an important role in the thinking of the present leadership. But as the international power and influence of the KMT waned in the 1970s and 1980s, the old hostility was refocused on the new "threat": Taiwan's democracy.

While Taiwan considered its transition to democracy in the late 1980s and early 1990s a momentous achievement, the leaders of the PRC perceived it as a threat to the authoritarian system they had built in China.

If the Chinese had ideas similar to those of the Taiwanese, then the rule of the CCP would be finished.

China is thus not fighting Taiwan because the latter wants to remain separate: History shows that most Chinese leaders don't care much whether Taiwan is separate or not. It is an outlying place -- very much like the Northwest Territories for the US -- and not crucial to China's "center of civilization."

The real reason China is fighting Taiwan is because it represents a successful democracy right next door, undermining the CCP's authoritarian "stability."

The second reason that seems to be prevalent in Chinese thinking is to "right the wrongs" caused by two centuries of "humiliation"at the hands of Western countries.

This may have been a factor in the 19th century, after the Opium Wars, when Western states established enclaves along the Chinese coast, but the trials and tribulations of the 20th century were of China's own making: The Chinese Civil War, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution were internal Chinese affairs with which the West had little to do.

The third reason for China's hardheaded attitude toward Taiwan is that it thinks Taiwan's close association with the US and the West stands in the way of China becoming a "great power."

The leaders in Beijing have set an ambitious course for China to become a "superpower" along the lines of the US: wielding economic and political influence and power across the globe.

For China's leaders, "possession" of Taiwan is a key element in their geostrategic competition with the US -- and to a lesser extent in their regional competition with Japan.

This is because of Taiwan's strategic location -- straddling the important sea lanes between Japan and Southeast Asia while keeping China from unfettered access to the deep oceans of the Pacific.

China's threats to Taiwan are thus not caused by Taiwan's efforts to seek its rightful place under the sun, but rather by geostrategic competition with the US. This argument is made eloquently in a recent book titled Why Taiwan? by Alan Wachman of Tufts University. As long as "Taiwan's people seek the dignity of sovereignty and the assurance that so long as they do no harm to the PRC, Beijing will regard the island with neighborly comity," Wachman writes.

He argues that if, on the other hand, one views the issue through the lens of Beijing's geostrategic ambitions, one might come to a very different conclusion. If it sees Taiwan as essential to its security and even more importantly as part of a broader geostrategic competition with the US and Japan, the chance of Beijing resorting to the use of force is much greater.

This has important implications for the US. Another US East Asia researcher, Don Rodgers, recently wrote: "In the United States, policymakers must be careful not to view increasing tensions between China and Taiwan as the outcome of a `trouble-making' government in Taiwan (as they seem far too inclined to do), but rather as one manifestation of an intensifying geostrategic competition between China and the US and Japan."

Let us hope that Washington pays heed.

Gerrit van der Wees is editor at the Washington-based Taiwan Communique.