Taiwan Archives - Page 2 of 8

From the bookshelf: ‘The Taiwan Story: how a small island will dictate the global future’

5 January 2025

Among the most complex foreign policy challenges facing President Donald Trump following his inauguration on 20 January will be relations with China and the US’s position relative to Taiwan.

Perhaps no better book informs political debate and public opinion than Kerry Brown’s The Taiwan Story: How a small island will dictate the global future (Viking, 2024). Brown is a prolific author of books on Chinese politics, currently based at King’s College, London, following a stint at the University of Sydney.

The Taiwan Story begins with the Chinese Civil War (1945–49), in which Mao Zedong’s communists ousted Chiang Kai-shek’s nationalists from the mainland and establish the People’s Republic of China. Chiang’s forces retreated to the island of Taiwan as the Republic of China. The US government sided with the Republic of China, with which it maintained diplomatic relations, not recognising Beijing.

The story evolves when the US switches recognition from Taipei to Beijing, following the 1972 visit to China by US President Richard Nixon and his national security advisor, Henry Kissinger. Thus began the US ‘acknowledgement’ of the one-China policy. According to the Shanghai Communique of 1972, ‘the United States acknowledges that Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China.’

Beijing’s insistence that Taiwan be united with the mainland has made the island Asia’s political flash point. A plethora of books have been published on Taiwan issues. What is most interesting about Brown’s is that he goes into the lives of the Taiwanese people and how Taiwanese politics, society and cultural identity have evolved quite differently to the mainland’s.

Chiang Kai-shek’s government on Taiwan was just as authoritarian as that of Mao Zedong on the Chinese mainland. But Taiwan democratised, holding its first presidential elections in 1996. Democracy is now firmly entrenched in Taiwan, as the presidency has alternated between the two leading political parties, the Kuomintang (the nationalists) and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

The Economist Intelligence Unit ranks Taiwan as the most democratic place in Asia and 10th in the world. Democratisation means that Taiwan has aligned its values with the West and distinguishes itself from China, which has become ever more authoritarian. Taiwan also has a rich, open and free civil society, something that is very much lacking on the mainland.

Taiwan has also established itself among Asia’s technology leaders. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company produces more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced semiconductors. Under US pressure, the company will not supply them to Chinese customers.

While Taiwan may be diplomatically isolated, with only 12 countries recognising it as the Republic of China, much of the world economy is depends on its technological prowess. And over the generations, a distinct Taiwanese cultural identity has developed, with the vast majority of Taiwanese people identifying as Taiwanese, rather than Chinese or both Chinese and Taiwanese.

Meanwhile, there is a growing risk of military conflict involving China and Taiwan. Chinese leader Xi Jinping is increasingly impatient for Taiwan to be unified with the mainland. As China–US relations have deteriorated, high-level US support for Taiwan has grown, even though Washington maintains its policy of ‘strategic ambiguity’ concerning its willingness to defend Taiwan. Most Taiwanese prefer the political status quo of de facto independence, as do the current president and his predecessor (both from the Democratic Progressive Party). In response, Beijing has cut off all official contact with Taipei.

What future for relations across the Taiwan Straits?

Brown explores issues and risks of a military conflict over Taiwan. It would be massively risky and costly, not only for the countries directly involved but for the whole world economy. Brown sees no possibility of reconciliation between China and Taiwan. But he does argue that peace across the Taiwan Straits has been ensured for seven decades by accepting the status quo and that sticking with it is the only realistic option. This would involve all sides dialling down the tensions, however.

Brown notes that both China and Taiwan have undergone radical change over the past half a century or more. Looking further ahead, he argues that it is highly possible that continued radical change will throw up new ideas which could offer a longer term solution to the Taiwan problem.

Editors’ picks for 2024: ‘As important as Ukraine is, a Taiwan war must be Australia’s biggest worry’

2 January 2025

Originally published on 30 September 2024.

Other than the Middle East, the world faces the possibility of two major wars escalating in Europe and East Asia, over Ukraine and Taiwan.

Australia must worry about either of those wars, but ultimately it’s the possible loss of Taiwan to China that could be the front-and-centre issue for our national security.

Ukraine and Taiwan each face a military threat from a large neighbouring great power that is nuclear armed. In Ukraine’s case, Russia has already invaded, and the two have been at war for more than two-and-a-half years. In Taiwan’s case, communist China’s President Xi Jinping is making increasing threats that China should integrate Taiwan, and he reserves the right to use force to occupy it.

