An increasingly precarious status quo between China and Taiwan

To analyse. Will the island of Taiwan soon be at the heart of a military conflict between China and the United States? The majority of Taiwanese do not believe it. They are worried, but not panicked. Two polls carried out this year indicate that about 60% of them consider it unlikely that an attempt to invade the island by the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the coming years. “There are so many ties between Taiwan and the People’s Republic of China that the Taiwanese believe that a war would not make sense. Moreover, they do not see themselves as separatists and do not feel that they are a threat to the renewal of the People’s Republic. For them, this has more to lose than to gain from a possible conflict ”, analyzes Shelley Rigger, Taiwan specialist at Davidson College (North Carolina).

Read also Taiwan president says island will not bow to pressure from China

Yet on the occasion of the National Day on October 10, President Tsai Ing-wen warned them: “I want to remind all my fellow citizens that we do not have the privilege of letting our guard down. “ In front of “The rise of authoritarianism”, Taiwan is located “In the first line of defense of democracy”, she explained, before calling the “Maintenance of the status quo” in relations with the People’s Republic of China. The problem is that this status quo of de facto but not de jure independence is increasingly fragile, undermined by the evolution of each of the three stakeholders: communist China, Taiwan and the United States, which militarily support this one.

For communist China, this island of 23 million inhabitants is a part of its territory which must be reunified and managed according to the principle of “one country, two systems”, like Hong Kong and Macao. As Jean-Pierre Cabestan explains in China, war or peace tomorrow? (Gallimard, 288 p., € 22), since 1979, when diplomatic relations were established between Washington and the People’s Republic of China, Beijing considers that “Any renunciation of the use of force would be counterproductive, because it would help to discourage any peaceful rapprochement”. Problem: the China of 2021 no longer has much to do with that of 1979. Forty years ago, the US military would have had no trouble countering a Chinese aggression against Taiwan. Today, this is nowhere near so obvious, and the PLA is openly preparing for a possible invasion of the island.

“Taiwan is no longer a marginal subject”

Moreover, while China and Taiwan maintained a dialogue until 2016, Beijing ended it when Tsai Ing-wen took over as president. Officially because it refuses what is called the “1992 consensus”, accepted by the then ruling Kuomintang, which recognized that there is only“One China”, even if Beijing and Taipei did not give it the same definition. For Beijing, President Tsai has broken the status quo, refusing to recognize this consensus.

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