Some of the Chinese government’s efforts became mired in red tape, were exposed as veiled indoctrination efforts or were hijacked by people in Taiwan who collaborated only out of opportunism. But also, Beijing itself has unwittingly forged a new brand of patriotism in Taiwan — to an extent that even the poll data I have cited cannot fully capture.
In 2015, President Xi Jinping of China told then-President Ma Ying-jeou of Taiwan: “No forces could separate us despite gusts of wind and rain and longtime isolation from each other, because we are brothers whose bones are broken but tendons are still connected, and we are a family whose blood is thicker than water.” The florid rhetoric could not mask the fact that the Chinese Communist Party’s so-called One China policy — generously backed by information warfare, a diplomatic campaign against Taiwan, the cultivation of a local pro-China lobby — is in fact an aggressive annexation policy. Beijing, despite itself, is only giving the people of Taiwan a raison d’être and a common cause to rally against its attempt to conquer them.
The people of Taiwan don’t just have more and more reason to keep their distance from China; now, they also have more opportunity to. This is partly because of the growing rivalry between the United States and China, which has prompted Washington to increase its support of Taiwan in various fields, from the military to the economy.
Taiwanese investment in mainland China, especially in traditional industries such as footwear manufacturing, had dropped after the global financial crisis in 2008. But the trade war waged by President Trump has caused global supply chains to reorganize and relocate, especially assembly lines for information and communications technologies.
During Mr. Ma’s tenure (2008–16), nearly 70 percent of Taiwan’s global foreign direct investment was in China; under the Tsai government, the figure has dropped to 43 percent. (These are my estimates, calculated from statistics from the two administrations’ official websites.) With the United States–China trade war, the reshoring of Taiwanese investment in Taiwan has hit a record. For the first 11 months of 2019, Taiwanese companies with business operations on both the island and the mainland invested $4.1 billion in China and $23.2 billion in Taiwan. This evolution doesn’t only mean that Taiwan’s economic dependence on China is decreasing; it means that this dependence is decreasing in favor of Taiwan’s growing economic investment back home.