In Russia’s case, Putin is bogged down in a slow war of attrition, which he did not expect. And he is making increasing threats of the use of nuclear weapons. Ukraine’s recent occupation of Russian territory in the Kursk oblast (region) is the first time that a non-nuclear power has invaded the territory of a nuclear superpower. One of Putin’s self-proclaimed advisors, Sergei Karaganov, has recently said, ‘Any attack on our territory must get a nuclear response.’

There are, however, some obvious differences between Ukraine and Taiwan. First, Ukraine is an internationally recognised independent state, and we should remember that post-communist Russia recognised it as such in the 1994 Minsk Agreement.

In the case of Taiwan, there is no such recognition that it is an independent country. To the contrary, nearly every major power in the world does not recognise Taiwan as a separate independent nation state. Even so, more than 70 percent of Taiwanese identify themselves as being Taiwanese—not Chinese.

This leads us to another significant difference. Ukraine cannot yet be recognised as a full democracy free from corruption and having an independent judiciary. Quite the opposite. After Ukraine became a separate country, it suffered prolonged instability and violence due to the rise of oligarchs and widespread corruption involving criminal gangs. Corruption continues to be a major impediment against it joining the European Union.

By comparison, Taiwan is not only a much longer established democracy, but it does much better in surveys about corruption and has a basically independent judiciary.

Both these countries have a chequered recent history. Ukraine declared its independence from Russia in 1990. Yeltsin was so anxious to be president of a separate Russia that despite being reminded by one of his senior advisers to raise the issue of Crimea with the new Ukrainian president, Leonid Kravchuk, Yeltsin hastily remarked that Crimea could be settled later.

In January 1994, Ukraine agreed to cease being a nuclear power; it transferred 1300 strategic nuclear warheads to Russia in exchange for security reassurances from the US and Russia about Ukrainian sovereignty. Had Ukraine retained some nuclear weapons, it would probably not have faced the humiliation of being invaded by Russia.

In Taiwan’s case, it was effectively under ruthless martial law from 1949 under the dictator Chiang Kai-shek until the demise of the KMT single-party system and the rise of the democracy movement in the 1980s. Martial law was eventually lifted by Chiang’s son, president Chiang Ching-kuo, in 1987, and constitutional democracy was restored.

We have now seen a vibrant democracy in Taiwan with routine, peaceful changes of government over the past 37 years. The success of democracy in Taiwan has contradicted an old assertion that Chinese people, including those in Singapore and Hong Kong, would never be able to make democracy work properly.

This brings us to the crucial issue of all-out military contingencies involving the survival of both countries and their differing strategic implications for Australia. In the case of Ukraine, the big question is what Australia would do if Russia’s war with Ukraine escalated into a full-blown military confrontation between Russia and NATO. From a moral and international legal perspective, there would be pressure on us to make some sort of contribution. But Ukraine is not in our region of broader strategic concern in the Asia-Pacific region. Moreover, if the war in Europe were to escalate to include Russian attacks on neighbouring NATO members, such as Poland and the Baltic countries, it would involve high intensity land-based military conflict for which the Australian Defence Force is not structured. We could make no more than a limited military contribution.

But such an escalated European war might create an opportunity for China to attack Taiwan. China could perhaps attack Taiwan at the same time as Russia expanded its war to neighbouring NATO countries. Although Taiwan itself is not in Australia’s area of immediate strategic interest (Southeast Asia and the South Pacific) a successful conquest of Taiwan and defeat of America by China would raise potentially first-order strategic threats to Australia, and our own survival as a fully independent state, for the following reasons.

First, if China decisively defeated the United States in such a war, then there might be nothing to stop China from expanding southwards and establishing military bases in our immediate vicinity. And a beaten US might retract into one of its historic phases of isolationism. Australia would then be strategically isolated and without a protector. Southeast Asia and the South Pacific would effectively come into China’s sphere of influence.

Second, such a shock defeat of the US would have grave consequences for Japan and South Korea. It would involve them conceding sea and air control of the East China Sea and the South China Sea to China. A China commanding the island of Taiwan would have military dominance over the South China Sea and Southeast Asia. A new China-centric geopolitical order would then most likely prevail throughout East Asia. Such a crisis might reasonably drive Japan and South Korea into acquiring a reliable retaliatory nuclear strike capability of their own.

Third, Australia would have to consider where its future lied under the jackboot of a dominant Beijing. Without the US alliance and our critical access to American intelligence, surveillance, targeting, weapon systems and world-beating military platforms, we would no longer have credible military capabilities. Would we then retreat into a neutral posture with only the pathetic remains of a credible military force?

