Taiwan Today

There can be no more vital information for the government of the Republic of China (ROC) than an understanding of how leaders in Beijing make decisions. Mainland China's long-term goal is to return Taiwan to Chinese sovereignty--by nature a position that causes tremendous anxiety in the self-governing ROC. But just what explains Beijing's ritual vacillation between bellicose pronouncements toward Taiwan and soothing professions of peaceful intent? On the one hand, mainland China is building the military capacity to seize Taiwan by force, and on the other, it is wooing Taiwanese capital and traveling the globe to reassure foreign governments of its desire to live peacefully within the international system.

Fathoming the intentions of the secretive leadership in Beijing can be likened to trying to understand Egyptian hieroglyphs before Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone. Political science, concerned chiefly with the study of institutions, is helpful at sketching out the evolution of mainland China's entry into the international community--its accession to the World Trade Organization, its stance on arms control agreements, its growing ties to neighbors in ASEAN, and so forth. But at the heart of its decision-making still lies a human puzzle, with leaders making decisions characterized at times by the unpredictable and the emotional.

In China: Fragile Superpower, author Susan Shirk provides some missing pieces of the puzzle. Shirk, a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego, employs social science methodology, tracking trends in the Chinese media, incidences of public demonstrations and changes in official statements while seeking bellwethers of Chinese sentiment. But she does something much more intriguing as well. Her experience as US deputy assistant secretary of state during the Clinton administration gave her a firsthand look at the decision-making rationale of mainland China's leaders as they reacted to events and negotiated with their counterparts in the United States. Shirk displays a remarkable sensitivity to the human element, and she is at her best when weaving together her own observations as a diplomat and a curious observer in East Asia with scholarly research and recent history.

What emerges from this approach is a portrait of mainland China's leaders besieged by public expectations and increasingly insecure at home, even as the country's role in world affairs grows. This paradoxical conclusion is the result of research that allows facts, no matter how complex and contradictory, to speak for themselves. And the implications of an insecure regime in Beijing could not be more important for Taiwan and stability in East Asia.

A Question of Legitimacy

In the early chapters of the book, Shirk provides a brief overview of mainland China's history from the communist revolution in 1949 through the economic opening under former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) general secretary Deng Xiaoping and the subsequent economic boom. She follows with a concise explanation of the domestic problems facing contemporary mainland China--income inequality, unemployment, environmental degradation, student unrest, labor unrest, ethnic unrest and so on. The list is dizzying, and one has to wonder how the Chinese authorities have managed to keep the lid on public discontent in the past few decades.

This overview is useful as a primer to modern mainland China, but can read at times like a US State Department briefing book. It covers subject matter that is familiar to any regular watcher of mainland China and presents it in short sections with frequent headings. Two important points emerge, however: The CCP must meet popular expectations when addressing these problems and it must do so without the benefit of a unifying ideology.

Ever since Deng announced that it was glorious to get rich and opened up mainland China's economy, the CCP has presided over an economic boom largely at odds with its founding beliefs. Yet, even though the regime's ideology has evaporated, the vestiges of communism still inform the expectations of the people, who naturally want a certain degree of fairness and enfranchisement in the prosperity of the state. People do not want to see government officials and a sliver of privileged society getting rich at their expense. If the people do not feel that they are getting a fair shake from the government, the regime could easily face a crisis of legitimacy and the possibility of being pushed aside.

The closest scrape to date was the 1989 mass protest in Tiananmen Square, which directly challenged the legitimacy of the government. The widespread demonstration mortified the already insecure regime, which doubted even that the army could be relied upon to restore order. In the end the army protected the regime, and with villainous consequences, but the genie was out of the bottle. Leaders in Beijing realized that mainland China could crumble like the Soviet Union, and the CCP could be pushed out by a revolution echoing past transitions in mainland China's history.

Mainland China's leaders implicitly air their fears by their constant emphasis on social stability. "They use the euphemism 'social stability' to convince the Chinese public that Communist Party rule is essential for maintaining order and prosperity," Shirk writes, "and that without it, a country as large as China would fall into civil war and chaos."

