Is Taiwan Overly Anxious About the US Election?

Across the Pacific, a sense of anxiety lingers as many Taiwanese worry over how this year’s election of the United States president will affect them. The main concern is that warming relations with the US can stand to be disrupted if a different president enters the White House.

Public discourse in Taiwan is turning heated. Talking about the US presidential election is becoming controversial. Podcasters and journalists have been receiving harassment from their Taiwanese audience over the past weeks over their opinions on US politics.

Understandably, people in Taiwan are concerned with how their lives will be affected, especially with controversial topics such as opening up import of particular US pork and beef products, and defense-related issues at play. But should the level of anxiety be this high for an election that most in Taiwan have no vote in?

Taiwan’s unusual support of Trump

Even though Trump has been criticized domestically in the US for undermining US credibility abroad and taking an unilateral approach to diplomacy, Taiwanese are surprisingly supportive of Trump.

According to a poll, 42% of Taiwanese hope that Trump wins in the 2020 election, the highest of seven countries polled in the Asia-pacific region.

Trump has been successful in “Winning Hearts And Minds In Taiwan,” according to NPR. From answering Taiwan President Tsai’s phone call in 2016 to sending in two high-level officials from the US government in 2020, Trump scored points with people in Taiwan by appearing to favor Taiwan.

A total of nine high-profile arms sales of fighter jets, tanks, and munitions to Taiwan by the US government since 2019 are seen as strong support for Taiwan’s defense. These arms sales were used as campaign materials ahead of Taiwan’s 2020 election. Lawmakers of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), such as Wang Ting-yu, head of the Legislative Yuan Committee on Foreign Affairs and National Security, have historically welcomed Washington’s headstrong policy towards Beijing under Trump.

These substantive advances to US-Taiwan relations are likely reasons why many in Taiwan approve of Trump. 

Taiwan’s worry over a Biden presidency

In contrast, Taiwan seems much less friendly towards Biden, who has to play opposition against a favorably viewed Trump and who comes from a party that traditionally has been perceived to be more reluctant to support Taiwan.

In Taiwan, there is fear that, as the US president, Biden will reverse course on four years of Trump’s foreign policy and attempt to reconcile with Beijing, at the expense of Taipei.

This assumption however, is contested. Yang Kuang-shun, a co-founder of US-Taiwan Watch, highlighted that though Biden has been historically cautious when speaking on Taiwan, voting record has shown strong support for Taiwan related laws, including the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 (TRA), passed when he was a senator. 

“Biden’s past positions on Taiwan’s status and future may not be encouraging to many Taiwanese. Nevertheless, Biden has shown his commitment to the TRA throughout his career with the legislation he introduced or cosponsored,” Yang wrote in March. 

Lai I-chung, president of Prospect Foundation, a Taipei-based think tank, also agrees. “Whether Biden or Trump gets elected, US’s hardline policy towards China and support for Taiwan will not change, because this is one of the few issues that enjoy a bi-partisan consensus in the US,” he wrote in a Voice Tank article in October. 

At the same time, Lai also argues that a Biden Presidency would neither be more “Pro-Taiwan” nor “harder on China” than the Trump Administration. 

Team Biden, Team Trump, Democrats, and Republicans

A deeper look at the team behind each campaign’s national security team and party platform would suggest that the difference between the two candidates’ prospective is probably narrower than what is perceived.

On the Republican side, there are several staunch longtime supporters of Taiwan. Republicans in the senate such as Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, Cory Gardner, and Tom Cotton, and Republicans in the House of Representative such as Steve Chabot and Ted Yoho are amongst some of the strongest supporters of Taiwan. 

And in the White House under Trump, Taiwan has seen several pro-Taiwan policymakers being put into positions of importance. Amongst them are Randy Schriver, who was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs, and Matt Pottinger, now the Deputy National Security Advisor. Even controversial figures such as John Bolton and Steve Bannon were strong critics of the Chinese Communist Party. 