Fourth, the truly nightmare scenario would be a conjoining of Russian military successes against contiguous NATO members such as the Baltic countries and Poland with China’s defeat of America over Taiwan and the resulting dominance of Japan and South Korea. This wicked brew then drums up the ultimate contingency of an all-out nuclear war.

Those Australians who carelessly proclaim that the United States is finished, that China will inevitably dominate the entire Asia-Pacific region and that our only survival will be to get out of the ANZUS partnership need to think again. Theirs is a value-free world where we would be on the receiving end of communist China’s dominance.

So, in the event of a US war with China over Taiwan, what could Australia contribute? Our defence force is of a modest size but we have considerable potential to defend ourselves if, instead of just waiting for AUKUS submarines, we rapidly acquire sufficient long-range anti-ship missiles with ranges of more than 2000km.

We would, however, require access to airfields and ports—for example in Okinawa, which is less than 600km from Taiwan. But a more credible military mission for us would be to deny the narrow straits of Southeast Asia (Malacca, Sunda and Lombok) to China’s maritime traffic—including the 80 percent of its oil imports.

The purpose of this analysis has been to demonstrate the dangers of listening to those who focus only on the risks of resisting and deterring China. Instead, my analysis here concentrates on the dangers of not resisting and not deterring China.

Moreover, when strategic push comes to shove, we need to recognise that, unlike Ukraine, Taiwan may become directly important in our defence planning priorities. Even so, we do have a strong national interest in seeing Ukraine liberated from Russia’s illegal invasion and we should do what we can to bring that about.

Editors’ picks for 2024: ‘Floating piers and sinking hopes: China’s logistics challenge in invading Taiwan’

31 December 2024

Originally published on 27 August 2024.

No doubt the Chinese military was paying attention.

Last month the United States disassembled and removed the floating pier it had assembled at a Gaza beach to take aid deliveries.

Heavy seas beat it. Such a pier supposedly can be assembled in hours, but this one took almost a month. When it was operational, waves damaged it, and it repeatedly had to be pulled away from the beach to prevent its destruction. Once it had to be towed to a port for repairs. Waves drove ashore boats that serviced it.

And all that was nothing compared with the challenges that China’s armed forces would face in trying to deliver a mountain of personnel, equipment and supplies in an invasion of Taiwan. The pier’s lesson for China is that invading the island would be a doomed endeavour.

The weather of the Taiwan Strait makes the eastern Mediterranean look like a bathtub. Defenders would attack China’s piers. Almost every beach where China might want to build floating piers is overlooked by terrain that would turn the unloading zones into kill zones.

Even before those problems arise, building and installing a floating pier is a huge exercise. The US Department of Defense budgeted $230 million for the one at Gaza, called the Trident Pier. It was operational for 20 days—less than half of the time after it was positioned—and handled only about 9000 tonnes of supplies.

Logistics is almost always harder than planned, but joint logistics over the shore (JLOTS)— moving people and things from ships to land without a port—is subject to innumerable kinds of friction.

Any Chinese invasion of Taiwan would require improvised piers in many locations simultaneously. They’d be part of a logistical effort that would be enormously larger than anything the Chinese navy has attempted. Even optimistic estimates of just 300,000 personnel for an invasion force would be double the international forces fighting in Afghanistan at the height of the global war on terror.

Higher estimates suggest an invasion of Taiwan could need as many as 2 million soldiers. Few of them, and very little of their equipment and supplies, could go by air. Almost everything would have to cross the strait in ships.

Taiwan’s seven major ports would almost certainly be contested, guarded by sea drones and subject to sabotage.

The island has 14 beaches usable for military landings. All but one are surrounded by cliffs and urban jungles, perfect places for the Taiwanese army to hide forces that would attack anything coming ashore and anything used in bringing it ashore, including the piers themselves.

Mother Nature would be doing her bit, too. Indeed, her efforts may be enough to prevent using the beaches in the first place.

Also called the Black Ditch, the strait is known for ‘… strong winds, wave swells, and fog…’ half the year. The storms, heavy rain and squally winds of monsoon seasons sweep it and the coasts on either side. An average of six typhoons hit the strait each year. As Ian Easton details in his book The Chinese Invasion Threat, the weather of the strait shrinks the windows available for an invasion to just two months of ‘good suitability’: April and October. That is a narrow time constraint that worsens a vast logistics challenge.

Apart from soldiers and their equipment, the Chinese navy would need to ferry food, fuel and ammunition to them. The landing alone could require 30 million tonnes going ashore, which far outstrips the capacity of the Chinese navy’s amphibious transport fleet.

