What Taiwan is learning from the war in Ukraine

Some 5,000 miles separate Taipei and Kyiv, but in Washington, the two embattled capitals seem almost geopolitical neighbors. Russia’s full-scale invasion of its neighbor in 2022 and Ukraine’s subsequent struggle to repel the invaders and reclaim lost territory has resonated in Taiwan, which sits in the looming shadow of China.

The increasingly assertive Asian superpower scoffs at the self-ruling island’s sense of sovereignty and can’t countenance the success of Taiwan’s democracy. Chinese President Xi Jinping has yoked his political legitimacy to Taiwan’s eventual “reunification,” describing it as a “historical inevitability.”

The prospect of Xi following in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s footsteps and attempting a land grab across the straits seems more likely than it once did. And Taiwan, with new infusions of U.S. military aid, is preparing more vigorously to head off the threat. For the Taiwanese public, the Russian invasion of Ukraine “has brought some perspective, some reality” to the dangers at their own doorstep, Alexander Tah-ray Yui, Taiwan’s de facto ambassador in Washington, told me.

Last year, Taiwan boosted its defense spending by some 14 percent from the previous budget. It has expanded the training period of the country’s compulsory military service from four months to one year. Like Ukraine, it is trying to develop its asymmetric warfare capabilities in the face of a far larger and more powerful aggressor. And its officials have also noted the sweeping whole-of-society involvement that has accompanied Ukraine’s defense, the “civic resiliency,” as Yui put it, that undergirds the bravery with which Ukraine’s forces defied the odds and staved off Russian conquest in the early months of the war.

“People will only help you if you help yourself,” said Yui, whom I interviewed in the historic Twin Oaks mansion that was once the residence of the Republic of China’s ambassadors in Washington before it was shuttered when the United States opted to formally recognize Beijing’s Communist government in 1979. “So that’s one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned from Ukraine.”

The situation is always tense across the Taiwan Strait, but tensions have spiked in recent weeks. China launched aggressive war games to coincide with the May inauguration of recently-elected Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te, a politician who is reviled as a “separatist” in Beijing, where Taiwan is still viewed as a renegade province. A drumbeat of rhetoric hostile to Taiwan followed, with China’s defense minister Dong Jun, speaking at a security forum in Singapore last month, casting Lai and his allies in his ruling Democratic Progressive Party as traitors to the Chinese people.

At that summit, Dong echoed China’s new talking point about Taiwan - that its leadership, along with its supporters in the United States, were pursuing “separation” from China in “incremental” fashion. Taiwan, which has styled itself the Republic of China since the 1949 takeover of the island by Nationalist forces fleeing the victorious Communists, has never formally declared independence from China and the bulk of its population would prefer to maintain the stable, if uneasy, status quo.

The country is not recognized by most of the United Nations’ member states and exists in a kind of diplomatic limbo - denied entrance into major international institutions yet also the source of great affection and concern among U.S. lawmakers and successive U.S. administrations. President Biden alone has authorized some 14 arms sales to Taiwan since taking office in 2021.

In the past three decades, Taiwan has also transformed into a prosperous, vibrant multiparty democracy wholly at odds with the political dispensation in Beijing. Recent polling found that some two-thirds of Taiwan’s population sees itself as primarily Taiwanese in identity, rather than Chinese - a reality that flies in the face of Chinese propaganda about Taiwan and its inhabitants being simply an extension of a greater Chinese nation.

“The more [the People’s Republic of China] tries to squash Taiwan’s internal freedom and our own sovereignty and insist that we are a ‘renegade province’ of theirs, the more actually they’re pushing us away,” Yui told me.

The Taiwanese envoy in Washington pointed to dwindling Taiwanese business investment in China, and a chill in cross-strait economic ties that has set in over the past decade. Yui said it’s better for the two countries to “prosper together,” but China “has to accept who we are, has to accept our existence and treat us accordingly.”

All the noises coming from Xi and the Communist Party elites clustered around him suggest Beijing has no interest in reconciling itself to the DPP in power in Taipei, and sees the growing American investment in Taiwan’s security as a provocative threat. Unlike the divisive debate over funding for Ukraine, there have yet to be partisan disagreements in Congress over support for Taiwan, and Yui expressed gratitude to both Democrats and Republicans for their continued embrace of Taiwan’s cause.

In Washington, some wonks have worried that the United States’ extensive backing of Ukraine’s war effort has hamstrung its ability to bolster Taiwan’s defense. Some lawmakers have argued that the United States should focus principally on warding against Chinese expansionism, even if that means allowing Russia to consolidate its illegal gains in Ukraine.

Yui rejected the necessity of such a trade-off. “The U.S. is the leading power in the world,” he said, adding that it “still has the capability to deal with different scenarios, different theaters and different challenges.”

Taiwan’s survival - and the ability to thwart or, more accurately, deter a Chinese invasion - has huge international implications. Yui summoned the principles of a rules-based order, of the importance that might should never make right. He also acknowledged the enormous economic stakes: As the world’s leading producer of super-advanced semiconductors, Taiwan is a critical cog in the global economy and at the heart of myriad world-spanning supply chains.

The war in Ukraine was disruptive for food and energy prices in countries far away from Eastern Europe, but that turbulence may pale compared with the chaos unleashed by a Chinese invasion. “A conflict in the Indo-Pacific will be a much uglier scenario,” Yui said.

To that end, he acknowledged that Taiwan and its allies must build up a set of fortifications, defensive capabilities and diplomatic understandings elsewhere that disincentivizes Beijing from making the kind of move the Kremlin did in 2022.

“We have to make sure that whenever Xi Jinping wakes up every day,” Yui concluded, “he looks in the mirror and says, ‘I don’t think today is the day.’”