An urgent review of THE STRUGGLE FOR TAIWAN: A HISTORY by Sulmaan Wasif Khan (2024)
This is an up-to-date book about the convoluted triangulation of the USA, PRC and ROC, from the point of view of an US academic sympathetic to the people of Taiwan, if not always to the governments of the US and ROC, and least of all to that of the PRC. The contemporary conundrum, with dire warnings of chaos and nuclear cataclysm, as he posits again and again, is not a historical inevitability but rooted in ignorant choices made by equally ignorant politicians. The hope is therefore that intelligent choices are possible, now and in the future, to reach an accommodation that allows for a modicum of agreement amongst all the political players. That this may be wishful thinking is evidenced by his evaluation of who some of the main players were and still are, and are likely to be again: at the time of writing, ex-president Trump is running to get back and is described by Khan as having had ‘neither principle nor genius, but he did have a low cunning: he saw and exploited the worst feelings in his electorate (p.191)’. None of the other US presidents up to Biden come off much better (the book does not catch up to the Harris’ nomination). PRC’s Xi Jinping is portrayed as even worse than Trump, a bully, not be trusted, as evidenced by his treatment on Hong Kong, saying that ‘the model of governance was no longer “one country, two systems’; it was just one country, and a rather miserable one at that (p.203)’. Such contemporary put-downs serve to highlight the potential for chaos and war, since neither side has any clue how to solve the Taiwan problem peacefully. The Taiwanese president-elect, William Lai, and his predecessor Tsai Ingwei, as the meat in the sandwich do their best to play both sides to their advantage, even though Taiwan is utterly dependent on the US for military support and protection. Khan speculates about possible past and future scenarios, some of which are quite bizarre, such as suggesting Taiwan could have developed its own nuclear weapons as a deterrent. More realistic are the notions of the status-quo remaining indefinitely, i.e. Xi Jinping having a change of heart, hinting benignly that reunification will be achieved in 50 – 100 years, or going totally soft and granting Taiwan independence. Alternatively, Xi or his successors could revert to Deng’s position, offering a genuine “one country, two systems” solution, allowing Taiwan total autonomy, including its own military. It all depends on the PRC. Of course, there is the wishful speculation that the CCP will disintegrate, like the Soviet counterpart did, and democracy will come to China – as it did to Russia? All any US government can do is to scale down the military posturing, seek dialogue with the PRC and hope for the best.
How we got to this seemingly unsolvable geopolitical problem is a well-known historical development. Khan does a good job to recapitulate. It’s a bit of a lost cause, since we all know that nobody ever learns from history, condemned to repeat it. Khan is harking back to empires in the past and how they are buried in the sands of time and circumstance. As such no Chinese nationalist will be interested in the observation that the demise of the Qing dynasty was, in itself, a story of a colonial power losing its grip over China, including the fact that during that time Taiwan was at best an insignificant island that no Chinese emperor cared about. When Taiwan and the Pescadores fell to the Japanese, the only people that rebelled were the local Taiwanese. Perhaps the first stirrings of a Taiwanese identity. Of course, even then there were multitudes of ethnic Chinese divisions, not to speak of the indigenous population (one that Khan gives not much credence).
The latter note (in brackets) has some personal connection: as a linguist resident in New Zealand/Aotearoa I had specialised in Oceanic languages, and as is not so well known, even in Taiwan amongst the Chinese ethnicities, the aborigines of Taiwan are the ancestors of the Polynesian migrations. As such my first sojourn to Taiwan was a linguistics conference at the Academia Sinica in Taipei in 1997, with the seven indigenous tribes and their languages featuring prominently. In 2024 they constitute about 4% of the total population. My personal knowledge of Taiwan goes a bit further though: I worked at a red-brick university in Taoyuan for a year, and we have Taiwanese in-laws. It is not clear from the text if Khan has much personal knowledge of Taiwan but one would guess that he has travelled there. From his references and acknowledgements, it is clear that he owes a great debt to various Taiwanese experts, resident in the US, and as such his academic research is impeccable – notwithstanding his neglect of the indigenous peoples of Taiwan.
