Taiwan's Impact on China

This chapter introduces the book by explaining why and how Taiwan is important to China. It starts off by explaining how significant Taiwan is in the calculation and strategic interest of the Chinese Communist Party, which has a monopoly of power in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It examines how Taiwan contributed to the economic success of the PRC but posits that Taiwan exerts an even stronger impact in areas that political scientists often overlook. It shows that much as political and economic factors matter, it is in the cultural and day-to-day living realm that Taiwan’s impact on the Mainland Chinese is at its greatest. This ranges from popular songs and novels to the Taiwanese approach to civility. It stresses that Taiwan’s impact on China rests ultimately on the effectiveness of its “soft power.”

In this chapter Brady uses framing theory to understand the Chinese Communist Party’s information controls on Taiwan affairs and outlines the links between Beijing’s Taiwan propaganda organizations and the CCP’s domestic and international propaganda system. Brady shows that China’s Taiwan frames are aimed at molding domestic and global public opinion on Taiwanese affairs, at placing limits on the Republic of China’s global political and commercial space, and, ultimately, on resolving the sovereign status of Taiwan. China’s Taiwan frames are in direct conflict with the emerging “Taiwanese identity” frames coming out of the ROC.

Lin provides an authentic and thoughtful examination of how Mainland Chinese intellectuals understand and assess the relevance of Taiwan’s developmental experience. He shows a great diversity of views exists among Chinese scholars on what specific aspects of Taiwan’s developmental experience provide valuable lessons for China, and highlights that this often reflects their different personal background and experience. But there is one thing that is common to most, if not all mainland scholars—when it comes to Taiwan’s democratization Chinese scholars respond less negatively if it is not linked to the notion of self-determination.

This chapter examines Taiwan’s impact on Chinese people through cross-strait social interaction by assessing which of the elements of Taiwanese society have touched and made the most impact on Chinese people, particularly scholars and students visiting Taiwan. It questions the conventional belief that it is Taiwanese democracy or economic success that makes the greatest impression on Chinese visitors. Instead, what has left an indelible mark on their minds relates to the social relationships and interactions in everyday life in Taiwan. Chinese visitors were deeply touched by the more traditional “Chineseness” they encountered in Taiwanese society which they felt was missing from their home society. They were moved by Taiwan’s everyday display of hospitality, civility among strangers, the nurturing of traditional culture, and the vitality of civil society. It is this kind of feeling of a “dream home” away from home that naturally moved Chinese visitors in Taiwan.

Most explanations of China’s explosive economic growth in recent decades focus on Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, but the removal of Mao-era restraints was no guarantee of success for the PRC economy. In fact, China’s economic performance has far outstripped even the most optimistic projections of the 1980s. One central reason for its surprising success is the contribution of foreign investors, among whom the earliest, most persistent and ultimately most influential were Taiwanese investors, the so-called Taishang. Taiwan-originated firms were the key source of capital, management expertise, technology, and contract manufacturing relationships for Mainland China; as such, they were instrumental in the development of China’s export-oriented manufacturing. Despite their outsized role in China’s economic development, Taishang as a cross-Strait ‘linkage community’ have done surprisingly little to alter the political relationship between the two sides. In fact, they contribute to a conceptualization to China as economically unified but politically diverse—an idea that positively resonates with the majority of Taiwan’s populace.

By focusing on the electronics industry, this chapter explains in detail how Taiwanese investment brought Mainland manufacturers into the global value chain, something which it had taken the Taiwanese decades to join. It also shows the limits of Taiwan’s impact here as their Chinese partners are catching up fast as they take advantage of their collaboration with the Taiwanese. In the last decade or so, the progress the Chinese have managed to make has been so impressive that they are now beginning to reduce their dependence on their Taiwanese partners, and, in some instances, to compete against them. This chapter demonstrates the need for analysts and, indeed, government officials in Taiwan, to understand while Taiwanese investments have helped to change China, this may well be a time-limited phenomenon.

By focusing on the cases of two prominent Taiwanese writers, Qiong Yao and Xi Murong, Yeh explores and explains in this chapter how and why they captivated Mainland Chinese so easily in the 1980s and 1990s. Yeh shows that they were appealing to Mainland Chinese who were just beginning to emerge from the highly regimented and brutish world of the Cultural Revolution and the anti-Confucius campaign. They provided a glimpse of what a China that was modernized, unregimented, and comfortable with its heritage might look like. Yeh reveals that by resonating with the collective unconscious of post-Mao Chinese society these writers made their writings readily accepted and loved by mainland readers and tolerated by the CCP in quest of modernization and Chineseness.

This chapter examines Taiwan’s impact on China through the songs of Deng Lijun (1953–1995), a legendary Taiwanese pop singer whose sweet voice and versatile style have left a deep impression on the Chinese people. Lin explains the context in which Deng’s songs were introduced into China, arguing that Deng was well loved because her music activated personal freedom, igniting a yearning for democracy, and eliciting individual emotions and pre-1949 cultural memories. In addition, Lin analyses Deng’s stylistic impact on today’s singers. It concludes that despite the Nationalist Party’s coining her as an envoy for the democratic Taiwan, Deng exerted a more lasting influence on Chinese listeners in nonpolitical aspects. Likewise, Deng’s popularity was more accountable to the market demand than to Chinese government’s party-state control.

This chapter looks into exchanges between Chinese and Taiwanese scholars who specialize in religious studies and assesses the extent to which such interactions have had an effect on how Chinese officials approach religious affairs. It argues that the Chinese leadership sees the advantages of Taiwanese authorities’ prudent management of religious affairs for stable governance, but some fundamental differences in both polities make it difficult to achieve a wholesale adoption of Taiwan’s approach. Starting with an overview of the changes in relations between the political and the religious field in Taiwan, it then looks at the increased cross-Strait exchanges on religions, and underlines what Chinese officials have found useful in these interactions. Despite claims that a shared culture can overcome political disagreements and institutional differences, the focus on regime maintenance makes China resistant to adopt Taiwan’s approach to religion. As a result, China retrieves selectively from Taiwan what reinforces the existing political structure.

The working definitions of civility in modern Western societies and in Taiwan share the essential elements of respect, tolerance, and due consideration of strangers as well as of acquaintances. Yet, unlike American civility, which emphasizes equality, social distance, and impersonalization, the Taiwanese model of civility embraces mutuality and closeness as well as hierarchy in interpersonal relations. Mainland visitors to Taiwan embrace this distinctive feature of civility in Taiwan and then further reconstructed it into an idealized model. In this process of imagining and reconstructing Taiwanese civility, the preservation of Chinese traditional culture has emerged as a new defining feature of Taiwanese society. While most mainlanders uphold Taiwan as a praiseworthy example for the future of Chinese culture and society, their reconstructed Taiwanese civility has encountered criticism and resistance from public opinion leaders as well as ordinary people from Taiwan.

This concluding chapter draws together the different strands in the book and highlights that much as Taiwan played a crucial role in helping China to reach the stage of economic take-off, and its democratization experience offers in principle a highly instructive example, the most important source of its influence on China is its “soft power.” This is soft power in the classic sense, based on the innate attractiveness of what Taiwan has to offer, whether in terms of popular culture or other aspects of society, such as civility. But the scope of Taiwan’s soft power to impact upon China is limited by whether or not it is judged as subversive by the powers that be in China. Despite this constraint, Taiwan still makes a disproportionate level of impact on China.