Escalating U.S.-China tensions have triggered a debate in Washington over “strategic ambiguity” — the long-standing U.S. policy to stay quiet on whether it would defend Taiwan should China attack.
Opponents to such a guarantee for Taiwan’s security often argue that it might provoke a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Somewhat validating this theory, Beijing recently expressed anger when Deputy Secretary of State Wendy Sherman discussed the Taiwan Strait with her Japanese and South Korean counterparts before heading to meetings in China.
That said, China’s intention to dominate Taiwan is inherent in its authoritarian rule. This is the only logical conclusion from observing China’s past policy toward Tibet, Xinjiang, and Hong Kong. In turn, sustained peace in the Taiwan Strait is only possible with an unequivocal U.S. commitment to defend the island.
Since its annexation of Tibet in the early 1950s, the Communist Party has decided that there can be only one politico-economic system in China. China affirmed its sovereignty over Tibet in 1951. Back then, the two sides reached an agreement that promised the region autonomy in the new “People’s Republic,” a prototype of the “one country, two systems” principle employed for Hong Kong and Macau decades later. But the agreed-upon autonomy quickly fell apart as Mao Zedong launched his collectivization movement, erasing markets and private property rights.
Phuntso Wangye, founder of the Tibetan Communist Party that was infused into the CCP upon the Chinese takeover, gave a lucid explanation in his biography of why the “two systems” approach failed. He observed that “if you kill a sheep on one side of the pen, it will certainly scare the sheep on the other side.” Even though Phuntso believed in collectivization, he saw how the atrocities under Mao, especially those that happened to Tibetans outside Tibet, stoke fear in an autonomous region. The tensions eventually lead to the 1959 Tibetan uprising, China’s crackdown, and the Dalai Lama’s exile.
The Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang also has a clear economic motivation: to pave the way for China’s Belt and Road Initiative, much of which runs through Xinjiang to Central Asia and the Middle East. Central to Beijing’s global dominance ambition, the economic plan requires an elevated level of social control that’s at odds with the Uyghur way of life. The result is the horrific destruction of the Uyghur identity and Uyghur lives, as George Washington University professor Sean Roberts has explained.
Hong Kong’s “crime” in Beijing’s eye was that it had one foot in the free world. China’s government was aware of this political incongruence long before the handover. According to declassified British colonial records, the United Kingdom considered allowing Hong Kong to become a self-governing colony in the 1950s, which would grant the city a certain degree of democracy. But the plan was quashed when China threatened to “liberate” Hong Kong in response.
This political consideration explains Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong despite the latter’s tremendous economic value. Its attempt to beautify China’s political system in Hong Kong’s schools started just a few years after the handover. Now, the presumably autonomous city has no pro-democracy legislators, no pro-democracy newspapers, and no room for publishing pro-democracy cartoons.
It’s only logical to view Taiwan as the next political thorn in China’s ideological side.
Considered a renegade province by China, Taiwan has a 15-year history of free elections, a blossoming high-tech industry, and an impressive record against COVID-19. The island presents an inconvenient truth to “the other side of the pen” — that authoritarian rule is neither needed nor desired for human flourishing.
U.S. policymakers would be misguided to think that China’s plan for Taiwan is a function of whether America and its allies pacify or provoke it. It’s not. Peace in the Taiwan Strait depends on whether China has the capabilities to take the island, which Pentagon leaders believe it may have in six years, and whether the U.S. shows the fortitude to come to Taiwan’s defense. This commitment must come before it’s too late.
Weifeng Zhong is a senior research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and a core developer of the open-sourced Policy Change Index project, which uses machine-learning algorithms to predict authoritarian regimes’ major policy moves by “reading” their propaganda.
