We know a lot about how Americans and Taiwanese view the Taiwan question, but until now there’s been no good data on how the women and men on-the-street in China view the same issue.
Adam Liu of the Lee Kuan Yu School of Public Policy in Singapore and Xiaojun Li of the NYU Shanghai and University of British Columbia attempt to fill this gap in the paper highlighted today.
Previous studies have suffered from the fact that the question has often been put to people in China in the binary form of ‘Should China use force to reunify with Taiwan, or not’. Even when couched in these terms support for a forceful reunification attempt has been consistently tepid.
The researchers wanted to know what would happen if people were offered more nuanced choices that are the more likely options in the real world. Their survey therefore contained escalating choices with all-out assault being only one of five potential paths regarding reunification.
Survey respondents were offered the following options to pick from (it wasn’t one or none as you’ll see from the results table below):
- All out war
- Military coercion. Limited engagement involving some use of force
- Economic sanctions
- Bide time. Wait for China to get bigger and reunification thus inevitable
- Do nothing. Leave Taiwan be and go on about its business
The survey was crafted so the options were mixed up as people in surveys often choose from the top. There were also follow-on questions designed to obtain more color on why respondents opted for the choices they did.
On the big questions this is what came out:
The authors were encouraged to see only a small majority favored all-out war (I would note it’s a simple majority nonetheless). It was also encouraging to see how much support there was for the less aggressive paths. Finally, few will be surprised there was little enthusiasm for the do nothing or, de facto, separation option.
The authors conclude their results are at odds with characterizations of the Chinese population as rabid nationalists eagerly baying for restitutional conflict. The work seems to demonstrate the real situation is complicated and China’s leaders couldn’t count on widespread support for a more belligerent posture if they ever decided to head down that road.
The full paper is an easy read, contains a lot of other useful observation and can be accessed via this link Public Support for (Non-) Peaceful Unification with Taiwan.
Happy Sunday.