Pod Insights If You're Listening Will Xi Jinping cross the Taiwan Strait? About this episode For decades, Beijing has pursued a simple strategy towards Taiwan: the carrot and the stick. The stick comes in the form of military drills, missile launches, and increasingly aggressive displays of force designed to remind Taiwan of China's power. The carrot is soft diplomacy: business opportunities, cultural exchanges, economic integration, and promises of prosperity under closer ties with the mainland.
The problem is that neither approach has delivered the outcome the Chinese Communist Party wanted. Since the 1990s, the number of people in Taiwan who identify as Chinese has collapsed, while a distinct Taiwanese identity has surged. That leaves Xi Jinping facing an uncomfortable reality. Taiwan won't come willingly, but a military invasion would be enormously costly. So what happens when both the carrot and the stick fail?
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0:37 Speaker 03 This podcast was produced on the lands of the Uwabikal and Gadigal people. On the Chinese island of Dandang, just off the coast of the city of Xiamen, there's an interesting little tourist trap called the Frontier Broadcast History Museum. The centrepiece of the museum is a giant horn, which, according to its plaque, is the world's largest loudspeaker.
1:04 Speaker 03 The volume on the speaker is set to like 1% power these days, but from the 1950s to the 1990s, pro-communist propaganda messages like this
1:17 Speaker 03 were being blasted with 20,000 watts of power through the horn out over the ocean.
1:26 Speaker 03 See, six kilometres over the water is an island that belongs to Taiwan, where there was another set of speakers blasting anti-communist propaganda straight back at them.
1:48 Speaker 03 The interesting thing is that the speakers were set up on the edge of the islands. But the Chinese speaker isn't on the edge of the island anymore. It hasn't been moved. It's just that a giant international airport has been built in front of it.
2:06 Speaker 03 The airport has cut the distance between the Communist Chinese island of Dandong and the Democratic Taiwanese island of Jinmen from 6 kilometres to 3 kilometres. Plus, China has built a giant new bridge across the harbour. They're calling it the Xiamen-Jinmen Bridge. And they'd like it to cross the border between the two sides and allow people to drive between them.
2:31 Speaker 04 Taiwan's government has called the bridge a national security risk and has never agreed to it. Despite that, China has gone ahead with building a portion of the bridge on its side.
2:40 Speaker 03 The new bridge and airport are meant to open later this year. And if Chinese President Xi Jinping attends the opening ceremony, there's one thing that's likely to really annoy him. Despite reclaiming land to halve the physical gap between China and Taiwan, and building half a bridge that's meant to link the two sides, the unification of Taiwan and China seems just as far away a possibility as it was back in the days when they were blasting propaganda at each other over the ocean.
3:13 Speaker 04 It's part of Beijing's efforts to integrate China and Taiwan in various ways, with the ultimate goal of bringing Taiwan under its control.
3:28 Speaker 03 As we've been discussing over the last few episodes of this series, it's a strong ambition of Xi Jinping to bring Taiwan under Beijing's control while he's in office. How does he plan to achieve this? Well, for a long time, he's been using two methods: the stick and the carrot. The stick is military threats, basically encircling Taiwan with the Chinese navy, firing missiles into the sea nearby, that kind of thing. While the carrot is soft diplomacy, where Xi tries to convince the people of Taiwan to voluntarily submit to Beijing's control. So today, we're going to look at the two methods: the stick and then the carrot, and
4:11 Speaker 03 see whether either of them are working. I'm Matt Bevan, and this is If You're Listening.
4:22 Speaker 03 If you want to attend Cornell University in upstate New York, there's an unusual requirement that all incoming students need to meet. It takes place in one of the university's pools.
4:34 Speaker 05 The test consists of jumping feet-first into the deep end, continuously swimming 75 yards and ending in the shallow end.
4:40 Speaker 03 Completing this test is a requirement of entry at the Ivy League school.
4:45 Speaker 05 We are not looking for the next Michael Phelps here. Can you fall in water over your head, gain composure and swim to safety?
