Overview

This volume focuses on Taiwanese identity and cross-Strait relations at a time when the ascent of China has proven to be the greatest sustained story of international relations in the new millennium. How the people who live in Taiwan view themselves is a function of great power competition. Taiwan, formally the Republic of China (ROC), exists in the shadow of one giant, the People's Republic of China (PRC), and is a key client state of another, the United States (US). Each of these features influences both the evolution of Taiwanese identity and the playing out of cross-Strait relations. Embedded in history with an eye on the future, this study will pay some attention to developments prior to the flight of the Kuomintang (KMT), the losing side in the Chinese Civil War, to the island of Formosa in 1949. However, most attention will be paid to events since that time and especially in recent years, which have witnessed dramatic changes in the capabilities of the PRC, Taiwanese identity, and cross-Strait relations. In such dynamics, the US stands out as the key third-party actor among those external to Northeast Asia, with potential to impact the direction and magnitude of further developments (Jentleson, 2016). In our approach we consider especially the pull between ideological and self-interested motivating factors on shaping identity. The overall objective of this volume is to assess the evolving nature of Taiwanese identity and cross-Strait relations in connection with a rapid rise of China. As such, it also possesses implications for the US-led world order and today's most critical great power competition.

This chapter continues with three further sections. The second section focuses on recent developments in cross-Strait relations. The third section reviews the rise of China in connection with evolving identity for Taiwan and the role of the US. The fourth and final section provides a plan of work for the chapters that follow.

The challenge of cross-Strait relations

When Ma Ying-jeou and Xi Jinping met in Singapore on 7 November 2015, it marked the potential beginning of a new era in cross-Strait relations. The heads of state for the ROC and PRC had not met in person since the end of the Chinese Civil War that produced a communist regime on the Mainland and nationalist flight to Taiwan – a gap of more than six decades.

Military casualties are the common metric of war. Every war leads to losses, now, in the past, and in the future. And in each case, people are losing fathers, sons, mothers, and daughters and countries are sacrificing their most committed citizens. Each individual has a personal experience with war and these experiences drive the formulations of their wartime views. If the costs are perceived to be too high, the citizen ends his or her support for the conflict. If the costs are modest and the goal is important, the citizen remains supportive of the policy. Individuals are uncertain what the total costs of any particular conflict are until the conflict is over. But citizens are called upon to make ex ante judgments about a policy before the data are clear, even before a conflict starts. In order to make those assessments, they have to estimate what they think obtaining the war’s objectives will cost, in human terms using casualty characteristics that include their accumulation, recency, and trend as well as their spatial distribution and social connections. In the end, Costly Calculations are personal assessments by individuals about a war’s value and costs.

We set out an array of initial conditions for both sides of a conflict that form their levels of public support. These initial conditions result in selection effects; most wars whose initial conditions are not favorable to public support never occur and are nonevents. Miscalculations occur, and some wars whose opposition was underestimated are almost immediately unpopular. Leaders can attempt to persuade the public and shift the cost and benefit perceptions. But the selection effect is strong and as a result, support for a conflict, at least initially, is generally high. We also identified a set of factors that might vary as the war is fought. Changes in strategy, alliances (on either side), and news from the battlefield can alter the expectation of costs and the values assigned to the aims of the conflict. The war’s aims can change as well. Each of these wartime factors can shape opinion by shifting costs (ETC) and value (RP) higher or lower. We can thus identify the factors that influence individuals and consequently the aggregate shape of society’s value of a conflict ex ante within and across conflicts and that predict its impact on support given a war’s estimated costs.

Overview

This chapter conveys and assesses elite reflections obtained from multiple waves of research interviews conducted in Taiwan. Material from those dialogues will facilitate our reassessment of the conventional wisdom identified in Chapter 4 and reflect support for the construction of our diagrammatic approach. Recall the systemist Figure 4.2, which conveyed cause and effect for the rise of China, Taiwanese identity, cross-Strait relations and the role of the US as gleaned from the academic literature. The depth from descriptive analysis of interviews in this chapter is intended to complement the breadth obtained from survey research assessed in Chapters 6–7. All of this will be compared in Chapter 8 with the graphic story of cause and effect told by the academic literature and encapsulated in Figure 4.2 from Chapter 4. Analysis will culminate in an elaborated systemist visualization that builds upon Figure 4.2 through incorporation of what has been learned in Chapters 5–7.

Content from the interviews is assembled into the following categories: meaning of identity; the 1992 Consensus and identity; deepening business, trade and economic ties; Sunflower Movement of 2014; textbook controversy and colonial legacy; China's rise, identity and the US role; and Tsai's presidency and cross-Strait relations. This is an intentionally inductive approach that covers sets of issues as these combine together naturally through the interviews. Moreover, this comprehensive approach is in line with principles from analytic eclecticism and systemism that underlie the project as a whole.