Recognising this, the navy is incorporating civilian roll-on, roll-off ferries (roros) as reinforcements. While China has fewer than 50 roros today, it could have two or three times as many by 2032.

That still leaves the problem of getting over the beach. China should view the story of the Trident Pier as a cautionary tale. JLOTS operations are technically complex, costly and risky. The security threat to the improvised pier at Gaza was hardly comparable to the one that Taiwan and its friends would present to a Chinese cross-strait amphibious operation. Nor were the weather challenges comparable, though the sea state off Gaza was still bad enough to ensure the US pier was usually not functional.

The money that the US spent on the pier also paid to show China just how hard JLOTS can be. If that lesson deters war, it was a cheap price to pay.

Editors’ picks for 2024: ‘The curiously cozy relationship between Taiwan and Japan’

24 December 2024

Originally published on 18 June 2024.

Because Taiwan lacks formal diplomatic ties with most countries, it works hard at developing cultural and social links with them.

But not with Japan. Far more than is widely understood in other countries, Taiwan and Japan have an unusually close cultural and social relationship that doesn’t need government promotion. Their relationship might even be called cozy.

This must be an influence in international policy. Japan has its own national-security reasons for backing Taiwan’s preservation from Chinese conquest, but the mutual fondness between the two countries can only reinforce Tokyo’s resolve.

Most surprisingly, the close Taiwan-Japan relationship is based largely on nostalgia for colonialism. Many Taiwanese even feel reverence for their former Japanese colonial masters, who modernised the island during an occupation that lasted from 1895 to 1945.

More than anything, that colonial nostalgia is the doing of the Kuomintang, the nationalist party that lost China’s civil war to the Communists and came to the island in 1949. Japanese rule had been tough, but the Kuomintang’s was brutal.

Comfort, or even fascination, with a history of Japanese colonialism is a strong cultural factor that sets Taiwan apart from China and South Korea, where occupation by Japan is remembered with revulsion. Last year, Taiwan’s de facto embassy in Japan found in a survey that 77 percent of Japanese said they felt close to Taiwan and 73 percent believed that Taiwan and Japan had good relations. A year earlier, Tokyo’s representative office in Taiwan had conducted a similar survey, finding that Taiwanese had much the same feelings towards Japan.

Japan suddenly became aware of the depth of Taiwan’s affection for it after the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster, when an outpouring of Taiwanese donations exceeding 20 billion yen (US$230 million at the time) outdid contributions from every other country. It was a watershed moment for Japan.

Since then, Japan has repaid this friendship. For example, after China suspended imports of Taiwanese pineapples in 2021 in an apparent attempt to squeeze the island’s economy, Japan stepped in to buy loads of the fruit.

When a powerful earthquake hit the Taiwanese city Hualien in April this year, Japanese local governments and private citizens ran fund-raising campaigns. Hualien subsequently suffered from a drop in tourism, so diplomats in Japan’s de facto embassy in Taiwan encouraged Japanese expatriates on the island to visit the city.

Taiwanese visitors were the biggest spenders in Japan last year, even edging out Chinese ones. Taiwan is an unusually popular travel destination for Japanese. In 2019, before the Covid-19 pandemic distorted Japanese travel patterns, 11 percent of overseas trips by Japanese were to Taiwan, compared with 9 percent to Thailand, which is far more famous elsewhere for holidays.

Although Taiwanese are ethnically Chinese, they are culturally very different to the people of China. Much of that difference comes from Japanese colonial influence that permeates Taiwanese society. In Taiwan, the local Chinese dialect includes Japanese words, tatami mats are found in many homes, and big dollops of wasabi are routinely served with seafood. As for more modern influences, many young Taiwanese are keen to learn Japanese so they can read original editions of manga. They copy Japanese fashion, too.

The closeness between Taiwan and Japan isn’t just cultural and social. Mutual trade is booming. Japan is Taiwan’s third-largest trading partner and Taiwan is Japan’s fourth-largest. Japan has also voiced support for Taiwan’s participation in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership, a proposed multilateral free trade pact

Amid concerns that concentration of advanced integrated-circuit manufacturing in Taiwan creates a global vulnerability, Taiwan’s star chipmaker, TSMC, has been lured to set up shop in Japan, the United States and Germany. In February it said it would add a second chip factory in Japan and increase investments there to more than US$20 billion. The word in Taipei is that TSMC’s Japanese ventures are operating more smoothly than those it has in the United States, thanks to cultural similarity.

