China tensions: Chinese Communist Party’s plan to take Taiwan

It is the tiny piece of land that China’s leader wants because it is a source of national pride. But it is causing a diplomatic minefield.

Chairman Xi Jinping wants Taiwan. It’s a matter of national pride. And nationalism is his wellspring of power.

But Taiwan is complicated.

It’s an independent democracy. The world doesn’t formally recognise it as such.

The outcome of this uncertainty is a diplomatic minefield.

China insists Taiwan is inherently Chinese. But the island’s ownership has changed many times over the centuries. And its Indigenous people have rarely been given a say.

Now they’re caught in a deeply ideological clash.

When the Chinese Communist Party seized control of mainland China in 1949, it failed to take Taiwan. The defeated Nationalist Party government fled there with its surviving military forces, its treasury and a host of refugees.

The Communist Party’s victory, therefore, was not complete.

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Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed to regain control of Taiwan. Picture: Naohiko Hatta/AFP

Taiwan was – and remains – a thorn in its ideological side.

Doubly so now the island state has embraced the competing ideology of democracy.

From the outset, Beijing has insisted that nations cannot diplomatically recognise both China and Taiwan. There is but one China, it declares. And therefore any matter involving Taiwan is, therefore, an internal matter for Beijing to handle.

“Reunification is the historical trend and it is the right path,” Xi proclaimed in Beijing’s Great Hall of the People last year. “Taiwan’s independence is a reversal of history and a dead-end road.”

But, like his assertions of ownership over the south and east China seas, history makes matters far more complicated than convenient.

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Modern Taiwan only came into existence in 1949. Despite pleas for independence as the world carved up the Japanese empire after World War II, the island was handed to the Chinese Nationalist government.

China immediately set about colonising the new territory, erasing all signs of Japan’s rule and quickly overwhelming the indigenous population. In 1947, thousands of protesters were brutally massacred while demonstrating in Taipei.

With the fall of Beijing to the Communists in 1949, Taiwan became a military dictatorship. But its rapid economic growth helped spur it towards presidential democracy by the late 1980s.

It’s now one of Asia’s economic powerhouses.

But, for seven decades, Beijing has proclaimed its intention “to strive for the motherland’s peaceful reunification” with the “rebellious province”. In recent months, the word “peaceful” has increasingly been dropped from this chant.

In its place are threats that any formal rejection of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” doctrine will be met with force.

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Taiwan must “clearly recognise that Taiwan’s independence would only bring profound disaster to Taiwan,” Xi has said. “We make no promise to renounce the use of force and reserve the option of taking all necessary means.”

But modern Taiwan has little affection for the mother country. Its younger generations tend to poll in favour of the democracy and independence they now enjoy.

This doesn’t suit Beijing.

And the chances of any mutually agreed reunification are rapidly fading. Which may explain Chairman Xi’s increasingly bellicose behaviour and the ramping up of military posturing on Taiwan’s borders.

“We are willing to create broad space for peaceful reunification but will leave no room for any form of separatist activities,” the Chinese leader said.