4:50 Speaker 03 So every Cornell alumnus has completed this test. And it's really quite an impressive list of people. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Christopher Reeve, Bill Maher, Bill Nye, Ann Coulter, 23 Nobel laureates and two presidents of Taiwan. Here's one of them, visiting his alma mater in 1995.
5:11 Speaker 06 Finally, after 27 long years, I am back in Isaku.
5:20 Speaker 03 Lee Dung Hui had been appointed president of Taiwan by the Undemocratic National Assembly in 1988 and then a few years later announced the end of the nationalist military dictatorship and a transition to democracy.
5:34 Speaker 06 My years at Cornell from 1965 to 1968 made an indelible impression on me. I returned to my former land, determined to make my contribution toward achieving full democracy for our society.
5:58 Speaker 03 So this was 1995. The first democratic presidential election had been scheduled for the following year. Lee Dung Hui was planning to run as a candidate and he explained why to his fellow Cornell alumni.
6:13 Speaker 06 Whatever I have done as president of my nation.
6:19 Speaker 06 I have done with the people in my heart.
6:23 Speaker 03 Now, generally, a foreign leader visiting America to speak at a college reunion wouldn't be a big deal. In fact, happens pretty frequently without anyone paying all that much attention. But in the case of President Lee speaking at Cornell in 1995, it drew quite a bit of attention indeed. And that's because for the president of Taiwan to visit the US requires a visa, which again, that doesn't feel like a particularly big deal. But to China, the existence of this visa meant that the US was not only recognizing Taiwan as a separate entity from China, but that it had a legitimate president. And
7:03 Speaker 03 they were quite pissed by this. So they decided to get out the big stick to intimidate the Taiwanese. On Chinese TV, it was announced that the military would start firing missiles into the sea near Taiwan.
7:17 Speaker 07 This poker-faced announcement on China's state-run national television prompted the new crisis in relations across the Taiwan Strait.
7:26 Speaker 03 Over the following month, the Chinese Communist Party continued to wield their stick and sent the Chinese army to conduct missile artillery and naval drills in the Taiwan Strait.
7:37 Speaker 05 China's move is clearly in retaliation for Taiwan's increasing assertiveness in international affairs.
7:43 Speaker 03 Watching all this unfold, the Republican-controlled US Congress decided to ramp things up and annoy Beijing even more. They held a special event honoring the then 97-year-old widow of the former Taiwanese dictator, Chiang Kai-shek.
8:00 Speaker 07 It is an honor for us to have you here, Madame Chiang. We thank you for giving us the opportunity to be present with a gracious and great leader, to have a sense of touching history by having you here.
8:21 Speaker 03 Needless to say, this also didn't go down well with the Chinese. And the Clinton administration became increasingly concerned that China might attempt an invasion of Taiwan.
8:31 Speaker 03 So Clinton sent a very strong signal to China to not do that.
8:36 Speaker 07 We are combining diplomacy with a show of force. America has the best damn navy in the world, and no one should ever forget that.
8:46 Speaker 03 The two battle groups can keep planes in the air 24 hours a day, close enough to hit Chinese forces now massed in the Taiwan Strait should their war games become a real invasion. By the time the Chinese President Jiang Zemin visited New York for the UN General Assembly a few months later, tensions were extremely high. Anti-Chinese protesters marched on the streets of Manhattan. We are Taiwanese!
9:12 Speaker 05 We are Taiwanese! Taiwan independence!
9:16 Speaker 03 Taiwan independence! US President Bill Clinton organised a meeting with President Jiang, but the choice of venue only made things worse. China refused to hold the talks in the New York Public Library because of a human rights exhibit which included the Tiananmen Square massacre. Clinton and Jiang did eventually manage to meet, but there was no agreement to back down. The first Taiwanese democratic presidential election was approaching, and China was not happy about it. They weren't just going to put their stick away and let it happen. The Chinese military is using these exercises to inflame nationalist feelings at home and send an ominous warning to Taiwanese voters to forget about independence.