Getting back to the Japanese occupation of Taiwan and the subsequent reunification with China, Khan asserts that this was by no means a given. While Chiang Kaishek at the Cairo Conference in 1943 extracted from FDR and Churchill the promise that Taiwan and the Pescadores would be returned to him personally as part of the punishment to be meted out to belligerent Japan, there was already a confused and chaotic relationship with the Western Allies, what with Chiang being accused that he failed to fight the Japanese in his return for his obsession to defeat Mao’s communists, who themselves had left open any post-war arrangements concerning Taiwan and other entities formerly conquered during the Qing dynasty. Chiang himself would have happily traded Taiwan for any advantage over the dreaded communists who were far better organised than he was. With defeat looming, Chiang looted the remaining treasures and shipped them off to Taiwan, to where he would retreat, of course certain in his claim that Taiwan belonged to the greater China that he, Chiang, would reconquer from his military base in Taiwan. The victorious Mao proclaiming his PRC did not have the means to go after Chiang immediately, postponing, as it were, the operation for a later date.
While most of the Taiwanese happily kissed the Japanese good-bye, they certainly did not expect Chiang and his army and hangers-on to invade Taiwan as some sort of Johnny-come-lately liberators, having already been liberated some four years before. They resisted the onslaught but could not hold them back. Chiang established a brutal police state that thwarted any communist and independence sympathies (I visited Green Island to see the remnants of the time when it was a prison and execution island). Chiang’s ROC having been recognised by the US and her allies as the representatives of a sovereign China despite having absolutely no realistic claim to it, meant of course, that Chiang could strengthen his ragtag army and navy, and turn Taiwan into a fortress with US armaments. McCarthyism in the US had turned the world up-side-down, with the US ready to arm and support any small or big-time dictator who claimed to be a rabid anti-communist. Mao and his CCP had no choice but declare the US and Chiang as imperialist running dogs, but still harbouring the hope that the Taiwanese compatriots would eventually get rid of Chiang – and leave the door open for negotiations as to what is to happen next. Since unfortunately nothing of the sort happened for decades, the PRC came to equate Chiang with Taiwan, now declaring that Taiwan belonged to the PRC, and that reunification would have to achieved, no matter what, and if necessary by force. When in 1979 the US finally faced the facts and recognised the PRC as the ‘one China’ as opposed to the ROC being the ‘one China’, the deal was that Taiwan’s reunification with the PRC was unavoidable but could be delayed by the “one country, two systems” formula, also advocated for Hong Kong and Macao. By that time Chiang’s successor, his son Chiang Chingkuo, still harboured his father’s crazy ambition that he would liberate the PRC, starting out from Taiwan, hence while the US betrayal was hurting, he focussed on strangely contradictory policies that at one stage oppressed the freedoms of the Taiwanese and on the other hand allowed some measure of freedom. To this end, being a narcissist who wanted to be loved by his subjects, he appointed a true-blue Taiwanese as his Premier. Lee Tenghui succeeded Chiang after his death in 1988. Bizarrely, Chiang Chingkuo had been a classmate of Deng Xiaoping in Moscow, so no wonder he was a confused man. As Khan keeps reminding us, history is often based on random choices the movers and shakers of the day make, hence the ‘what if’ scenarios are worth playing out. What if Chiang had not chosen Lee as his potential successor? Would another KMT candidate have accepted Deng’s offer of ‘one country, two systems’ with the added incentive to let them keep their armed forces. After all, this would have guaranteed an unassailable power base for the KMT for decades to come. Lee Tenghui, who had grown up under Japanese occupation, had no appetite to make deals with a remote PRC. Lee was Taiwanese first and Chinese second. Lee also was realist enough to recognise that the KMT dream of retaking the mainland was fading fast even amongst the diehards. To distance himself from the PRC, he had the idea to allow a bit of Westminster democracy, not least because there were stirrings amongst his Taiwanese compatriots who wanted to assert their nationalist fervours. Alarm bells were ringing in the PRC and veiled threats were being made about reunification by force. These bullying tactics, as Khan also reminds us again and again, always had an opposite effect in Taiwan. It stiffened the back of Taiwanese nationalists who nevertheless realised that they cannot push the PRC too far, e.g. with cries for formal independence.
