The Taiwan story, How a Small Island Will Dictate the Global Future, by Kerry Brown, Penguin, 2024

Feb 2, 2025
The island of Taiwan is marked with a red pen on the map.

Professor Kerry Brown is among Britain’s most distinguished China specialists. He has written very widely on modern and contemporary China and has experience not only in academia, but also in the British diplomatic service. He has some Australia experience, having directed the China Studies Centre at the University of Sydney from 2012 to 2015.

The title is interesting. Why will this small island (Taiwan) dictate the global future? That is because the PRC government insists that it is part of a single China, while the United States, while recognising the PRC as the only legitimate government of China, in fact seems to be moving towards seeing the problems in other ways, such as democracy versus autocracy, opening the possibility of intervening militarily should China try to reincorporate Taiwan militarily.

A few general comments before approaching some major issues. Brown everywhere writes well and with a clear, accessible style. He obviously knows what he’s talking about. He is a serious scholar with deep grounding in his subject and wide experience in China, as well as deep knowledge of the country’s modern and contemporary history. He knows the people well, and has great affection for them. Put in blunt terms, he obviously likes the place.

Much of the book details Taiwan’s history, especially its recent history, its economy and people. He seems to be very impressed by how Taiwan has undergone a democratisation process, changing the people in the direction of being Taiwanese rather than Chinese much more than might have been expected.

I found the last chapter but one (Chapter 7) especially interesting. It is entitled “What if a Cross-strait War Started?” He posits a near-term future in which a fictional but plausible senator called Brownlow gets to be president. What’s striking about Brownlow is how reactionary he is. (He’s more consistent but in many ways rather like Trump). He does not care about any strategic ambiguity towards China. All he has is hatred of it because it is communist and doing better than the U.S. His policy is to establish diplomatic relations with an independent Taiwan. It is that red line that drives China to divert from its policy of peaceful reunification to war. I personally agree with the implication that the source of provocation is the U.S., not China.

Brown is not prepared to guarantee that either side would win. But he is (rightly) insistent that it would set both China’s and the world economy back by at least a decade. He does not speculate further on what happens after that, but it seems clear to me that a war would be a total disaster for everybody and blame belongs to the U.S., not to China.

Brown ends the book by considering what the stakeholders should do. He is very insistent that Western powers, especially the U.S., should not encourage Taiwan towards independence. He appears to favour the current status quo. His final verdict (p. 452) is “for today, strenuous defence of the stalemate is all we can meaningfully do. Anything else is insanity.”

There are a couple of interpretations I don’t fully share. For instance, when the PRC was voted to take the China seat in October 1971, it was no longer possible in international law for the ROC to continue in the U.N. Brown suggests Chiang Kai-shek ordered his own side out, because he could not envisage sharing the seat with the PRC and Mao. But it was never seriously on the cards that both would be in the United Nations together. Certainly, that would not be possible now.

The United Nations, which surely represents international opinion as much as anybody and, I would argue, more than the U.S., is very clear that Taiwan is a part of a single China and that it is the government in Beijing that represents it. Brown obviously knows this. But I think it needs more emphasis in a treatment of this sort. I just gained the strong impression that, although this book is about Taiwan in the world, and at the end he says “everyone is a stakeholder in the Taiwan issue” (p. 452), it is really only the U.S. that is important, other than China and Taiwan itself. The BRICS, the United Nations and countries other than the U.S. don’t seem to matter much.

I think he is right that any “strenuous defence of the stalemate is all we can meaningfully do”. The last thing anybody wants is war. But I also think that the U.S. should stop provocations and allow the governments in Beijing and Taipei to hold discussions and begin to sort out their own problems. I know at present this is extremely difficult. Will it always be so? I don’t know, but I like to think that peaceful resolutions in the world are still possible.

I don’t believe the current mainstream media line about the dangerous and aggressive China. I think the reason China arms itself is for defence and because experience shows it that predators will victimise and demonise a weak country. Xi Jinping is not irrational, and I don’t see him as particularly power-hungry, certainly not when compared with U.S. leaders like Donald Trump. Just leave them to sort out their own problems. There’s at least a chance they could succeed, at least a better chance than with continual interference by the U.S., an unstable and declining imperial power.

I don’t agree with all Brown’s interpretations. But I very much admire him as a Sinologist and analyst of Chinese history, including Taiwan. This book provides excellent and more or less bias-free commentary on a very important part of history and our contemporary world.

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