10:01 Speaker 03 On the mainland, Chinese civilians weren't concerned about the prospect of war.
10:06 Speaker 04 I'm not worried at all. China has such strong military power. What are we afraid of? When Li Danhui wants independence, we'll destroy him.
10:14 Speaker 03 In Taiwan, it was a different story. The situation was getting genuinely terrifying, and many Taiwanese people booked flights to the US and Canada. The Taipei stock market plunged. Since China's first round of missiles pounded the waters off Taiwan last July, Taiwanese companies have been shaking in their boots. There was serious concern that a war between the US and China may begin over Taiwan. With so much military hardware now concentrated around Taiwan, one fear is that a
10:45 Speaker 07 misdirected missile or some other mishap could trigger a confrontation which nobody had reckoned on.
10:50 Speaker 03 The message from China to the Taiwanese people was clear: don't vote in the presidential election if you know what's good for you. They feared that a successful election in Taiwan would set an uncomfortable precedent.
11:03 Speaker 07 Never before have the people of Taiwan or in any part of China been able to choose their leader in a free election.
11:10 Speaker 03 When the election day arrived, the people of Taiwan ignored the threats of being hit with China's stick and voted in enormous numbers.
11:19 Speaker 07 Turnout to the polls was high, an unfamiliar process even for President Lee Dong Hui and his wife.
11:25 Speaker 03 President Lee won in a landslide.
11:28 Speaker 07 With this result, Taiwanese voters have delivered a message of defiance to Beijing, and the man who has brought their island into the international spotlight is now emerging from party headquarters to claim victory.
11:40 Speaker 03 Taiwanese MP Paris Jang said the massive turnout was a clear rebuke to Beijing's threats. The people give our reply to China and hope they understand they won't try another military provocation once again in the years to come or in the months to come. But I'm afraid that China may not get that message. At his inauguration, President Lee made it clear that the thing the authoritarian government in Beijing feared most had happened. We have already proved eloquently that the Chinese people are capable of practicing democracy. It was an incredible historic moment.
12:21 Speaker 03 Taiwan did what the mainland explicitly told them not to do, and they got away with it. There was no invasion, there was no war. Beijing had tried the stick, and it had failed. Perhaps they would need to switch to the carrot.
12:46 Speaker 03 The Chinese province closest to Taiwan, right across the strait, is Fujian. With Taiwan just 200 kilometres in that direction, this part of China is waiting For the day when its Taiwanese compatriots can cross that stretch of water on a ferry. At the time of the 1996 Taiwan presidential election, the deputy secretary of the Communist Party in Fujian Province was an ambitious man in his mid-forties named Shi Jinping. It's here Mr. C spent the longest time, building his political career over a period of seventeen years. While the central government in Beijing tried to scare Taiwan into submission with the stick, Shi Jinping's government in Fujian was trying the carrot method,
13:29 Speaker 03 attempting to create economic ties across the strait by luring in Taiwanese business and investment. By night, the city of Xiamen becomes karaoke heaven for Taiwanese businessmen. By day, it's a cheap manufacturing centre in a corner of the world's biggest market, a beacon to overseas Chinese investors who feel certain China will never attack its own people. One of his responsibilities as a senior Fujian government official was to look after Meizhou Island, birthplace of the goddess Mazu.
14:02 Speaker 01 On Meizhou Island of southern China, believers come from far and wide to celebrate the birthday a thousand years ago of Mazu, goddess of the sea and queen of heaven.
14:14 Speaker 03 Legends say that Mazu could predict stormy weather and protect fishermen in the Taiwan Strait from harm. That made her quite a big deal on both sides of the strait.
14:27 Speaker 01 She's worshipped by tens of millions of Chinese who pray for wealth, success and safekeeping.
14:35 Speaker 03 Now, this is an interesting challenge for a member of the Chinese Communist Party. The party is explicitly atheist and has a history of religious persecution.