In 2021, Taiwan worried that its stock of Covid-19 vaccines was running low, because, the government said, China had interfered with the island’s supplies. Japan responded with a donation larger than any other country’s.

Political connections are getting closer, too, even though they are more sensitive than culture and trade, because of China’s hostility. Also, old-guard members of the Kuomintang, remembering Japanese atrocities in China during and before World War II, are not fond of Japan. But the party has not held the presidency since 2016.

Parliamentary diplomacy serves as a Taiwanese channel for discussing security issues with another country. It’s vibrant with Japan. In 2021, Taiwan, Japan and the United States launched a trilateral strategic forum involving lawmakers from all three nations. That year, Taiwan and Japan also launched what they call 2+2 talks, in which two ruling party lawmakers from each side with expertise in defence and foreign affairs would meet twice a year.

The message from all this is simple: to each other, Japan and Taiwan are much more than near neighbours.

Taiwan rushes to build up its nascent drone industry

17 December 2024

The drone message from the war in Ukraine has not been lost on Taiwan. Uncrewed aircraft and vessels, especially small, cheap ones, can be built and used in far greater numbers than even a much more powerful enemy can cope with—just what Taiwan needs as it eyes China’s massive forces across the strait.

The island has begun working hard on exploiting this transformation in military technology. An emerging theme is cooperation with the United States, which is keen to reduce its reliance on China’s massive drone industry.

Taiwan is painfully aware of China’s edge in mass-producing drones, which can cheaply surveil a battle zone, collect targeting data or even dive into and damage weapon systems that cost far more than they do. The island produces few drones, but Taiwanese officials still hope it can develop a substantial drone industry.

Many Taiwanese companies are already talented makers of tech hardware, such as silicon chips. The government thinks these talents can be redirected so that local firms can make loads of uncrewed air and sea craft that will radically improve Taiwan’s capacity for defence.

If Taiwan had a drone industry, it could make such weapons and sensor-carriers very cheaply. Moreover, it would not have to cajole other countries into supplying them, whereas it always must when seeking to import complex military equipment. In 2022, the government drone program was expanded to include private companies. Some of those companies are in joint ventures with US firms. The island is also buying US loitering munitions, conceptually similar to attack drones.

In mid-2022, Taiwan unveiled a cutting-edge drone research facility combining government and private-sector technologists in the southwest island. Nearby, the government broke ground late last year on a planned industrial park for drones. Taiwan also has hopes of becoming a big player in drone supply chains for the US and its allies. In his inauguration speech in May, President Lai Ching-te pledged to make Taiwan ‘the Asian hub of unmanned aerial vehicle supply chains for global democracies.’

However, Taiwan’s drone manufacturing is plagued with the same problems as its high-tech sector. It tends to be strong in making hardware, but it’s very weak in design and system integration, says Su Tzu-yun of Taiwan’s government-backed Institute for National Defense and Security Research.

Richard Weir, the vice president of global strategy and government relations for IMSAR, a US maker of sophisticated radars, adds that Taiwanese drone makers tend not to clearly identify missions, weapons and sensors for the drones before they’re designed. They must decide in advance whether a drone should have strike capabilities or just be used for signals intelligence, he says.

‘We see a lot of good drones being designed in Taiwan but a lack of clarity of how that drone will be utilised beyond carrying a small camera,’ says Weir. His company is working with several Taiwanese companies to produce drones that will assist with maritime domain awareness.

‘We get the sense that Taiwan’s industry is looking for support in creative approaches in addressing threats,’ Weir adds.

The US under the Biden administration has wanted to reduce its reliance on Chinese-made drones and their components; this indicated there was room for cooperation with Taiwan. In September, the US International Trade Administration organised a visit to Taiwan for a delegation of representatives from two dozen US companies that make drones and anti-drone technologies. They dined with top Taiwanese security officials and were connected with Taiwanese companies looking for partners and customers.

Rupert Hammond-Chambers, the president of the Virginia-based US-Taiwan Business Council, notes that Taiwanese drone design and integration can be greatly enhanced through cooperation with foreign companies. In 2024 alone, his council brought to Taiwan almost 60 drone-industry companies, he says.

This trend of US and Taiwanese companies working together in the drone sphere and supported by the US government will probably continue under the Trump administration, he adds.

‘I don’t see the incoming Trump administration as disruptive to this effort,’ Hammond-Chambers says.

‘Quite the contrary. I believe that a continued focus on supporting co-development of domestic platforms and systems will be a major focus of the incoming US government,’ he says.