High-profile Republicans outside the administration, some of which advocated a more traditional, non confrontational approach towards Beijing, are beginning to support closer relations with Taiwan. For example, Richard Haass, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, switched in September his position on Taiwan, going from warning against taking part in “The Looming Taiwan Crisis” or going “To the Brink With China” to now declaring that “American Support for Taiwan Must Be Unambiguous.”

There is no lack of supporters of Taiwan on the Democrat side either, with Senator Robert Menendez and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi representing stalwart bipartisan support that has increasingly gelled amongst democrats over the past years. 

The people who would likely occupy senior positions in a Biden Presidency are in no way “panda huggers,” despite advocating for a more rational US policy towards China. Kurt Campbell, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Asia and the Pacific during the Clinton Administration during the 1996 Taiwan Strait Crisis, co-wrote with Biden Advisor Jake Sullivan in late 2019 detailing “How America Can Both Challenge and Coexist With China.” 

In the article, Sullivan and Campbell labeled the need to move beyond past previous US policy of engagement and leniency towards Beijing. 

A more modern US policy on China would move past “the avoidance of friction in the service of positive ties” when competing China. And, implicitly referring to Taiwan, the two advocate that the US should “avoid a tendency that was all too common during the Cold War: to see third countries only in terms of their relationship to a rival government,” instead advocating that a relationship with an unnamed “third countries” should be more based on value rather than pragmatic reasons.

“It would be misguided to build a neo-containment policy on the premise that the current Chinese state will eventually collapse, or with that as the objective,” Campbell and Sullivan wrote, rejecting the theory, often supported by figures such as Steve Bannon and his close associate Guo Wengui, as well as the right-wing Falun Gong media network Epoch Times, that China under the CCP will inevitably collapse.

Campbell was also reviewed alongside Ely Ratner, Deputy National Security Advisor during Biden’s Vice Presidency from 2015 to 2017, in an earlier 2018 article on Foreign Affairs on what had and had not worked as the US attempted to engage with China. 

“Washington now faces its most dynamic and formidable competitor in modern history. Getting this challenge right will require doing away with the hopeful thinking that has long characterized the United States’ approach to China,” the two noted.

Evidently, those who would be expected to return from the Obama administration appear to have shifted their view on engagement with China. It should be important to note that, under a bipartisan consensus that has only begun to solidify in 2020, conversations between both parties have shifted from whether the US should support Taiwan in context of China to how the US will support Taiwan.

Taiwanese Americans, the vocal minority

The anxiety caused by the perceived uncertainty of the US election is becoming divisive and controversial. And with opposition lawmaker Lin Wei-chou of the opposition pro-China Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) having openly supported Biden, the Taiwan government has been issuing statements of neutrality under its foreign ministry and Ambassador to the US Hsiao Bi-khim.

And though most people in Taiwan do not get to vote in the US election, there is a vocal and active minority that do get to vote – the Taiwanese American community.

From journalist Fan Chi-fei, who suffered from cyber harassment after openly supporting Biden, to former Formosan Association for Public Affairs president and food safety expert Mike Kuo, who appeared in front of TV programs to defend Tsai administration’s decision to allow import of meat of ractopamine-treated animals from the US to Taiwan, Taiwanese Americans have been influential in shaping the perception of the current US election.

As public sentiment boils over for a group of people with no vote in the US election, it comes into question whether the Taiwanese public should really be as impassioned and take partisan positions in a foreign election, spurred by pundits who do have partisan preferences in the election. Certainly US nationals influencing Taiwan’s election would be seen as unacceptable.

Conclusion

At the end of the day and upon a close examination of the two candidates’ foreign policy, it would appear that either choice of president for the American people will probably not upend US-China or US-Taiwan relations as much as people in Taiwan may think. 

For non-American Taiwanese, there are probably more worries elsewhere that should spur more anxiety, such as the Senate election.

If the Taiwanese worry about losing a president that it perceives to be supportive of Taiwan, there should be an equal part of worry for losing pro-Taiwan lawmakers such as Cory Gardner, who introduced acts like Asia Reassurance Initiative Act of 2018 but is likely to lose his Colorado seat. 

(Feature photo of Donald Trump and Joe Biden, both by Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0)