Why Taiwan?: Geostrategic Rationales for China’s Territorial Integrity
By Alan Wachman
Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, 2007. 272 pages.
ISBN-10: 080475554X. ISBN-13: 978-0804755542

To highlight how China sees its strategic situation, East Asia specialists sometimes like to engage in a kind of thought experiment: They take a map of China and rotate it 90 degrees counter-clockwise, so that China’s interior is to the south and its coastline faces north. If one looks at China this way, what becomes clearer is not only the mass of Chinese territory but the ring of islands hovering around China, stretching like a band off its coast.

Strategists note that Beijing must be concerned by the degree to which these islands are restrictive of China’s security, or protective of it. It is through these vulnerable waters that predators came in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and through which the bulk of Chinese trade, and thus its economic sustenance, travel today.

Specifically, this “first island chain,” as Chinese strategists call it, runs from Japan’s mainland in the north, through Okinawa in the East China Sea, and down to the northern Philippines. Japan and the Philippines are U.S. allies. On Okinawa are stationed about half of the 47,000 U.S. troops based in Japan. Of course, in between lies the island of Taiwan.

It is this strategic situation that Alan M. Wachman, associate professor of international politics at Tufts University, puts at the heart of his new book Why Taiwan?: Geostrategic Rationales for China’s Territorial Integrity. Wachman poses a fundamental question in his book, one whose answer seems self-evident to China hands but at which he seeks to take a fresh look: Why is China’s communist regime committed with such fervor to regaining Taiwan, even to the point of risking war with the United States – especially when in the past it has “relinquished sovereignty over large tracts of what was China’s territory, settled for less than it claimed in negotiations over other tracts, and ignored land that was once a part of China, about which nary an irredentist word has been uttered?”

In response to Wachman’s question, the typical China hand would weave together very complex cultural, social, psychological, and historical themes from China’s recent history to explain that country’s seemingly strange obsession with the island. But Wachman’s own answer, or at least part of his answer, is refreshingly practical and direct: It is classic geopolitics, stupid.

Wachman does not dismiss the other aspects of Chinese interest in Taiwan. But he suggests that observers not simply buy into China’s preferred narrative, so successfully peddled at home and abroad, as the sum total of the story. His book, as he puts it, seeks to “offer a corrective to views of the Taiwan issue that stem from the notion that the PRC’s position reflects a consistent and straightforward interest in righting the injustices of history, satisfying popular nationalist ambitions, ensuring regime legitimacy, providing a bulwark against the division of China’s territorial integrity, or demonstrating resolve in opposition to Taiwan’s independence as a way of discouraging independence movements in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Tibet.”

Mental map

Wachman’s book traces in some detail how China’s attention to Taiwan has been fitful at best (and hardly indicative of proprietary feeling) over the centuries. During most of its imperial period, for instance, Taiwan was either ignored or dismissed as a remote, uncivilized, and inconsequential outland – “no bigger than a ball of mud,” as one Chinese emperor put it. According to another source, the name “Taiwan” didn’t even appear in Chinese documents until the late Ming period (1368-1644), when the island became an outpost for defeated Han loyalists after the Manchus (Qing) took control . Chinese maps during the early Qing dynasty (1644-1912) fail to depict the island. When Taiwan was taken by Japan in 1895 following the Sino-Japanese War of 1895, Wachman notes, it again fell off what he calls the “mental map” of China. Indeed, throughout most of imperial times, the island was considered part of an eastern periphery. This periphery was thought far less critical to Han Chinese security than were the traditional challenges that came from the nomadic and often militant peoples along China’s land borders to the north and west.

Ironically, it was one of those successful northern nomadic challengers, the Manchus, who originally consolidated “Chinese” control of Taiwan – along with other substantial non-Han regions to the west, such as Tibet and Xinjiang. China’s mental map of itself – and the geopolitical rationale that accompany that map, though formed during a period of “foreign” domination – has continued to exist within subsequent Han-majority Chinese regimes, producing assumptions about the geographic outlines and requirements of modern China.

Wachman traces the geopolitical rationale for controlling Taiwan to the Qing strategist Shi Lang, who served under the rule of Kangxi (the great emperor who had compared Taiwan to a ball of mud). Kangxi, far from assuming Taiwan was part of or important to China, said his dominion would “gain nothing by possessing it, and it would be no loss if we did not acquire it.”

Shi Lang begged to differ, however, arguing that Taiwan had strategic importance to China in several dimensions: as a buffer against pirates, criminals, or others from afar who wished China ill; to prevent the island from becoming a base for rebellious elements at home; or as a bridge to project power into vital sea lanes. Direct evidence that Shi Lang’s argument was decisive in Kangxi’s thinking apparently does not exist. But in 1684, a year after Shi Lang set forth his ideas, Taiwan was declared a prefecture of Fujian Province.

Today, few Chinese policymakers or strategists invoke Shi Lang when discussing the country’s approach to Taiwan. However, the doctrine of “strategic denial” – preventing elements that may threaten the security of the Chinese heartland from gaining access to territory along the country’s periphery – has clear echoes in contemporary China policy (not only toward Taiwan but also Tibet and Xinjiang). It remains to be seen whether power projection, another of Shi Lang’s strategic ideas concerning China’s periphery, has a similar logic and relevance in contemporary Chinese thinking – although the idea must give pause to those in China’s neighborhood watching the nation’s rise closely.