14:45 Speaker 07 Thirty years ago, all churches in China were closed.
14:48 Speaker 03 The Communist Party spent decades destroying religious practices across the territory it controlled. The Chinese sought to wipe out.
14:55 Speaker 02 Tibet's religion, its customs, its civilization.
14:59 Speaker 03 Religious practices were destroyed or driven underground, but not in Taiwan.
15:04 Speaker 04 Taiwanese worshippers hold their own celebrations for Mazu's birthday. Free from mainland religious constraints, Taiwanese worshippers are more zealous than their mainland compatriots.
15:16 Speaker 03 Two thirds of the Taiwanese population are believers in Mazu. But if they wanted to visit the temple where she was born on Meijiu Island in the 1990s, they had to go through quite a rigmarole.
15:28 Speaker 04 There are no direct communications or transportation links between the two sides, so to get here, pilgrims have to first arrive in a neutral territory before journeying on to the mainland.
15:41 Speaker 03 Xi Jinping and his colleagues in Fujian saw this as a potential opportunity to improve relations between Taiwan and the mainland. They were willing to offer the people of Taiwan a carrot. Mazu worship was reclassified by the central government from being a religion to being cultural heritage, which is a bureaucratic way of saying that the Communist Party decided that it was okay. The government funded the rebuilding of Mazu's temple, which had been destroyed decades earlier. She then championed an expansion of the complex, and to celebrate, sent a golden statue of Mazu from the temple to Taiwan for a nationwide tour.
16:25 Speaker 03 She was carried on foot all across Taiwan before returning home to Meijiu Island.
16:33 Speaker 03 The idea was to promote the shared ancestry and culture between people on both sides of the strait.
16:42 Speaker 03 For Xi Jinping, this new carrot method, using soft diplomacy to win over the hearts and minds of the Taiwanese people, seemed to be working. Economic investment between the two sides was increasing. According to Chinese government data, by 2001, Fujian was home to over 4,000 Taiwan-funded projects valued at more than $7 billion.
17:06 Speaker 03 Since Xi Jinping became president of China, he's continued to use this carrot strategy, which worked so well for him in Fujian, but on a much larger scale with the resources of the entire central government.
17:19 Speaker 00 Plans to improve transportation corridors and provide a better business environment. There are plans to expand social and cultural exchanges between Fujian province and Taiwan. And Beijing says it represents a new effort to advance peaceful reunification.
17:35 Speaker 03 She had a number of carrots in his arsenal. He invested in large infrastructure projects. He launched social programs and offered generous business incentives. He continued to invest heavily in the goddess Mazu. Despite inconvenience, people have come to celebrate the anniversary of Mazu's ascension to heaven. Crowd is packed, shoulder to shoulder. Everyone is here to watch the procession and pray for peace. Beijing pays leaders of Mazu temples in Taiwan. Around 50 bucks per pilgrim, they convince to travel to the mainland, with a bonus if they send more than 100 people. Once pilgrims step off the plane or ferry, all their expenses are covered by the Chinese government. They're greeted with banners
18:19 Speaker 03 covered in slogans about cross-strait peace and unity. They're encouraged to join up to the Chinese social media service WeChat and get put in group chats with tour guides and other pilgrims. Woven into the program between the incense offerings and the dragon dancers are addresses from Communist Party officials about shared identity and shared destiny. After they return home to Taiwan, the messages they get on those WeChat group chats become increasingly political, criticizing the pro-independence DPP party and praising the more China-friendly KMT. The thing is, these WeChat messages weren't particularly effective. In the 2024 election,
19:02 Speaker 03 the DPP won an unprecedented third consecutive presidential term. Taiwan has elected the ruling party's candidate, William Lai. Beijing had paid The vote as a choice between war and peace, labelling him a dangerous separatist. The defeat of the China-friendly KMT was a clear sign to Beijing that the possibility of a peaceful unification with Taiwan was slipping away. The problem for Xi Jinping is that the sentiment of the Taiwanese people towards the mainland has changed a lot since the 1990s. Every year, people in Taiwan are polled about whether they primarily identify as Taiwanese, Chinese, or both.