Work continues in four additional sections. The second section introduces the interviews in terms of time, place and representativeness. The third section contains the content of the interviews organized into the categories enumerated in the previous paragraph. Analysis and synthesis of that material, notably in terms of (dis)agreement among interviewees, takes place in the fourth section. The fifth and final section sums up the chapter's contributions.

Characteristics of the interviews

Chin-Hao Huang and Patrick James carried out the bulk of the research interviews in Taipei during September and October of 2015, respectively. Given the proximity of those visits to the presidential election of 16 January 2016, political issues held an even greater importance than under normal conditions for both elite and public. On the one hand, this closeness to the election might have the disadvantage of evoking more emotional responses than otherwise would be expected.

The Reservation Point — RP — captures the value of achieving a set of war aims and Expected Total Costs — ETC — captures a war’s anticipated costs. Both vary across persons and conflicts and together determine the relationship between military casualties and opinion. Not achieving the aims makes costs unacceptable, endogenizing winning and losing. Variations in casualty expectations over time and space lead the political consequences of war to differ temporally and geographically. The role of casualties grows over the duration of the conflict. Marginal casualties will have a proportionally greater effect on the population’s estimates of total expected casualties (ETC) at the start and cumulative casualties over the duration of a conflict. Individuals’ values of wars and their aims fluctuate, which means that opposition will be triggered at different levels of expected and observed costs. The distribution of beliefs about the value of a conflict’s war aims and the distribution of ETC — both of which may change within a specific conflict, and clearly vary across them — are the primary (although not unique) factors that shape elite and mass approval.

The personal costs of war — military dead and injured—are the most salient measure of war costs and the primary instrument through which war affects domestic politics. We posit a framework for understanding war initiation, war policy, and war termination in democratic polities, and for understanding the role that citizens and their deaths through conflict play in those policy choices. We believe that war support derives from individuals’ calculations of a war’s value and cost. High-value conflicts are more likely to be supported than low-value conflicts. Conversely, low-cost conflicts are more likely to occur andtohave durable support, while high-cost conflicts are likely to see rapid erosion of support when they are fought. We develop a comprehensive theoretical approach and examine these arguments with a variety of empirical methods in multiple wars, conducting analyses of tens of thousands of citizens across a wide variety of historical and hypothetical conditions. We also analyze the ways that military casualty information travels from distant battlefields to the homefront and address policy implications.

The local information environment reflects a community’s experience with a war’s local casualties. As this experience varies across communities, so too does the information environment. The intensity of the experience is also reflected in the information environment. When a community has suffered more wartime losses, those deaths receive more coverage, even when we control for community-specific factors and size. While national media are more likely to report on international stories in general, specific local media give more attention to an international story if it includes local casualties. These local news stories include powerful elements, most notably military funerals and flag-draped coffins that make the stories vivid and highly influential. These scripted events represent standard, well-known symbols of loss that clearly and powerfully convey the cost of combat, directly affect ETC, and therefore significantly dampen public support for fighting a war. Social networks also contribute to individuals having varied levels of information about a war’s costs that in turn influence their variation in predictions of a war’s ETC and powerfully alters their views.

Overview

This chapter focuses on the evolution of Taiwanese identity. The question, ‘what does it mean to be Taiwanese?’, has never been obvious or easy to answer. Instead, responses vary across time, geography and individuals. Since identity represents a sense of belonging to a larger group, such ideological factors as values, ideas and emotions that affect the collective contribute to identity formation. Additional important aspects of evolving Taiwanese identity include cross-Strait relations, the ascent of China and the ongoing role of the US in Northeast Asia. While it is beyond the scope of the present investigation to cover all of the relevant academic literature in the preceding interconnected subject areas, what follows is a good faith effort. The review is deemed sufficient to identify the most important patterns in what academic literature has said about Taiwanese identity, most notably in connection with the other aspects discussed in the book thus far. In peeling back the layers of Taiwan's identity choice, we also begin to uncover how and why Taiwanese identity is highly political and increasingly convergent with the changing tides of political support on the island.

This chapter unfolds in eight additional sections. The second section covers early Taiwanese identity. The third section identifies historical imperatives. The fourth section covers the politics of Taiwanese identity. The fifth section assesses the impact from the rapid ascent of China to world power status. The sixth section turns to how the PRC exerts pressure on Taiwanese identity. The seventh section explores the closely related elemental role that Taiwan plays in relation to the Mainland. The eighth section explores the nexus of the US, PRC and cross-Strait relations. The ninth and final section assesses the academic literature in an overall sense.

Early Taiwanese identity

Taiwanese identity experienced a major, Sino-centric shock with the arrival of the KMT from the Mainland after its defeat in the civil war. Over the course of subsequent decades, in tandem with democratization, state dominance declined, with identity-related elements from civil society gaining ground. Taiwanese identity today is multifaceted and includes both demographic and belief-based elements. The rise of China also impacted upon Taiwanese identity, as irredentism from Beijing exerted pressure on the nearby island.