He notes that developing Taiwan’s domestic drone industry improves Taiwan’s deterrence capabilities and supports a main Trump priority of creating China-free supply chains. Cutting-edge US drone technologies are unlikely to be integrated into Taiwan’s domestic drone sector and related supply chains, he adds. This means there’s not much chance of US technological secrets getting leaked to China.

‘Most of the support will be mature technologies that are proven and allow Taiwan to stand up new capabilities as quickly as possible,’ Hammond-Chambers concludes.

Australia’s ties with Taiwan have strengthened. They should strengthen more

10 November 2024

It’s often hard work. It’s often in the face of ingrained habits of anxiety and suspicion. But Australia is steadily building closer links with that place that is in some ways its most natural partner in east Asia: Taiwan.

Rather than ‘place’, I feel tempted to write ‘country’. A few years ago, the embassy of the People’s Republic of China sent a polite and, in the end, slightly puzzled diplomat to explain to me mistakes in articles I’d written.

Foremost was that I’d referred to Taiwan as a country. I explained that readers might be perplexed as to what else to call a place that had its own constitution, elected its own leaders, printed its own money and defended its own borders.

Australians feel comfortable in Taiwan, however it’s described. It has a similarly sized population. It has an effective universal healthcare system. Visitors fly there without needing visas. Its indigenous population is about the same, proportionally—though with closer links culturally to Pacific islanders, who mostly derived from Asia via Taiwan. It was the first place in Asia to legalise same-sex marriage. It’s a comparatively egalitarian, middle-class place and generally the most socially progressive in the region. Its physical beauty mirrors that of New Zealand’s South Island, which it resembles a little topographically.

Of course, there’s a huge economic difference. Australia’s only world-leading industry is to discover, extract and export resources, which we do brilliantly. Taiwan’s is to innovate, develop and market the high-end semi-conductors used in almost every form of advanced activity and product in the world.

But that also means there’s big scope for joint endeavour, including in services, in which trade soared 50 percent in 2023. Overall, Taiwan became Australia’s sixth-biggest goods-and-services export market in 2023, while Australia became Taiwan’s fifth-largest import source. The prospects for further increases are high, with Taiwan’s GDP growth expected to reach about 4 percent for 2024. Mutual investment rose 24 percent in 2023 to $41 billion, split fairly evenly between the two, and with nine Taiwanese banks now operating in Australia, to which they have brought funds of $65 billion.

In early November, 11 Taiwanese biotech companies formed the biggest international delegation to participate in Australia’s largest life sciences conference this year, AusBiotech 2024, in Melbourne. Five of them are located at the Southern Taiwan Science Park, which coordinated the delegation.

In August, the 37th Australia-Taiwan Business Conference was held on Queensland’s Gold Coast, with more than 180 participants, almost a third from Taiwan. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘smart partnerships for a smart future’. It was organised by the Australia Taiwan Business Council, alongside its counterpart the Republic of China Australia Business Council, whose name reflects archaic pieties that Taiwan must retain to avoid being lambasted for seeking independence.

The conference featured major speakers and panels on critical minerals, energy transition, biotech, advanced manufacturing including defence and space, and cyber security. The speakers included Senator Tim Ayres, the assistant minister for trade and for a Future Made in Australia; Cameron Dick, the then deputy premier and treasurer of Queensland; and Donna Gates, the acting mayor of the Gold Coast. Three Queensland state and federal members of parliament participated, as did three parliamentarians from Taiwan.

Emerging business leaders made presentations, and plans are underway for an enhanced four-year program to build on this important network connecting young entrepreneurs and executives of Australia and Taiwan.

Next year’s conference is likely to be held in Taiwan’s lively second city, Kaohsiung, providing further opportunities for Australian businesspeople to deepen and broaden their Taiwan networks and commercial opportunities. The positive trend in the relationship would be enhanced considerably by the participation of Australia’s trade minister; it has been 12 years since a trade minister, then Craig Emerson, went to Taiwan.

Such a visit—especially if the minister is accompanied by a business delegation—would do much to further galvanise economic opportunities. Taiwan’s minister for economic affairs should also visit Australia with a business delegation.

In 2025, Australia will take the chair of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. There is therefore a strong case for Australia to encourage Taiwan to negotiate membership, and separately to negotiate a bilateral free trade agreement. However, Canberra’s overriding regional priority of stabilisation of the relationship with China makes such moves unlikely. But federally sponsored trade and investment missions—perhaps focused on areas such as biotech or green energy—would be a helpful alternative step.