19:46 Speaker 03 Before President Lee spoke at Cornell University that day in 1995, about a quarter of people in Taiwan saw themselves as Chinese, another quarter said Taiwanese, and half the population said both. The proportion who see themselves as primarily Chinese has since collapsed to around 2% or 3%. About 30% of people see themselves as both Taiwanese and Chinese. More than 60% of people now say that they are just Taiwanese. None of Xi Jinping's carrots have brought them any closer. It's not like Xi Jinping has completely abandoned the stick method, but that doesn't
20:30 Speaker 03 seem to be working for him either.
20:33 Speaker 00 China wants Taiwan to know it's getting ready. Propaganda videos show a fierce fighting force on the move in its bid to take Taiwan back.
20:46 Speaker 03 The people of Taiwan have been living with China's threatening stick waving since the 90s, so they don't take it particularly seriously anymore. People in Taipei have seen it all before. If nothing happens, then nothing happens. There's nothing we can do to control it, we just get used to it. Everything Xi Jinping has done in his efforts to bring Taiwan under his control, the Mazu tours, the blockade drills, the half-built bridge between Xiamen and Jinmen Island, have been exactly as effective as the big horn-shaped speaker blasting propaganda across the water.
21:20 Speaker 05 Reading the news in Australia... might think there's a constant sense of panic here in Taiwan. But really, everyday life is very normal.
21:28 Speaker 03 So the carrot isn't working. Brandishing the stick threateningly isn't working either, which is good news on the surface. But what if China actually used the stick rather than just waving it around? For years, military experts have been talking about 2027 being a deadline for the Chinese military.
21:48 Speaker 05 The timeframe for an assault on Taiwan, I would put it at 2025 to 2027. And this is largely dependent on when I think Xi Jinping can be confident that his military can do this.
22:00 Speaker 03 And the date that most analysts point to is 2027. That is the date that Xi Jinping has given his military to have the ability to do it. According to the CIA, China no longer has a fixed timeline for achieving unification with Taiwan. Not for 2027 or any year in the near future. Experts are now saying that it's unlikely to happen this decade. Xi Jinping has recently purged basically the entire senior leadership of the Chinese military. Perhaps it's an effort to protect himself from a potential leadership coup, but it's kind of unclear. What is clear is that the military modernization efforts appear to be in disarray. The CIA now says that Beijing hopes to get the job done by 2049,
22:45 Speaker 03 which is the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party's victory over Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists in the Chinese Civil War. But that's more than two decades away. Xi Jinping will be nearly 96 by then. The window for him to cement his legacy as the leader who unified Taiwan with the mainland will have closed.
23:11 Speaker 03 At the beginning of this four-part series, we were talking about how Xi Jinping has been wasting enormous amounts of time, money and resources, planning for a war that he doesn't have to fight. He's spent money trying to reach Taiwan diplomatically. He's spent money beefing up the Chinese military. He's also spent hundreds of billions of dollars trying to make sure that China could survive a war with the United States over Taiwan. If he decides to give up on trying to take control of Taiwan, all of that would have been wasted. Then again, it'd also mean that he could focus on improving the standard of living for the people he already controls.
23:53 Speaker 03 War or peace, it's really just up to him.
24:05 Speaker 03 This episode of If You're Listening was written by Adair Sheppard and me, Matt Bevan. Supervising producer is Cara Jensen-McKinn. It's produced by Pat Sunderland and Adair Sheppard. Now, Adair is a little bit angry with me and Cara because we cut out her favourite thing from this episode. A story about an ancient Chinese cultural practice that was eradicated from the mainland, but maintained on Taiwan. It involves men tying large weights to their genitals. So, instead of squashing it into this episode, we're going to spend a bit of extra time exploring it with an ABC reporter who gave it a try. That's coming up on Tuesday. I'll see you then.
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