The rest is history, as Khan soldiers through the decades, noting that the various crises were tamped down through luck and occasional good sense, only to resurface when the ‘jingoism and confusion (p.241)’ on both sides meant that neither side had any idea ‘what it would do if things went wrong (ibid.)’. Fast forwarding to Pelosi’s visit, the military posturing response by the PRC is the latest instalment of chaos, accentuated by the Ukraine war, i.e. conflagration a possibility at any given minute. Khan does not really offer an analysis how the Taiwanese population at large copes with such impossible stress, other than suggesting that the internal politics are as much about the price of eggs as they are about negotiating a way through the status quo, in other words an attitude comparable to the infamous ‘nothing new on the Western front’. I use the analogy as Khan also refers to the German ‘kaiser’ during WWI which in popular history is always said to have been triggered by the assassination of the Austrian archduke, meaning, according to Khan, that history is not determined by an internal logic but by events that make no sense, triggering consequences unforeseen, random choices made by kings and queens (Trump referred to Xi as ‘King of China’ during his visit at his Mar-a-Lago mini palace) who have no idea what they are doing. It may be true that people in general go about their daily business even as the dark clouds of war gather over their heads, possibly in the unconscious knowledge that there is nothing they can do about it, as they are the mere bit players on a Shakespearean stage drama.
During my time in Taiwan and my subsequent observations from afar in New Zealand, and having family living in both the PRC and the ROC, I do get nervous reading the latest news even though both sides of the family reassure me that it’s business as usual. Reading Khan’s take on this issue he calls ‘the struggle for Taiwan’ is rather unsettling, as it reminds me of my student days in Germany, waiving Maoist flags without the slightest inkling that many years later I would be confronted quite personally by one of Mao’s ‘choices’ that Khan presents as (p.249):
The bitterness of the civil war, however, clouded Mao’s judgement. He could have granted Taiwan independence, at the outset, much as he ceded territory to North Korea and Pakistan … Instead, Mao stuck to the line that Taiwan was part of China.
According to Khan, Mao could have dismissed the generalissimo as an insignificant historical footnote, one that Taiwan would get over with in time (as it actually did) and establish friendly relations with the PRC. Again, historians like to point to precedents, as mentioned before, while the German ‘kaiser’ (a linguistic note: in German ‘Kaiser’ is a noun and always spelled with a capital K) should have been considered a historical foot note by the victorious allies and let the Germans get on with establishing a new and better order (as was the Weimar Republic). Instead, the allies inflicted retributive punishment on the German people who then fell for the Nazis. Obviously, the only comparison to Taiwan and Mao is that one should never punish the people for the sins of their rulers. The German Kaiser had abdicated and fled, while Chiang Kaishek, as a sore loser, did not throw in the towel, and instead proceeded to establish a reign of terror in Taiwan. I am not sure if one can so easily blame Mao for being short-sighted. After all he also had to consider the geo-political situation at the time: the US government, engaged in a nasty anti-communist witch-hunt, even with its own borders, did not portend well, especially as the US government bizarrely proceeded to recognise the ROC and Chiang Kaishek as the legitimate government of all of China. So, to play Khan’s ‘if what’ game, if the US had recognised Mao’s new PRC as the legitimate government of China – and maybe even leaving out Taiwan – Mao would have been more willing to consider Khan’s retrospect vision. From this point of view, maybe the US should shoulder most of the blame for the struggle for Taiwan, as Khan calls it, for a real struggle it is, and if you look up the synonyms for ‘struggle’, you should be alarmed and implore the current presidents to make the right, not the wrong choices. Not that Khan is in any way on the side of the PRC despite his sometimes quite severe and justified critiques of US foreign policy, especially since the PRC and the CCP, always fare far worse in the end. Maybe Khan should study the political works of Noam Chomsky to strike the right balance.
We, as ordinary citizens of the global village, we don’t really care who is to blame for what, just stop all this nonsense, we just want to live in peace without borders and guards, soldiers and tanks, drones and missiles, dirty politics and dirty money. Unfortunately, such pleas fall on deaf ears in our world of corporate power brokers, as Khan formulates it (p.200):
In a capitalist world, trade and investment tend to follow profit. Concerns about identity and political independence are secondary. Money chases money.
A sentiment equally attributable to all three combatants: the USA, the PRC and the de facto ROC. Unfortunately. But, as we all know, before you know, fortunes can and sometimes will change overnight, hopefully for the benefit of the ordinary people in Taiwan and around the globe, giving some credence to Khan’s equally hopeful assertion that a history of belligerence does not always determine the future of more of the same. But time is running out. Urgent review needed.