The problem with strategic buffer strategies, of course, is that as one absorbs new buffer zones to protect one’s heartland, one creates new territory requiring protection and buffers. Wachman describes this conundrum well in describing the Chinese experience:

“The urge to enhance power and bolster security by expanding territorial control to buffer regions surrounding the heartland resulted in the subjugation of historically or potentially threatening populations on the original periphery. Naturally the cost of subduing those threats on the original periphery and asserting dominion over them greatly extended the boundary across which lay new potentially threatening neighbors [and] against which the enlarged and often overextended empire had thereafter to defend itself.”

China’s tense relations with India, Vietnam (over the Spratly Islands), and even Korea are the result of the extended buffers required for today’s China. In fact, one might argue that in a globalized world, China’s urgent domestic needs extend its strategic periphery even further, to those areas that may offer the markets, investment destinations, and natural resources that are required to keep China developing economically so Beijing may maintain domestic stability. Strategic peripheries today are both geographic and functional, thus altering (though perhaps not rendering obsolete) China’s traditional geopolitical considerations of Taiwan’s importance.

As Wachman explains, geopolitical arguments are understated in China’s contemporary pronouncements about Taiwan. Wachman, when he cites selected Chinese strategic writings, particularly those focused on the development of sea power, is careful to note that such passages are not enough to prove China’s leadership thinks similarly. His care reflects the rigor required in academia. But his instincts – and common sense – clearly lead him, as they would any observer, toward a more decisive conclusion: that the strategic and geopolitical rationale for Chinese interest in Taiwan is a substantial factor in Beijing’s position on Taiwan (whether or not it is appropriate to state this idea in polite company within China, or to outside audiences).

National myth

In any case, only the most credulous of observers would buy into Beijing’s story on Taiwan as the last word on the subject. What is particularly telling, however, is that China feels it must avoid making the geopolitical case explicitly. One suspects that China would consider making such a case to be rude, embarrassing, or debasing to the purity of its intentions and its claim to the island. Indeed, were China to admit that its claims to Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan stemmed from a non-Han dynasty that saw these territories in strategic, rather than historically fraternal terms, China would have to admit that it was a normal hegemonic nation with a history of expansionism – rather than a victimized civilization that deserved to regain its rightful patrimony and due return for a century of humiliation.

Every nation has its story, its national myth, that affirms a people’s exceptionalism and virtue. The United States in fact is no exception. It is further not uncommon for the implications of such a narrative to come at the expense of others. The irony of China’s claim to Taiwan as part of its national narrative is that the island in recent years has transformed itself, apart from the mainland, into a successful, highly developed democracy, and has assumed the high road according to many aspects of international norms. China, meanwhile, faces enormous domestic challenges and can offer Taiwan little more than economic opportunity and political repression.

Under such conditions, the “will of 1.3 billion Chinese people” does not carry much weight in Taiwan, nor elsewhere outside China. For Beijing, this leaves only harsh rhetoric and threats. It is, after all, not the Taiwanese narrative that is in play. Indeed, in the Chinese narrative, the will and perspectives of the Taiwanese people are irrelevant at best. This fateful view remains a key obstacle to cross-Strait reconciliation, let alone integration.

The leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has so intertwined the integration of Taiwan into the “motherland” with the history and identity of the Chinese nation that, even should geopolitical concerns abate, the requirements of nationalism would almost certainly force China’s leaders to continue to push for Taiwan’s return. The CCP has painted itself into a corner. Its rhetoric has raised expectations concerning the return of Taiwan, and the government therefore must produce results. Over time, the party may find itself unable to control the passions of an increasingly nationalistic and restive population, one more confident of its own legitimacy and ability to promote patriotic objectives. China proceeds on its current Taiwan track at its peril.

Indeed, China’s brutal policies in Tibet and Xinjiang, and high sensitivity toward those regions, suggest that Taiwan is not in fact as unique as it seems. The difference between those regions and Taiwan is obvious, however: Taiwan is de facto independent, leans toward a major foreign power (at least to date), has independent military forces, and thus remains a potential bulwark of policies that may restrict or constrain China’s exercise of control and defense along its eastern periphery. For those fundamental geopolitical reasons, as Wachman suggests, Taiwan will remain a priority for Chinese leaders for the foreseeable future.

What is undeniable is that China’s efforts to regain the island peacefully and safeguard its geopolitical interests have been an abject failure to date. China has comforted itself by pointing fingers at the United States and demonizing Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian for this state of affairs. But as Wachman correctly notes, China has mostly itself to blame: “[China] reflects no self-awareness concerning the way its responses to Chen and Taiwan’s political dynamics since 2000 have helped to create precisely the situation it claimed an interest in avoiding.”

Let’s hope China somehow gains such self-awareness quickly so it does not make the same mistakes again. With the return to power of the Kuomintang under Ma Ying-jeou, an opportunity clearly presents itself for greater cross-Strait stability and development. While Beijing’s approach to the Dalai Lama and Tibet in recent weeks provokes pessimism, the ball is nonetheless in China’s court to demonstrate creativity, promote goodwill, and build real trust across the Strait. Should it do so, China would do more to safeguard its geopolitical interests than it could achieve through all the threats and firepower it could deploy against the island today or in the future.

— Derek Mitchell is a senior fellow and the director
for Asia in the International Security Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, based in Washington D.C.