TCSS Security Commentaries #041

Oliver Ward, PhD Student, National Chengchi Univeristy IDAS Program

It is well known among most with an interest in Taiwan’s strategic situation that Taiwan has a number of advantages and tactics to prevent, delay, or disarm a Chinese invasion. These include the famous ‘Silicon Shield’, a reference to Taiwan’s dominance in the semiconductor industry and subsequent leverage over China due to its dependence on Taiwanese semiconductor chips for a wide array of vital industries in China. Additionally, many will be aware of the difficulties that an invading Chinese force would face trying to land on Taiwan’s rugged and easily-defended coastline.

However, what may not have been considered as a potential defensive asset is Taiwanese soft power. Soft power, defined in 1990 by the man who coined the term, Joseph Nye, is “…the ability of a country to structure a situation so that other countries develop preferences or define their interests in ways consistent with its own.” This contrasts with the hard power alternative of ordering other countries to do what you want. This power has been employed by many different countries in many different ways. For the US it has served as a means of influence around the world to sway countries towards it and away from authoritarian alternatives, whether that was the USSR during the Cold War or Russia, China, or other authoritarian regimes today. For Japan it was a means of economic and diplomatic development, allowing the country to earn a new, positive reputation distinctly different from the past regime that inflicted atrocities on its neighbours before its defeat in 1945.

More recently, for South Korea it has served as a major asset in allowing the country to finally counterbalance against the nearby behemoths of Japan and China. South Korea receives another major benefit from its ability to project soft power: international support for its survival. Korea consistently scores very highly on American opinion polls, with recent polls indicating that seven in ten Americans support long-term US military bases in South Korea, and in 2022, 55% of those surveyed agreed with the deployment of US troops in the event of an attack on the South by North Korea. This figure was only 44% in 1990, and finally crossed the 50% mark in 2017. It has been during this period that the phenomenon known as the ‘Korean Wave’ or ‘Hallyu’ has spread to all corners of the globe. Starting from the institutionalisation of soft power in South Korea in the form of the Cultural Industry Bureau in 1994, to the spread of Korean dramas to Chinese television in the late 1990s, to investment in high quality Korean pop and cinema that incorporated Western technology and aesthetics leading to K-pop supergroups such as BTS and Oscar-winning films such as Bong Joon-ho’s ‘Parasite’, it is not an overstatement to say that Korean pop-culture is dominating.

It is particularly apt to focus on South Korea’s success in its soft power development given the country’s numerous cultural, historical, and economic similarities with Taiwan. It stands to reason that if there is one country similar enough to replicate the moves made by the South Korean government to integrate soft power into their national strategy then Taiwan would be a prime candidate: both South Korea and Taiwan are culturally Sinospheric, wealthy ‘Asian Tiger’ nations, both were previously annexed into the Japanese Empire with Japanese rule ending in 1945, both Republics were born out of civil wars with a communist counterpart, both have received American military support, and both countries democratised at very similar times in the late 1980s/1990s. Additionally, both countries have very strong manufacturing and high technology industries, are key linchpins in world trade, and share similar geo-strategic concerns.

However, a shift in strategy would require a huge amount of investment from the Taiwanese government and therefore it is important to highlight the value of such a shift. Casting one’s eyes to the recent hold-up of aid to Ukraine in the US House of Representatives, it’s not hard to imagine a similar situation occurring in a potential war between China and Taiwan. In such a situation, even a few percentage points of increased support from an invested US public could be the difference between US isolationism and US intervention. Despite their similarities, there are some big differences, and a future ‘Taiwan Wave’ will face difficulties that Hallyu does not. For instance, currently, numerous Taiwanese artists brand themselves as Chinese in order to cater to the Chinese market, and in effect their soft power influence to the world is lost within the Taiwan-China Mandarin language bubble. Furthermore, Taiwan’s lack of international recognition makes it difficult to hold high-level exchanges with other countries, especially as many of those countries are afraid of upsetting the Chinese Communist Party. Importantly though, Taiwan doesn’t need to reach ‘Korean Wave’-levels of success: it just needs to tip the balance.

Oliver Ward is a PhD Student at National Chengchi Univeristy’s International Doctorate of Asia-Pacific Studies Program