China sees invading Taiwan as its destiny. Could this be the year Xi Jinping unleashes geopolitical catastrophe? Josh Glancy visits a high-tech nation on red alert.
There’s something strangely exhilarating about the thud of artillery fire, providing it’s not aimed at you. In this case it’s the crack of CM-11 tanks pounding an empty hillside that has me somewhere between thrilled and terrified. Illumination flares soar into the night sky. Shells from 105mm cannons smash into targets drawn in chalk. Then two Apache helicopters loom overhead, rattling off chain-gun fire to mop up the imagined enemy.
I am watching this dress rehearsal in Hengchun, on the southern tip of Taiwan, as a group of Taiwanese military units conduct their “joint valour” annual exercises. It’s not stated explicitly, but everyone watching knows exactly who is supposed to be on that hillside. China, the geopolitical megalodon lurking 160 kilometres away across the stormy straits. Taiwan’s destiny.
“I hope when the moment comes the government gives me a rifle,” says Gary Shu, 62, a military enthusiast who organises cycling races in his day job. Shu has driven seven hours from Taipei to watch the fireworks. “This thing must be faced eventually and we will see if China is as strong as it thinks it is. We must prepare, because freedom is not free.”
Is China really about to meet Shu’s expectations and invade Taiwan? How would America respond if it did? And could that response unleash World War Three? These are the grave questions consuming military planners the world over.
The answers are sobering. If you thought Ukraine was bad and if the war in Gaza terrifies you, then picture China and America coming to blows over an invasion of Taiwan. Imagine the entire global supply chain of advanced microchips, 92 per cent of which are produced in Taiwan, getting snipped like an umbilical cord, causing the production of phones, laptops and cars to screech to a halt. Imagine trillions falling off stock markets in a single afternoon. Bloomberg estimates a war in Taiwan would cost the world economy US$10 trillion (NZ$16t), making the Russia-Ukraine conflict look like a bad day at the races.
If this all sounds like an excitable plot for a disaster movie, you should know that 67 per cent of US experts polled in January by the Center for Strategic and International Studies said they expected a crisis in the Taiwan Strait this year. And yes, the experts often get it wrong, but anyone who knows China will tell you this threat is real. It could be 10 months or it could be 10 years, but a so-called “contingency” is probable. “There’s a high chance of action in the next five years,” says Matt Pottinger, a former US deputy national security adviser. “It’s spooky how 1930s this moment is.”
Taiwanese armed forces war-game a potential invasion by enemy troops:
‘We are preparing constantly’
So how did this Belgium-sized nation of 24 million people become one of the most volatile places on earth? On first impression Taiwan doesn’t exactly feel like a country gearing up for combat. The news is full of parochial bulletins about bus crashes and fish prices. On the streets of Taipei and Taiwan’s second city, Kaohsiung, I saw no discernible military presence, no sense of a state ramping up for war, just ordinary folk getting on with their lives in a prosperous, advanced and remarkably safe country. (On the Data Pandas global crime index, Taiwan has the third lowest score, after Qatar and the UAE. You can happily leave your phone or laptop unattended in public.)
In recent years Taiwan’s military expenditure has risen to about 2.5 per cent of its GDP, but this remains well below Israel or America. For US defence planners, this apparent complacency is terrifying. “The Taiwanese are in total denial,” says Elbridge Colby, a former Pentagon official who wrote America’s national defence strategy in 2018. “They need to be ready for a brutal and costly fight to preserve their freedom.”
But most people in Taiwan, when you ask them about the China threat, shrug and say it’s too big a problem to waste time worrying about. If it comes, it comes. “We are preparing constantly, but we’ve been under this threat for decades and we have a daily life to live,” says Wang Ting-yu, a Taiwanese MP. “When people arrive here they expect to see Ukraine or Israel. Instead it feels more like Los Angeles.”
Wang is right that there’s a vaguely Californian mellowness to Taiwan, particularly in the south of the island where mango hawkers and palm trees line the roads and the average temperature rarely dips below 17C. But the China cloud continues to darken the horizon, growing moodier with each passing year. So-called “grey zone” actions from across the straits are a constant menace. Beijing has been accused of cutting undersea broadband cables that supply some of Taiwan’s outlying islands. When the Speaker of the US House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, made a historic visit to Taiwan in 2022, China responded with a huge show of force, launching ballistic missiles and flying fighter jets over Taiwanese airspace.