For the leaders in Beijing, this indeed is a dire view of their own society. And Shirk, interjecting quotes from her own interviews with people in mainland China, does a good job of illustrating the widespread obsession with the topic. "There is no external threat that is half as serious as the threat of internal conflict," one student says. And a student from Beijing University, from where many protesters came in 1989, put it more bluntly: "The political system is so weak. One day it could erupt like a volcano."

To prevent that volcano from erupting, the CCP has sought to promote itself as the defender of mainland China's dignity and the sole avenue toward great power status. The country has for generations felt slighted, and today people are genuinely hungry for recognition of its achievements. This need for recognition, however, has at times turned into rabid nationalism. "To Jiang Zemin [former mainland China president] and his colleagues," writes Shirk, "trying to bolster the Communist Party's popularity after the Tiananmen crackdown, it seemed like a good idea to bind people to the Party through nationalism now that Communist ideals had lost their luster."

The real strength of the book is Shirk's ability to evoke the nationalist streams coursing through mainland Chinese public discourse and identify the pivotal role of the media in directing public sentiment. Shirk points out that as the media has expanded in mainland China the CCP has signaled its willingness to allow the popular press to address nationalistic themes. These stories tend to focus on foreign news, which is deemed safer by the censors than domestic controversies. "This means a lot of reports about Japan, Taiwan, and the United States, the international relationships that are the objects of intense interest and emotion," writes Shirk.

Losing the Levers

Moreover, because of the spread of the Internet, foreign news, even with mainland China's powerful censorship, is easier to access. "The government is losing the levers to control the media," explains a mainland Chinese academic quoted by Shirk. Yet, foreign news in an environment highly charged with nationalism is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, nationalism stirs broad support for a strong mainland China, and on the other, it forces leaders to bow to public expectations. Once a news story that inflames popular opinion breaks, the government is forced to walk a tightrope between the public outcry and sober long-term policy.

The mainland Chinese leadership, in other words, is hemmed in by the nationalism that it uses to bolster its own claims to legitimacy. When the public clamors for a strong response to international events, the regime is forced to react to satisfy the public outcry. In political science jargon this is known as "blowback."

In a chapter examining the herky-jerky nature of US-mainland China relations, Shirk describes the ferocious blowback of public sentiment after a US bomber in May 1999 accidentally targeted the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the war in the Balkans. The attack killed three Chinese citizens and injured 20. Chinese publications tried to outdo each other in reporting the event as an attack on mainland China's dignity. It was reported as an intentional attack, and the government, according to Shirk, delayed relaying public apologies from the US government, further stoking public outrage.

In response to the bombing, protesters descended on US diplomatic posts and burned the US consulate in Chengdu, while mobs trashed American fast-food franchises. Fearing that protests could turn against the mainland Chinese government, officials organized the busing of protestors toward the American embassy, while the central government's Propaganda Department signaled its assent to continue US-bashing in the media. Shirk, who was tasked with investigating the incident for the US government, quotes one Chinese policy official who told her a year after the incident that "Pretty much all the intellectual and policy elite now believes the bombing was intentional, the result of a conspiracy."

Thus, a tragic blunder by the United States was turned by the mainland Chinese government into a rallying point for xenophobic outrage, souring US-mainland Chinese relations for some time. Official complicity in the demonstrations, moreover, indicated the weakness of the mainland Chinese government to manage public reaction to international events and keep important bilateral relationships on track. Fearing that protests would turn against the government if it did not react strongly enough to satisfy the baying crowds, Chinese leaders became trapped by their own nationalist experiment. Shirk quotes a People's Liberation Army general's own reading of the situation: "Demonstrations after the Belgrade embassy bombing or against Japan aren't really about foreign policy. They are the result of an accumulation of people's grievances against the Chinese government. ... Demonstrations on foreign policy actually reflect domestic politics."

So worried were mainland Chinese leaders after the ferocity of public demonstrations in recent years that they have ordered the media to back away from using incendiary language that might fuel nationalism. Yet after creating a powerful swirl of nationalist sentiment, the Chinese regime is today forced to ride a whirlwind of its own creation, afraid of not reacting to public sentiment lest it appear weak, but also terrified that the public outrage will turn against the regime.

