Challenge Taiwan

[Klaudia Aricas]

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The start gun at for the Challenge Taiwan pro race goes off at 7:00am local time (1:00am CEST) on Saturday 27 April with live updates and timing available at www.challenge-family.live and on social media @challengefamily and @challengetaiwan. For further information, visit www.challenge-taiwan.com.

Unfortunately, these are the last iterations of the World Values Survey and the Asian Barometer Survey. Hence, it is impossible to know whether people in Taiwan have revised their views in the interim, for better or for worse. My best guess is that if opinion has changed, it would be in a negative direction, as politics on issues like China, pensions, same-sex marriage, and so on, became more contentious.

The result has been a majoritarian system, which has some built-in advantages. The winner-take-all principle tends to produce fewer large parties. Fewer parties mean fewer policy programs from which voters must choose, while too many proposals can produce confusion and gridlock. Legislators chosen from single-member territorial districts are more likely to be responsive and accountable to their constituents than legislators who are picked in multi-member districts.

When one Taiwan party dominates the government for one or two presidential terms, it creates a number of incentives for political polarization, fostering phenomena that do not necessarily contribute to good, representative government:

First, when activist elements in the public oppose the policies of the majority party but see little hope of ending its dominance through electoral means, they have mounted large public protests in the name of the higher good. In these campaigns, they sometimes have the support of the opposition party.

The Deep-Light differences within the Green and Blue camp are not always significant. Generally, the policy issues under debate define which actors are involved and how politics are conducted. Some matters are negotiated within the legislature and between it and the executive, outside of the public eye. Others matters evoke polarization between the major parties. Still others create Light-Deep splits. But the issue that is most divisive within and between parties and at election time is how to address the challenge China poses to Taiwan. It is an issue that is substantively difficult and the one where the stakes are the highest.

Five years ago, Taiwan introduced an all-volunteer military system after reducing conscription for Taiwanese men born after January 1, 1994 to only four months of basic training (there is no conscription for women). Across partisan lines, Taiwanese administrations have gradually decreased conscription time from a peak of two years for the army and three years for the navy, air force, and marines.

However, high costs could force the Ministry of National Defense to further lower this targeted number of active duty volunteers to avoid feared budgetary trade-offs. As a result of the transition to an all-volunteer force, personnel expenses increased from 149 billion Taiwanese dollars (US$4.74 billion) in 2014 to NT$166 billion planned for 2020. Although the recent defense budget increase might alleviate current pressure to adjust the targeted number of personnel, budget cuts after the upcoming January 2020 presidential election are possible.

Moreover, with the current number of volunteers still well short of the target and planned continuous military pay increases, personnel expenses are likely to continue rising. The cost of the all-volunteer force therefore remains a central challenge to its success in Taiwan.

Vanessa Molter is a Master in International Policy candidate at Stanford University, where she focuses on International Security in East Asia. Currently, she studies Taiwanese security affairs at the Institute for National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, Taiwan, a government-affiliated defense think-tank. Follow her on Twitter: @vanessa_molter

Welcome to the President's Inbox, a CFR podcast about the foreign policy challenges facing the United States. I'm Jim Lindsay, director studies at the Council of Foreign Relations. This week's topic is Taiwan. With me to discuss the Biden administration's approach to Taiwan is David Sacks. David is a research fellow at the Council where his work focuses on US-China relations, US-Taiwan relations, Chinese foreign policy, and the political thought of Hans Morgenthau. Before joining CFR, David worked on political military affairs at the American Institute in Taiwan, which serves as the center of unofficial US-Taiwan relations in Taiwan. David, thanks for speaking with me.

David, I want to begin at the basics of the US-Taiwan relationship. As I mentioned in the introduction, you worked on political military affairs at the American Institute in Taiwan, which plays this unofficial role in US-Taiwanese relations. Why do we have something that deals with unofficial relations with Taiwan?

Sure. So, until 1979, the United States maintained formal diplomatic relations with Taiwan, formally the Republic of China, but Kissinger and Nixon began the process of rapprochement with the mainland, with the people's Republic of China that started with the Shanghai communique in 1972. And that process was completed in 1979 with the normalization of relations between the PRC and the United States. But the big hold up in negotiations was the status of Taiwan and the United States in that negotiation process acknowledged the Chinese position that there is one China and Taiwan is a part of China, but it never endorsed or recognized that position. After the United States normalized relations with the PRC, Congress passed a law, the Taiwan Relations Act, which president Biden actually voted for, and that forms the basis of our unofficial relationship with Taiwan. It established the American Institute in Taiwan, a nonprofit corporation, and it also set forward a few commitments that we can get into on what the United States would do with, and for Taiwan.

Let's just drill a bit down David on the term normalization. So what happened in 1979 is president Carter terminated the mutual defense treaty the United States had with Taiwan, Republic of China in formal terms. And that led Congress to pass the Taiwan Relations Act. The United States does not have an embassy in Taiwan does not recognize Taiwan as a sovereign nation, but tell us what the Taiwan Relations Act specifies.

There are a few things. The one that gets the most attention is that the United States will provide Taiwan with defensive arms that enable it to maintain a sufficient self-defense capability. Another one that gets less attention, but has come up a lot more recently is that the United States will maintain the capacity to come to Taiwan's defense while the United States has never committed to coming to Taiwan's defense. And I'm sure we'll get into the difference there. And then the other thing is to consider any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means of grave concern to the United States. Again, what the United States would do in the face of a Chinese attack on Taiwan is left ambiguous, but it's specific enough that we have essentially said it would be a big concern for the United States and that normalization with the PRC rested on the assumption that the question of Taiwan would be resolved peacefully.

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