Taiwanese Democracy Under Threat: Impact and Limit of Chinese Military Coercion

Abstract

S INCE 1994, China has launched a series of military exercises to demonOstrate its resolve to safeguard territorial integrity and to intimidate into abandoning any attempts to create either Chinas or China and one Taiwan through its pragmatic diplomacy. After Taiwanese president Lee Tenghui visited his alma mater, Cornell University, in June last year, China took more drastic military actions to indicate to that its toleration of any attempts to split national territory was wearing thin. Failure of military exercises to generate the desired intimidating effect only galvanized China to resort to more reckless military actions, culminating in launching missiles at targets dangerously close to Taiwan's two main key harbors in the north and in the south one week before the Taiwanese voters directly elected a president for the first time in the country's history. Chinese military brinkmanship instantly heightened tensions in the Strait of Taiwan, which caused many countries in the region, including Singapore, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, and Australia, to worry about its war propensity. The military action also prompted the U.S. to deploy two aircraft carrier battle groups in the vicinity of as a precaution against a potential military conflict between and China. What prompted China to resort to military coercion? What objectives did it seek to achieve? To what extent has it achieved its goals? To measure China's success or failure in achieving its goals, one has to ask the following question: To what extent has Chinese military coercion succeeded in influencing Taiwanese public opinion, political parties, and political processes to force that government to abandon or modify its diplomatic efforts to carve out a separate national identity in the international community and to accelerate national unification? Literature on coercive diplomacy has identified the following factors as conducive to a successful application of coercion to achieve political goals: motivation of the disputants, quality of leadership, articulation of precise terms for settlement, generation of a strong sense of urgency in the adversary to comply, international support, and confrontation with the adversary with the specter of unacceptable consequences that will result from further escalation of