Taiwan is facing increasing pressure from China, in various forms: military operations around the main island, tariffs on Taiwanese exports, and influence operations seeking to widen Taiwan’s political divides and bolster support for Chinese positions.
In one sense, that’s simply business-as-usual for Taiwan. “Actually, we’ve been through this ever since the People’s Republic of China existed,” Ambassador Alexander Tah-Ray Yui, Taiwan’s top representative at the United States, told The Diplomat in an exclusive interview on October 7.
Speaking from Twin Oaks, a historic mansion in Washington, D.C. owned by Taiwan’s government, Yui noted two recent developments that he said marked qualitative changes in the pressure from the PRC. First was the inauguration of Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as president in 2016. Beijing “didn’t like the DPP in power, so they started making some aggressive [moves],” he said.
Another shift came in 2022, when then-U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan. “They started to say, ‘Oh, you crossed a red line.’ No more median line in the Taiwan Straits… their fighter planes and naval ships started to surround Taiwan, and now every day easily 12, 20, 50 planes and naval ships are going around Taiwan, in the [air defense] identification zone… It’s a form of aggression and constant threat and coercion.”
But, Yui notes, China’s strategy toward Taiwan includes more than just military maneuvers. Beijing also engages in what Yui called “cognitive warfare”: disinformation and propaganda. “They’re trying to sway Taiwan, not only through elections but also how we see others, for example our opinion on the United States,” he said.
Yui referred to the “Doubt America Theory,” sometimes translated as the “America Skepticism Theory” – a set of related narratives voiced by some politicians and commentators in Taiwan that seeks to convince Taiwanese that, as Yui summarizes the narrative, “the United States is not really a reliable partner… the United States is the one creating all this conflict and tension in the region… but then when conflict really starts, it’ll be in Taiwan, and… you will nowhere see the U.S.”
The “Doubt America” campaign “has somewhat affected public opinion a little bit,” Yui said. “Part of the thing that we do is we counter, or debunk, this.”
For his part, Yui noted that U.S. support to Taiwan has been bipartisan and “very solid” in both Congress and the executive branch, thanks in part to a strong legal underpinning: the 1979 Taiwan Relations Act.
That said, a recent report from the U.S.-Taiwan Business Council (USTBC) raised alarm over U.S. arms sales to Taiwan. The USTBC noted that “for President Biden’s administration the dollar amount of [U.S.] security assistance provided [to Taiwan] has fallen each year since 2022… U.S. support for Taiwan’s material force modernization has been waning since 2021. It now sits at its lowest point since 2001, bar the Obama Administration’s 4+ year arms sales freeze from 2011-2015, and it is continuing to fall.”
Yui countered that sense of alarm, noting that the Biden administration “has made 16 announced arms sales [to Taiwan], and that’s also a record.” As for the lower overall monetary value of the sales, he suggested that was due to Taiwan’s changing defense strategy, which involves more emphasis on asymmetric defense rather than high-profile prestige platforms. “Drones,” Yui noted, “are smaller and not as expensive, but they are very useful in today’s war scenarios.”
However, he admitted that Taiwan is facing delayed deliveries in arms ordered from the United States, which Yui blamed on supply chain problems as well as “technical issues,” including the need to manufacture certain platforms to “Taiwanese specifications.”
To help resolve these issues, Yui is hopeful that new advances on a co-production and co-development of military equipment could see Taiwan begin to manufacture some of the desired U.S. weapons for itself. “We’re talking about maybe some of the weapons that we buy… could be produced or assembled in Taiwan, so Taiwan would become part of the military supply chain…. That will also solve some of the issues on the delayed delivery of these weapons.”
Solving the problem of delayed arms delivers is “an ongoing process,” he acknowledged, but Yui said Taiwan-U.S. cooperation on the issue was “very close, very open… and very fluid.”
While Taiwan-U.S. relations have been uniquely strong – despite the severing of official ties – for decades, Yui noted that Taipei is increasingly getting support from “not only the United States, but also other like-minded countries.” As a specific example, he pointed to the uptick in Freedom of Navigation Operations (FONOPs) through the Taiwan Strait, which China has been claiming as internal waters.
In addition to the United States, which has a long history of sending naval vessels through the strait, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, New Zealand, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom have done FONOPs in recent months “to express their disagreement with mainland China’s claim,” Yui said.
“The United States and many Western countries continue calling out to the PRC… warning mainland China not to unilaterally change the status quo of the Taiwan Straits through military aggression or through coercion.”
This is – in both the literal and figurative sense – a sea change, especially for Europe. Yui is particularly attuned to this; before taking the post of representative at the Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office (TECRO) in the United States in December 2023, Yui was Taiwan’s representative to the European Union and Belgium.
“Before coming to Washington, last year I was serving in Brussels. You could also sense that European Union countries’ attitudes toward Taiwan have changed,” Yui said. “…More and more European countries are willing to deal with Taiwan separately from the People’s Republic of China. A few years back, you would rarely see European countries talk about Taiwan without first talking about China… We were sort of an attachment to the Chinese issue. Not anymore.”
In part, this is because the EU’s attitude toward China is not the same. “Something fundamentally has changed between China and the West… [The EU is] looking at China in a different way, and that also changed how the West looks at Taiwan,” Yui said.
That, he added, made the difference.
Some have traced Europe soured outlook on China to Beijing’s decision to tacitly back Russia after Moscow’s invasion of Ukraine. Others point to the fall-out from the COVID-19 pandemic. But Yui put the turning point at a different spot: “In Europe, I think the defining moment was Lithuania.”
In late 2021, Lithuania opened a representative office in Taipei, and Taiwan opened one in Vilnius. In response, China adopted a strategy of economic coercion. “The PRC thought… they could bully a small country,” Yui said. “And so when Lithuania stood their ground… they [the PRC] decided to punish Lithuania by stopping all exports of goods to China.
“But they forgot that Lithuania is a member of the European Union. So instead of hitting a very small country… actually they [the PRC] hit a wall of the EU… So in the end, I think the EU’s view of China changed because of Lithuania.” Brussels had been given a first-hand view of China’s willingness to “weaponize trade.”
On that note, Yui argued that the shared values between Taiwan and its “like-minded” partners, whether in the United States and Europe, cements their bond as much as the sense of “shared adversaries.”
“These countries look at Taiwan, not only because we are economically relevant, but it has to do with values too. We share the same kind of principles, we respect human rights, freedom, and democracy,” he said.
Because of the affinities between Taiwan and Western democracies, Yui added, “The world will not stand by and let Taiwan face these threats alone.”
But most of all, Taiwan is willing to defend itself: “We are ready to defend our own homeland… We are determined to defend our way of life…because once you taste democracy people won’t go back.”