Letter from Taipei: Why Taiwan Remains Such a Surreal Place

I’ve been in Taipei for the past week, reacquainting myself with a city that I first fell in love with back in 1989 when I came here right out of high school to study Mandarin. Living in Taipei back then was a somewhat surreal experience. People were still hurting from nearly four decades of martial law that led to many of the massive societal cleavages the nation still grapples with today.

But it was also a time of great hope. The first green shoots of pluralism started to appear in the 1990 presidential election, paving the way for what would eventually become one of Asia’s most vibrant democracies.

People had a lot of mixed feelings back then. They were eager to shake off the past and excited to embrace a more open society while still anxious about the island’s uncertain future in the shadow of its rival across the Taiwan Strait.

Fast forward 35 years, and that same awkward mix of optimism and pessimism still defines Taiwan, albeit under very different circumstances.?

That sense of surrealness I felt back in the late 80s came rushing back when we learned on Monday that China, for the first time, surrounded the island in a mock blockade. By any measure, this week’s joint exercise by the Chinese Navy, Air Force, and Coast Guard was massive in scale.

The PLA Eastern Theater Command dispatched more than three dozen ships, including a full aircraft carrier strike group, along with 153 PLA fighter jets. Taiwan aviation authorities detected at least 111 crossings into its official air space on Monday, the most ever recorded in a single day.

While all that was happening in the air and at sea, Chinese cyber forces simultaneously pounded Taiwan with twice the average number of daily attempted intrusions, according to military officials in Taipei.

Yet back in Taipei, everyday life was totally unfazed. No one seemed to pay much attention to what China was doing or expressed much concern.

I struck up dozens of conversations with people on the street to ask them what they thought, and they all, without exception, responded with a blasé attitude of “Well, it is what it is.”

Honestly, I find this attitude totally baffling — reminding me, again, why Taiwan is such a surreal place.

They are literally facing an existential threat to the way of life they fought so hard to build over the past half-century, and yet, as China ramps up its military challenge, the public response tends to be lackluster.

Taiwan spends a modest 2.2% of GDP on defense, less than Singapore and South Korea. Throughout the 2010s, Taiwan repeatedly reduced its mandatory military service, eventually requiring men to serve just four months. It was only this year that the military service requirement was bumped back up to twelve months.?

Underlying the Taiwan public’s seeming indifference to their own defense is the confidence that if China does one day launch a full-scale invasion of the island, the United States will be there to protect them. Sure, to some degree, that’s understandable. After all, Joe Biden repeatedly and definitively said that the U.S. would intervene if China attacked Taiwan, breaking from the long-held U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity.

But there’s good reason why Taiwan’s leaders and its people probably shouldn’t invest too much in Biden’s pledges. The U.S. today is a fractured society overflowing with misinformation, to the point where it’s effectively impossible to foster a national consensus on any issue, much less one that would potentially lead to the death of thousands of U.S. forces fighting a war to defend an island far away in Asia that most Americans can’t find on a map.

So, I leave this special place with some unsolicited advice to President Lai Ching-te. If you want to maintain Taiwan’s autonomy, then you are going to have to start a much more sober conversation with your people about the reality of the threat from China and what’s needed to defend Taiwan.?