China also launches more than 10 million cyberattacks a month on Taiwan and spreads regular disinformation. Activity peaked during the Taiwanese general election in January. “We’re doing this every day, dealing with millions of cyberattack attempts,” says Audrey Tang, a gender-fluid computer hacker who serves as Taiwan’s first digital minister. “The grand narrative is that democracy never delivers and only leads to chaos. Every other tactic is trying to support this grand narrative.”
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has staked its prestige on reunifying with Taiwan, making this a central plank of its nationalist ideology and building the world’s largest navy, capable (it hopes) of undertaking what would be an exceptionally demanding amphibious operation. Nor is it vague about its intentions. In his recent New Year’s Eve address the Chinese president, Xi Jinping, repeated his claim that Taiwan and China would “surely be reunified”. In a previous speech Xi emphasised that this issue “cannot be passed from generation to generation” — he is thought to have ordered his military to be ready to take Taiwan by 2027.
The CCP is wary of the logistical horrors that a Taiwan invasion presents, as well as the backlash a difficult war might provoke at home. But Xi recently turned 70 and, in a rather Putinesque turn, has reportedly been visiting museum archives of late, looking at old maps from when China still ruled Taiwan. Meanwhile America and its allies are already stretched in Ukraine and the Middle East.
America, after all, has no concrete obligations towards or even diplomatic relations with Taiwan. Since 1979, following President Nixon’s rapprochement with China, the US hasn’t recognised Taiwan as a state, instead acknowledging communist China and maintaining a “robust unofficial relationship” with Taipei. Britain does the same. In fact only 12 countries in the world, all of them on the small side, recognise Taiwan, and many of them are now coming under Chinese pressure — Nauru, the tiny island in Micronesia, recently withdrew its recognition.
The situation is precarious then. Throw an isolationist Donald Trump presidency into the mix and it’s easy to see how things could go south — and fast.
A hand grenade in the tiger’s jaws
Nowhere sums up Taiwan’s ambiguous position in Chinese history, half in and half out, better than the Kinmen islands. These blustery outcrops still belong to Taiwan but are situated an hour’s bumpy flight from Taipei, just a few miles from the teeming skyscrapers of Xiamen on the mainland. Driving around the islands, in the literal shadow of China, gives a visceral sense of just how proximate this conflict is — defectors used to swim back and forth between Kinmen and the mainland.
Once described as a “hand grenade in the jaws of a tiger”, Kinmen used to be the front line of a semi-frozen conflict, fortified by trenches and tunnels and tens of thousands of Taiwanese troops. The struggle between China and the West is often referred to as a second Cold War, but in Kinmen the first Cold War never really ended. Rusting tank spikes still line the beaches. Buildings that were riddled with bullets in 1949 — when communist China tried to invade the islands — have been left standing with plaques honouring the repulsion of “bandits” from over the water. A giant speaker still blasts music towards the mainland, in which Teresa Teng, a Taiwanese pop star from the 1970s and 1980s, trills about how much she adores freedom. In previous decades propaganda leaflet bombs would be traded across the water. Before that, actual artillery shells. Just last month two Chinese fishermen drowned here after their boat capsized while they were being chased by the coastguard, who accused them of trespassing in Taiwanese waters.
Yet it is also the case that ferries travel back and forth to visit this sworn enemy daily, such is the paradox of life in Kinmen. At the Shuitou ferry terminal, long queues of locals line up for shopping excursions and holidays on the mainland. Their proximity makes the Kinmenese pragmatic about Taiwan’s relationship with China. “My body and mind are split,” Tony Su, 29, tells me. He is visiting the mainland to pick up supplies for his mechanics business. “My mind says we should be separate, but my body says we must be together. Economically, it is better for young people if we work together with China. But emotionally I want us to be an independent Taiwan.”
Geography, as they say, is destiny, and Kinmen’s problematic relationship with China is a microcosm of the entire Taiwanese experience. Taiwan only became an island some 10,000 years ago, when rising sea levels cut it off from the mainland. Until the 16th century, it was inhabited exclusively by its indigenous population, who are Austronesian in origin and closer in relation to Indonesia than to China. Named Formosa or “beautiful island” by Portuguese explorers, it came under Chinese control in 1683 during the Qing dynasty, which led to an influx of Han Chinese. The burgeoning Japanese empire then took over in the late 19th century and Taiwan only became part of China again in 1945, at the end of the Second World War.
