What is Taiwan’s China policy? Unpacking a mystery

Abstract

This study seeks to clarify the confusion over Taiwan’s mainland China policy since 2016. A popular view suggests that Tsai Ing-wen’s policy, which incorporated both deterrence and cooperation, was based on a hedging approach. This characterization is misguided, as hedging rests on the uncertainty of the threat posed by mainland China. However, after 2016, Taiwan has viewed Beijing as a clear threat to its security. Another view suggests that Tsai’s government shifted toward a balancing approach. Yet, this balancing perspective overlooks Taiwan’s continuous and close economic ties with mainland China, which contradict structural realism’s stance that balancing tends to push rival parties toward economic decoupling. With this in mind, this article proposes an new dual-track perspective to argue that Taiwan’s post-2016 policy has, in fact, embraced a parallel approach that combines hard balancing with economic cooperation toward mainland China. This dual-track approach seeks to maximize Taiwan’s security through hard balancing and aggregate power via trade gains, and is therefore distinctive from both the hedging approach and the balancing approach. Although both hedging and dual-track approaches incorporate elements of deterrence and cooperation, their assumptions, motives, and behaviors are different. While the hedging approach is premised on the uncertainty of the threat posed by mainland China, the dual-track approach rests on the certainty of such a threat. While the hedging approach pursues muted and limited balancing to manage the security dilemma with mainland China, the dual-track approach pursues hard balancing. While the cooperation element of hedging seeks to build mutual trust with Beijing, the dual-track approach only seeks to use cooperation to profit from China’s rise.