Brian Hioeby Brian Hioe
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Photo Credit: Tsai Ing-wen/Facebook
A PIECE IN The Atlantic in December by Damir Marusic, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, proves yet another example of when soi-disant western experts parachute into Taiwan and conclude they know Taiwan better than Taiwanese in a matter of days.
Though the piece is from a few months ago, examining it still proves instructive about a phenomenon that continues in the present, particularly one year since the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. After all, Taiwan is currently seeing more attention than ever, including from many visiting experts. Certainly, though Taiwan has benefited in past years from a wave of international correspondents relocating to Taiwan, allowing for more nuanced and detailed coverage that does not come from afar in Beijing, the phenomenon of parachute journalism occurs in parallel when journalists or authorities who are not based in Taiwan come in for a few days and produce articles on their experiences.
In the case of Marusic, what proves particularly memorable is that this occurs only after two days in Taiwan attending a conference on nationalism, after which he concludes that not only do Taiwanese know little to nothing about the existential threat that has faced Taiwan for decades but that they have not prepared for it. The article is a rambling travelog more than anything else and yet The Atlantic saw fit to publish it as authoritative.
Photo credit: Tsai Ing-wen/Facebook
Indeed, Marusic’s views are fairly clear when he begins by citing Tanner Greer, who has gained much traction in recent years for his criticisms of Taiwan’s military service system. Greer bases his claim to expertise on Taiwan’s military on the basis of unsourced anecdotes about chatting with military draftees rather than anything like a systematic study or survey–and western media has taken to repeating this endlessly as though he were an authoritative expert.
But Marusic’s observations are in the vein of long standing American views of Taiwan that only see it in terms of military, beginning with a long exegesis on the potentially apocryphal quote of a US defense official who apparently stated: “I thought I was going to find a second Israel; I found a second Costa Rica.”
After this follows several paragraphs that lead nowhere, but in which negative comparisons are raised between Taiwan and Israel. Yet in what world do such comparisons make any military sense? Taiwan is an island and a war over Taiwan would be primarily fought at sea. Israel’s adversaries share land borders with it. Still, it seems to be a recurring trend of supposed experts bizarrely imagining that a Taiwan Straits conflict would somehow be a land war.
Following a paragraph that consists of Marusic learning basic facts about Taiwanese identity for the first time, Marusic then spends another paragraph taking umbrage at the view that Taiwanese–separated from China by a mere strait and sharing a common language–might know more about China than Americans do. Noting the economic consequences of an invasion for China is for Marusic mere complacency rather, say, how Americans far at a remove from the Asia Pacific seem to imagine that China could conduct an invasion of Taiwan with no consequences for itself because they do not have to think through the many dimensions of such a contingency.
The last two paragraphs of the piece, then, include a gloss by Marusic on papers he hears at the conference about exports of pop culture from Taiwan to China, and attitudes about China in Taiwanese pop culture. Marusic then somehow spins into thinking this means that Taiwanese feel ambivalent about China and are complacent about China.
One wonders how in the world papers on Taiwanese and Chinese pop culture drawn from the perspective of cultural studies serve as indicators of the sentiments of Taiwanese society as a whole, but the degree of abstraction by which Marusic engages with Taiwan and China has led to this worldview. All this should, in fact, drive home the point what little knowledge Marusic has about Taiwan that he extrapolates what is in all probability a mere two academic papers into grand generalizations about Taiwan as a whole–indeed, should base my view of US military readiness on, say, listening to a few papers on patterns in Netflix consumption among Americans or America’s cultural exports to other parts of the world?
Throughout, Marusic draws comparisons between Taiwan and Ukraine while failing to ever quantify any metric of comparison except his own vague and unscientific gut feeling. All the more remarkable that the piece was published at all or that Marusic is apparently a senior think tank fellow. More likely then, Marusic came into Taiwan with a preconceived notion of it, and framed his brief experiences of it to bolster this argument, never mind the absurdity. How does one come to far-reaching conclusions about military readiness from attending a conference on nationalism, rather than, say, watching military exercises? Even Greer at least actually spoke to former military draftees, even if he seems to be rather sparse on having talked to actual military experts or officials.
Photo credit: Tsai Ing-wen/Facebook
But the standard for commentary on Taiwan in English is quite low, with a seemingly endless amount of parachute journalists or experts that come into Taiwan for a few days, and leave, concluding that they know everything–more than Taiwanese themselves do. And so, one expects to see more articles in a similar vein from people whose poorly thought-out takes on Taiwan are best discarded.
Still, this is expected to continue, with another recent example being former Pentagon official Elbridge Colby’s proposal on Twitter to sanction Taiwan for not doing enough for its own defense, with the view that American lives would be lost in its defense but that Taiwan is a “free rider.”
Of course, as should go without saying, it will be mostly Taiwanese lives lost in the defense of Taiwan from a Chinese invasion. Ukraine has commonly been seen in Taiwan as an example of America’s potential involvement in the event of a Chinese invasion, in that the US may provide arms but not get directly involved. Likewise, it is Taiwan that has a military draft of one year for all men, not the US, even if the US may still see Taiwan as spending too little in its defense. Moreover, one hardly expects faith in the US from Taiwan, if the US acts to punish Taiwan in this way–in fact, such a move would give China more ground in efforts to win Taiwan over. But, whether with Colby or Marusic, one generally sees a rather openly imperialistic view of Taiwan from such American experts.