It was the Chinese civil war, fought between Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists and Mao Zedong’s communists from 1945 to 1949, that turned the hitherto peripheral Taiwan into a fulcrum of Chinese politics. When Chiang’s Kuomintang (KMT) forces were defeated at the end of 1949, he conducted a “Great Retreat” to Taiwan where he hoped to regroup, bringing with him 2 million troops, a hoard of priceless artefacts and a troupe of elephants.
Of course the KMT never retook China. Instead it took control of Taiwan, with Chiang declaring the exilic Republic of China (which is still part of Taiwan’s official name) and ruling as a prince over the water, hosting representatives from Mongolia and Tibet, and insisting to the end that he would return to oust the communist interlopers.
The early decades of KMT rule in Taiwan were a fairly dismal affair. For 38 years martial law was enforced along with a “White Terror” that threw tens of thousands in prison for suspected pro-communist sympathies. But Chiang’s rule also laid the groundwork for the “Taiwan miracle”, a period of electric economic growth from the 1960s onwards in which the country joined the Asian tigers and evolved into a manufacturing powerhouse, embracing a free market economy and holding its first democratic presidential election in 1996.
Today the two main parties are the KMT, which still claims sovereignty over most of China and has sought to ease tensions with the People’s Republic, and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which leans more towards independence. The DPP held on to power in January when voters chose Lai Ching-te (also know as William Lai), a man described by China as a “dangerous separatist”, as its new president, though it lost control of the legislature, making it more difficult for the party to implement its agenda.
So when they say liberal democracy in Taiwan, they really do mean it: voter turnout in January’s fiercely contested election was 72 per cent. Until the inauguration in May, Taiwan has a female president, Tsai Ing-wen, who in 2019 signed same-sex marriage into law, a first among Asian countries. Watching the military exercises in Hengchun, I merrily took pictures of the tanks and asked nosey questions of the soldiers on guard. Had I done the same on the mainland, I’d probably be writing this from a Fujianese prison cell.
All of which makes Taiwan, predominantly Chinese in character but also democratic and free, an affront to Xi’s CCP. China’s official rationale for wanting Taiwan, published in a 2022 government white paper, is to “foil the attempts of external forces to contain China, and to safeguard the sovereignty, security and development interests of our country”. This acknowledges that taking Taiwan would allow China to project its power across the Pacific, control shipping routes and bring the Taiwanese economy under its command.
Clearly Taiwan also carries huge symbolic weight: it represents unfinished business from a bitter civil war, and its awkward but determined existence is a reminder that being Chinese needn’t mean living under authoritarian rule. “CCP propaganda says that Chinese people are not suitable for democracy,” says the Wang Ting-yu. “But what about us?”
Chips with everything
This ideological attachment to freedom is just one reason why Taiwan matters to America and the West. Another is its strategic position, right in the middle of what’s known as the “first island chain”, a linked series of American allies running from Japan to Malaysia that hems China in and prevents it from dominating the Pacific. But perhaps the most important reason lies a 30-minute bullet train journey southwest of Taipei, in a town called Hsinchu. Which is where they make the chips.
Hsinchu is Taiwan’s Silicon Valley, semiconductor or microchip foundry to the entire world. Each morning, high-speed trains deliver thousands of engineers to a giant industrial park where they jump into taxis that take them to the headquarters of TSMC, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. TSMC drives the Taiwanese economy, accounting for 15 per cent of the country’s GDP, and has allowed Taiwan to dominate the entire industry. If you want to make a smartphone or a computer, a car or a television — but also a washing machine, a fridge or even an LED lightbulb — then you might well need Taiwanese semiconductors.
What, you may be wondering, actually is a semiconductor? In short, it’s a substance — usually silicon or germanium — that conducts electricity under certain conditions but not others, managing the flow of current in all manner of electrical devices including the microchips inside computers. Since the first semiconductor was manufactured in America in 1947, the world has raced to make them ever tinier, allowing for an explosion in computing power. Taiwan does not design most of these microchips, but it is incredibly good at manufacturing them. Everyone from Apple to Intel hires TSMC to make their chips, which also play a critical role in advanced weapons systems.
Such is the complexity of this supply chain that neither the US nor China has been able to reproduce Taiwan’s output domestically, and China now spends more money importing chips than it does importing oil. This is why a conflict in the Taiwan Strait would be economically catastrophic.