In addition, a Future Made in Australia program might promisingly feature an agreement to foster the involvement of Taiwan tech companies in the development of critical minerals and rare earths processing in Australia.

Building such policy architecture would provide a helpful framework for the already promising commercial and cultural trends boosting connections between two natural regional partners.

The case for Taiwan: observer status at Interpol’s world congress

30 October 2024

Interpol’s vision statement is ‘connecting police for a safer world’. Yet it isn’t connecting all police and is leaving some people less safe. Excluding Taiwan from Interpol observer status undermines international cooperation and hinders the development of an effective security network to address the challenges posed by modern crime.

Last week, outgoing Interpol secretary general Jurgen Stock said, ‘The world is confronted with a dramatic surge in international organised crime in a way that, definitely, I haven’t seen in my now long 45-year career.’

The escalation of transnational crime, fuelled by technological advancements, poses challenges that no single nation can effectively address alone. The complexities of modern criminal activity necessitate robust international collaboration. Yet, a crucial democratic player that has much experience to share in this security landscape remains sidelined: Taiwan.

As Interpol prepares for its upcoming World Congress in November 2024, the 196 member states—nations committed to collaboration despite ongoing conflicts and geopolitical tensions—must address a critical question: why is Taiwan, a proven champion of global safety, denied observer status? The exclusion undermines Interpol’s principles of international cooperation and its collective ability to combat transnational crime. It’s time for Interpol to rectify this oversight and include Taiwan as an observer in the conversation.

Let’s be clear: many international institutions do not require nation status for members or observers. Interpol is one of them. And Taiwanese society consistently ranks among the safest worldwide. As with the World Health Organization, the refusal to include Taiwan results from China blocking the decision and from other countries being fearful of upsetting it.

If these institutions claim that all that can be done is being done in the name of public health and safety, they’re uttering a known untruth.

Taiwan’s exclusion from Interpol hampers the island’s law enforcement agencies by denying them access to vital real-time intelligence that could enhance efforts to combat crime, domestic and transnational. Without Interpol observer status, Taiwan must rely on indirect information that often arrives too late.

The case of Lisa Lines, an Australian who fled to Taiwan in 2017 after allegedly arranging a violent attack on her ex-husband, illustrates how Tawain’s exclusion from Interpol helps criminals. Interpol issued a red notice—an international request to law enforcement agencies worldwide to locate and provisionally arrest an individual pending extradition. Australian authorities had to send the request through Interpol because Taiwan had (and has) no extradition treaty with Australia.

But Taiwan did not receive the red notice quickly enough. Lines was not arrested until 14 months later, when she travelled to Palau.

Taiwan’s law enforcement consistently demonstrates a commitment to tackling international crime, and Interpol has recognised this. The Interpol Stop Online Piracy initiative recognised Taiwanese police for their efforts against illegal broadcasting, illustrating their valuable insights and experiences.

A lack of observer status at Interpol also severely restricts Taiwan’s ability to contribute to important discussions and initiatives. And Interpol’s members miss out on the possibility of Taiwan providing timely intelligence on emerging criminal methods and alerting them to threats from criminal groups exploiting Taiwanese passports.

Beijing opposes Taiwan’s inclusion in health and safety bodies because it is wants to shift the view of the rest of the world on the status of Taiwan. It fears that Taiwanese participation in Interpol could weaken its attempts to advance its own claims over the self-ruled democracy.

Taiwan’s police can already cooperate directly with law enforcement agencies elsewhere. There is no good reason why it should not do so through Interpol, too.

Interpol was established to facilitate international police cooperation, not to serve as a tool of geopolitics or international relations. Its constitution emphasises the need for mutual assistance among police authorities, a fact that emphasises that its focus is on crime prevention and enforcement, not political manoeuvring.

Excluding Taiwan undermines this foundational principle and weakens the global network essential for addressing threats that cross borders. The 1984 Interpol General Assembly resolution that replaced Taipei with Beijing as the organisation’s representative of China does not preclude other participation by Taiwan. Interpol does in fact have both the authority as well as the responsibility to grant observer status to Taiwan.

As Interpol prepares for its 92nd General Assembly in Glasgow on 4 November, the moment for decisive action has arrived. It should welcome Taiwan as an observer, facilitating the island’s involvement in key meetings and initiatives that shape global policing efforts.

Australia should be a champion for Taiwan’s observer status. Recognising that a collaborative approach is essential for the security of all nations, we must ensure that Taiwan has a voice in global law enforcement dialogues. This is not just about Taiwan, and Interpol mustn’t allow itself to be a pawn in China’s pursuit of global power. It is about building a more effective security network that can adapt to the challenges of modern crime through international cooperation.

