Insidious Power: How China Undermines Global Democracy by Hsu Szu-chien & J. Michael Cole

Author:Hsu Szu-chien & J. Michael Cole [Hsu Szu-chien & J. Michael Cole]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: China, diplomacy, international relations, democracy, espionage, United Front, influence
Publisher: Camphor Press
Published: 2020-07-27T20:02:24+00:00

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The China Factor in Taiwan:

Incentive Structure, Impact Assessment, and Counteractions

Wu Jieh-min and Tsai Hung-jeng

The rise of China has fueled Beijing’s global ambitions and heightened international anxieties. Chinese influence is made possible by the synergy between its growing purchasing power and its political will. By flexing its economic muscles around the world and through its enhanced military presence in East Asia, Beijing has displayed its determination in pursuit of national rejuvenation. China has threatened its neighbors as well as the West, which worries that enhanced Chinese “hard power” could challenge the current world order (Chinese ideologues have eagerly propagated an assertive “Tianxia” system in international relations, and retired generals have advocated a tougher military posture). Those countries also fear that China’s sharp power could corrode democracy through diffusion of Chinese authoritarianism (Diamond et al. 2016, Cardenal et al. 2017). This chapter focuses on how China wields its economic statecraft against Taiwan in the context of global geo-economics (Blackwill and Harris 2016, Norris 2016).

Taiwan lives alongside China geographically and has linguistic and cultural affinities with it. Although Taiwan is unlike Hong Kong, whose sovereignty was handed over to China in 1997, Taiwan’s democratic statehood is continually contested by a regime in Beijing that upholds an unwavering irredentist stance through military threat, diplomatic containment, and economic absorption. On top of these measures, Beijing has also employed a series of united front tactics to interfere with Taiwan’s domestic affairs. These gambits run similar to what Western nations have perceived as “sharp power” practices by China and Russia. Yet what is more significant in the case of Taiwan (and Hong Kong) is that Beijing is able to execute its political goals by way of cultivated “collaborative agents” embedded in the targeted polity. In effect, Beijing has conducted this line of interference for more than a decade in Hong Kong and Taiwan. For instance, the Chinese government has repeatedly leveraged Taiwan’s trade dependence to interfere with Taiwan’s elections. In 2012, Beijing interfered with Taiwan’s presidential election by mobilizing an echelon of local tycoons to support the “1992 consensus” (i.e., the “one China” principle upheld by Beijing) and the re-election of Ma Ying-jeou (马英九).

Recently, Australia found itself on the list of Chinese “interferees” (Maley 2017), a situation that helped alert the world to the negative influences of a rising and assertive China at the height of its purchasing power. In fact, Beijing has been deploying such intervention devices around the globe for some time, and has skillfully applied them to Taiwan and Hong Kong. The Chinese campaign is widely known as “using business to steer politics” — offering economic incentives to induce people to political collaboration. We might call China’s strategy the commercialization of united front work.

Chinese economic statecraft has not, however, proceeded without defiance. It has encountered criticism and resistance, possibly because it has worked so effectively that it has alarmed those states and societies targeted. Such is the case with Taiwan–China relations, in which the Kuomintang (KMT) started to cooperate with Beijing in 2008 after

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