![]() These analogies mislead more than they illuminate. and Chinese supply chains (and the supply chains that connect those countries) depend on Taiwanese production.Īs the Cold War rhetoric has heated up, historical metaphors have crept into the public discourse about Taiwan: perhaps its status resembles Berlin, or threatens to escalate to that of the international crisis around Cuba in 1962. Taiwan produces more than half of the world’s semiconductors, which are used in everything from cars and iPhones to the Chinese missiles pointed at the island. Amid global supply shortages, people around the world abruptly realized Taiwan’s significance to semiconductor manufacturing. Taiwan is one of the most important nodes in this economic relationship-a reality that was underscored as the pandemic set in. The Soviet Union was not completely cut off from the capitalist world-it depended, for example, on grain imports from the West-but China and the United States are far more interdependent. But the economic links between China and the United States are markedly different from the relations between the Soviet Union and the West during the twentieth century. The long-standing possibility of military conflict, however unlikely in the short term, has contributed to a glut of recent commentary claiming we are hurtling toward a confrontation between two superpowers-a new Cold War. Although Taiwan’s economy is deeply integrated with China’s-China receives close to 44 percent of Taiwanese exports-it depends on the military backing of the United States to deter Chinese territorial ambitions. There is perhaps no other country so wedged between the United States and China today. A December 2021 poll by the Election Study Center at National Chengchi University shows that only 2.8 percent of the island’s residents consider themselves to be Chinese, and only 1.4 percent are in favor of immediate unification with China. ![]() Although roughly 2 percent of the population is Indigenous, and the majority is Han, descended from waves of migration over the past 400 years, the current population increasingly identifies as Taiwanese rather than Chinese. ![]() Today, because of the victories of popular movements in the 1980s and 1990s, Taiwan is a flourishing democracy ruled by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).Ĭhina has long claimed that Taiwan is part of its integral territory, though the last time the same polity controlled both Taiwan and China was in 1895, before Japanese colonial rule. ![]() The KMT claimed Taiwan was quintessentially Chinese and sought to paper over the fifty-year Japanese colonial period. From 1949 to 1987, the KMT ruled by martial law-a right-wing dictatorship propped up by the United States to counter China. The island fell to the rule of the Kuomintang (KMT) when Nationalist forces fled there following their defeat at the hands of the Communist Party during the Chinese Civil War. The historical roots of the conflict over Taiwan are fairly well known. This article is part of a forum, “ A New Cold War?” published in our spring issue on China.Īs tensions between the United States and China have escalated in recent years, Taiwan has once again become a place of growing international concern. Visitors look at a painting at the Guningtou Battle Museum in Taiwan that commemerates the 1949 battle over Kinmen in the Taiwan Strait. Cold War metaphors have crept into the public discourse about Taiwan.
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