Taiwan mobilises civil society to bolster civil defence

4 October 2024

Taiwan has taken a big step towards bolstering civil defence, marshalling a range of resources and know-how across society.

A top-level committee, launched in June and detailed in late September, has been working to incorporate civil expertise into defence policy. In an unusual move for Taiwan, the group includes representatives from grassroots organisations that have been working since 2022 to absorb lessons from Ukraine’s experience at war with Russia.

Most of the island’s people are remarkably ill-prepared for an attack from an increasingly aggressive China. For example, few Taiwanese would know what to do if bombs began shattering nearby streets.

In detailing the purpose of the committee, President Lai Ching-te said that citizens need to know how to deter an approaching enemy. By strengthening resilience, Taiwan can prepare for both disasters and national defence.

The 23 members on the committee, the Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee, include the defence minister and seven other ministers, with President Lai Ching-te as the chairperson. Also on the committee are representatives from Taiwan’s space agency, the Association of Hackers in Taiwan, Google Taiwan and Buddhist and Christian religious groups. The chairperson of PX Mart, one of Taiwan’s largest supermarket chains, is an adviser.

‘The composition of the committee was a recognition that emerging national security challenges require new approaches to risk management and that must include whole-of-government coordination—both horizontal and vertical—as well as a whole-of-society coalition,’ said committee member Enoch Wu. He heads Forward Alliance, one of the grassroots NGOs that prepares Taiwanese civilians for natural disasters and war.

Taiwan’s ability as a society to coordinate with its armed forces and government in response to a military threat is lightyears behind that of Ukraine and Israel. Globally, Israel is considered the gold standard.

Even though this is an early step for Taiwan, and progress will probably be slow, it is still a significant development. By bringing so much talent together to improve civil defence, the government should become much more able to mobilise society in time of need.

Before the committee held its first meeting behind closed doors on 26 September, President Lai in a speech promised to ‘expand the training and utilisation of civilian forces’ and ‘improve the readiness of our social welfare, medical care and evacuation facilities, and ensure the protection of information, transportation and financial networks’. The committee is also looking at ways to improve food supplies and protect energy and other critical infrastructure facilities so that they keep operating during emergencies. Taiwan’s interior minister said the government had identified 310 such facilities that needed protection or duplication.

President Lai said the committee would hold tabletop exercises in December and hold an unscripted civil defence exercise in March 2025. In June it will coordinate with the military for the annual Huang Kuang Exercise, an annual drill that is supposed to show off readiness to face an attack from China.

Presence on the committee gives a platform to two private grassroots organisations that prepare Taiwanese civilians for national emergencies. Since 2022, Wu’s Forward Alliance has been working with Spirit of America, an independent American NGO that has provided aid to Ukraine in collaboration with the US Department of Defense. Spirit of America has offered instructors and other experts to help Forward Alliance train emergency first responders in Taiwan.

Forward Alliance says 19,000 people have attended its training workshops since its founding in 2020. The workshops include basic first aid, search and rescue and team-based training in managing crowd safety and people in shelters. Forward Alliance says it’s also trained more than 1300 Taiwanese law enforcement professionals in emergency casualty care and donated first aid kits to various police precincts. Taiwan’s de facto US ambassador, Raymond Greene, attended a Forward Alliance exercise on 14 September with nearly 300 participants that simulated civilian responses to a mass-casualty explosion in a rural area.

Liu Wen, chairperson of the Kuma Civil Defense Education Association, who is also on the committee, said her organisation would like to train Taiwanese government officials and bring a ‘wartime consciousness’ to the committee. What Taiwan needs to overcome, she says, ‘is the ideological challenge that war preparedness is a form of provocation to China.’ Kuma trains Taiwanese in self-defence capabilities ranging from basic first aid skills to planning evacuation routes from homes and deciphering Chinese propaganda and disinformation.

Ingrid Larson, a top official with the American Institute in Taiwan, voiced support for the committee. Within Taiwan, however, Lai’s biggest challenge most likely will be winning support from the China-friendly opposition parties, the Kuomintang and Taiwan People’s Party. So far, they haven’t given much of a response, but they probably will be resistant and sceptical. While these parties firmly support democracy, they also support a more conciliatory approach to China and, in the past, have labelled Lai as a provocateur.

As important as Ukraine is, a Taiwan war must be Australia’s biggest worry

29 September 2024