For Taiwan, this situation should be particularly alarming. Reacting to one of the many flaps that regularly arise between Taiwan and mainland China, Beijing could feel constrained by public opinion and respond militarily. After years of indoctrination on the Taiwan question, the mainland Chinese public reflexively reacts to Taiwan's politics as an affront to mainland China's sovereignty and its future greatness. Shirk quotes an interview with an academic at a Chinese think-tank on why mainland China, which is so much more powerful than Taiwan, is so sensitive to statements by ROC politicians. "We are the hostages to our own propaganda," the expert said. "Our propaganda makes it hard for us not to react when Taiwan or the U.S. do things."

Commitment Trap

Even if mainland China's leaders desire peace, they might fall into a "commitment trap," and adopt a hard-line policy to satisfy public expectations, no matter how damaging it might be to the country's future. "The assumption that CCP rule could not survive a Taiwan declaration of independence," writes Shirk, "compels China's insecure leaders to react to steps toward formal independence by threatening the use of force--and makes it costly [domestically] for them to back down."

To emphasize this point, Shirk opens her book with a hypothetical crisis in the Taiwan Strait. A collision near the midline in the strait between fighter jets from mainland China and Taiwan sets off a firestorm of public indignation in mainland China. The media describes it as an act of hostility toward mainland China and a slight that mainland Chinese leaders must address. Citizens march on Tiananmen Square to demand action. Chinese leaders are left with only bad choices--an attack on Taiwan that will likely result in a wider war (and international support for Taiwan's independence) or a fall from power.

Fortunately, recent events have made this scenario a little less likely. After witnessing the rabid nationalism orchestrated by Jiang Zemin, mainland China's leaders today are signaling that economic growth must trump any fantasies of military glory. They have attempted to channel nationalism into more peaceful avenues, such as competition in the Olympic Games. And while their desire to draw Taiwan into Beijing's orbit remains, the leaders' anxiety over domestic unrest has prompted them to cast around for methods that allow mainland China to gain international respect and still show progress to the public.

In her conclusion, Shirk counsels the US government to afford Beijing some of the respect it so badly desires, to welcome mainland China's rise as an economic power, and to continue to dissuade it from military action. Engaging mainland China, she argues, will allow the regime in Beijing to handle its own domestic problems with more confidence. For the United States, with its own varying constituencies and a Congress that is often hostile to mainland China, this will be difficult. For Taiwan, it will be even more so.

The recent flurry of diplomatic activity between Taipei and Beijing has allowed leaders on both sides of the strait to deliver to their own domestic constituencies the possibility of peace and prosperity in their relations. Yet, as leaders from Taiwan and mainland China both sell cross-strait progress as a victory for their own side, negotiations could sour just as quickly.

Taiwan must also grapple with a factor patently absent in mainland China--democracy. In a multiparty system, political parties emphasize their points of difference, and Taiwan's opposition parties have been sharply critical of the recent cross-strait agreements. In all democracies, opposition voices can have a beneficial effect, since their criticism tends to direct national policy toward the center, slowing change but ensuring that a broad swath of the population is satisfied that the possible pitfalls of a new policy have been examined.

The emphasis on the differences of policy by Taiwan's political parties, especially during elections, runs the risk, however, of ignoring the consensus on some fundamental principles shared by the people of Taiwan. Despite the pro-independence aspirations of his party, former President Chen Shui-bian worked to meet the needs of Taiwanese businesspeople in mainland China and established charter flights to bring them home at the holidays, just as he was unwilling to risk war by pushing too quickly for formal independence. Similarly, President Ma Ying-jeou, whose party has traditionally favored an eventual rapprochement with mainland China, is unwilling to sacrifice Taiwan's democratic achievements to improve cross-strait trade.

The recent agreements between Taiwan and mainland China, widely viewed as a positive development for peace, will in the end need the support of the people living on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. In mainland China, this means that the insecure regime described by Shirk will need to recast expectations and find the strength to adopt more forward-looking policies. And through a better understanding of the domestic pressures in mainland China, so well described in China: Fragile Superpower, the ROC government will be better able to negotiate agreements that benefit Taiwan's economy without sacrificing its hard-won political independence.
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Robert Green is a regular contributor to Economist Intelligence Unit publications on Taiwan.

Copyright © 2008 by Robert Green