Some Taiwanese strategists have suggested that their semiconductor industry provides a “silicon shield”, meaning a Chinese invasion would simply be too expensive for everyone involved, including China. Not everyone is convinced. “The silicon shield is pure fantasy,” says Pottinger, who was a key figure in driving the Trump administration’s adversarial stance towards China. “The CCP would be willing to risk the destruction of Taiwan’s chip manufacturing, if they believe it will hurt the West more than it will hurt China.”
Hedging its bets, Taiwan is also investing in (mostly American) military hardware, though its defence planners are divided between buying conventional battleships and tanks, or whether to take their lead from Ukraine and invest in asymmetric warfare: shoulder-fired missiles, unmanned submarines, drones. “Asymmetric is the only way to fight against vastly superior forces,” says Admiral Lee Hsi-ming, Taiwan’s former chief of the general staff, who has advocated a “porcupine” strategy — using widely dispersed smaller weapons to inflict maximum pain on a larger invading force. “It can’t be a conventional fight. If you use the symmetrical warfare, you are dead. But I don’t think we fully understand that yet.”
Either way, Taiwan holds only about two weeks’ worth of gas supplies on the island and has been reducing its nuclear power capacity, primarily as a response to the Fukushima disaster in 2011. So if it comes to war, Taiwan will need America to run a Chinese blockade and provide supplies, even if the odds of the US putting actual boots on the ground remain low. “I tell my friends in DC, if you want Taiwan to turn itself into a porcupine, then you must agree to be our Uber Eats,” says Alexander Huang, the KMT’s envoy to the US.
A complicated way to live
Of course, all this anxiety over the future falls most heavily on the young. Like most undergraduate students, those enrolled at National Taiwan University in Taipei are living in a protected bubble — until they finish their degrees and are spat out into an unforgiving world. But being a Taiwanese student adds a whole new layer of uncertainty. “One day lawyers might be out of a job, if China conquers us and changes the system,” says Benjamin Choy, 20, who is studying law. “That’s a complicated way to live. But you focus on the things you can manage.” His coursemate Julia Lin, also 20, says the China issue is “too big” for her to really worry about. “I spend more time thinking about climate issues,” she says. “I feel as if I can do more about that.”
The day before we meet, Taiwan restored national service for its youth from four months to one year, a move that the DPP has heralded as an important step in fronting up to China. The service involves boot camp followed by a period of active duty in anything from military intelligence to boiler maintenance on board naval ships. Yet no one I speak to takes it that seriously. “It’s a way to train people to be stupid,” says Josh Lee, 19, a politics student. “There’s a common saying that all they teach you is how to sweep the floor.” What would he do if China invades? “The only thing I could do, I guess, which is stay here and die for the country.”
There’s something particularly affecting about these Gen Z students, concerned like their peers the world over with climate change and LGBT rights, also imagining their entire way of life being swallowed whole and tank shells one day being fired at them in earnest. In fact, walking around agreeable Taipei, watching the hawkers flog taro balls and oyster omelettes, seeing the range of influences — pan-Chinese, Japanese, indigenous — that have been fused to build this clever and thriving democracy, it’s almost too painful to think of it all perishing under fire, streets reduced to rubble, just to wrench it under the thumb of a dictatorship that has never ruled here. It ought to be unimaginable. But of course it isn’t — history is full of such stories. Taiwan must prepare then, because freedom is never free.
Five essential books about Taiwan
- Matt Pottinger’s The Boiling Moat: Urgent Steps to Defend Taiwan, due to be published in July, paints an alarming picture of Chinese intentions in the Taiwan Strait. A prominent China hawk, Pottinger was deputy national security adviser during the Trump administration.
- Jonathan Clements’s Rebel Island: The Incredible History of Taiwan takes a concise journey through the island’s complex history and all the different ethnicities, refugees, mavericks and nationalities that have come together to make modern Taiwan.
- The Struggle for Taiwan by Sulmaan Wasif Khan, released in May, explains how Taiwan went from being a side note in the chaos across Asia at the end of the Second World War to being the fulcrum of global geopolitics.
- Kevin Chen’s novel Ghost Town, which won the Grand Prize at the Taiwan Literature Awards in 2020, recounts the memories of a Taiwanese family through the second half of the 20th century. The main character, Keith Chen, returns to his hometown, Yongjing, from Berlin, where he served prison time for murder.
- Two Trees Make a Forest by Jessica J Lee. A British Canadian travel writer, Lee’s memoir explores her family’s history on the island via the lush landscapes and perilous tectonic position of Taiwan.
Written by: Josh Glancy, with additional reporting by Hugo Peng
© The Times of London
