China’s Use of Cultural Ties to Influence Taiwan – | Asian Markets

In recent times, China has employed a wide selection of navy techniques to coerce Taiwan. Army workouts involving missile launches into waters close to Taiwan have turn into more and more common, as evidenced by the 2 Joint Sword drills carried out final 12 months. Simply final week, Taiwan accused China of sabotaging an undersea cable in northern Taiwan. Additional investigations revealed that the vessel accountable belonged to a company based mostly in Hong Kong. Every day intrusions by China’s fighter jets have practically quadrupled, from 380 in 2019 to over 1,700 in 2023. These developments have undoubtedly heightened security issues within the Taiwan Strait.

Equally, China has employed varied instruments of financial coercion. Beijing has imposed restrictions on its residents and college students touring to Taiwan since former Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen got here into workplace in 2016, considerably weakening Taiwan’s tourism and better schooling industries. In 2021 and 2022, China halted imports of important Taiwanese agricultural merchandise, resembling pineapples and apples, that are key exports for Taiwan. This motion precipitated panic amongst native farmers. 

Moreover, China has used financial incentives to poach Taiwan’s diplomatic allies by offering them financial incentives, main nations like Nicaragua and the Solomon Islands to sever ties with Taiwan. Since 2016, 10 of Taiwan’s diplomatic allies have switched to acknowledge the Individuals’s Republic of China as a substitute.

Whereas navy techniques and financial statecraft have garnered a lot of the world’s consideration, there was little dialogue about how China leverages cultural and ethnic connections with Taiwan to attain its political targets. 

Taiwan has deep cultural ties to China; each share comparable languages and dialects, traditions, festivals, and values. Till not too long ago, Taiwan’s formal schooling system relied closely on Chinese language literature, that includes basic texts that promote Confucian values, in addition to programs on Chinese language historical past and geography. It’s unsurprising, then, that students have discovered Taiwanese residents proceed to treat Chinese language tradition as an integral half of what is taken into account genuine Taiwanese tradition, regardless of escalating tensions throughout the strait.

In contrast to navy and financial approaches, the place operations, incentives, and impacts are more readily detectable, the softer, cultural method based mostly on commonalities gives Beijing an various instrument to affect Taiwanese residents. A long time of analysis on social id principle reveal that cultural closeness and familiarity strengthen in-group cohesion. In follow, this means that emphasizing cultural connections may make Taiwanese residents much less delicate to the assorted types of threats posed by China. This method additionally displays the philosophy of the Chinese language strategist Solar Tzu, who said, “The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

Examples of this strategy will be seen on the flip of the new 12 months. On January 1, the Individuals’s Liberation Military’s Jap Theater Command launched a New 12 months’s video that includes the track “Chinese People” (中國人). The video was rigorously tailor-made for the Taiwanese public, utilizing conventional Chinese language characters in its subtitles quite than the simplified model generally utilized in China. The track is well-known in Taiwan, as it’s a basic by Andy Lau, who not too long ago carried out it during a live performance in Taipei. Along with clips of PLA jets and naval vessels, the video additionally deliberately included clips of Chinese language college students visiting Taipei to increase its appeal. 

This isn’t the primary time the Jap Theater Command has relied closely on cultural similarities to affect people in Taiwan. Within the New 12 months’s video of 2024, it rewrote a track broadly fashionable in Taiwan to convey the message, “Reunification is Winning.” (回家才贏). No different Chinese language Theater Command uploaded comparable videos.

Such cultural-themed propaganda is unlikely to appeal to the bulk of Taiwan’s citizenry. As of this writing, the video titled “Chinese People” has garnered solely 5,500 views. In line with analysis by Nationwide ChengChi College in Taiwan, solely 2.2 p.c of residents establish as “Chinese only,” whereas the bulk (64.3 p.c) think about themselves Taiwanese. 

Nevertheless, the shortage of clear affect from such videos doesn’t counsel that such issues are overblown; it might merely point out that Beijing must refine its messaging and invest more time in crafting narratives that resonate with the public in Taiwan. One innovation Beijing may experiment with is infusing cultural operations alongside different current techniques. 

The “Chinese People” video from the Jap Theater Command is clearly an instance of a mixture of navy and cultural components. It’s affordable to imagine that more refined operations incorporating cultural components will emerge within the close to future. At present, the Chinese language app TikTok boasts a consumer base of 5.65 million in Taiwan, which is quickly growing. Such apps and different social media platforms are doubtless to supply the required channels for these operations to gain traction.

For Taiwan, countering cultural operations and safeguarding its democracy requires the next important actions. First, it’s important to establish susceptible populations which may be prone to such operations. Methods to reinforce media literacy within these teams will be carried out with the help of native NGOs. 

Second, Taiwan ought to harness its burgeoning cultural id by embracing its journey of democratization and emphasizing its variations from China’s political system, significantly in values resembling respect for democracy, the rule of law, freedom of speech, and human rights. Collective achievements, resembling successful the current World Baseball Softball Confederation (WBSC) Premier12 championship, can additional solidify this id. 

Within the context of nearer Taiwan-U.S. relations, it is important to develop past navy and financial cooperation to incorporate more people-to-people exchanges. These interactions can help foster new cultures, shared identities, and collective recollections, forming a sturdy basis for a international alliance in opposition to authoritarianism.