Thank you very much. This is truly an honour and privilege for me to be able to speak in front of this committee.
I'm actually Zooming in from Accra, Ghana, right now, so you'll have to forgive me if the connection is a little wonky at times. I will do my best.
Let me begin by saying that it's very clear that Taiwan and its fate are central to the legitimation formula of the authoritarian regime in Beijing. As noted by Kerry and Steve before, the very fate of Taiwan and the ability of the Communist Party in China to make claims on Taiwan and to eventually unify it with the mainland are absolutely essential to the legitimation formula for that regime. In other words, as Kerry points out, the identity politics trumps, in many cases, the economic politics.
This puts Taiwan in a very precarious situation, and I would suggest to you, in an even more precarious situation as time passes, because on the one hand it means there is less and less space for Taiwan to manoeuvre in the international arena, and we have seen tremendous effort by the regime in Beijing to limit this space for Taiwan.
It comes, however, precisely at the time when support for Taiwan internationally, I would suggest to you, is at one of its all-time highs. About 10 years ago I'm reminded that Charles Glaser wrote a very influential piece in various foreign policy magazines in the United States, suggesting that perhaps that was the time for the United States to let Taiwan go, and that this was increasingly a problem for American foreign policy. That was 10 years ago, and increasingly that seems to be a very antiquated view of Taiwan.
Indeed, Taiwan presents itself to the world, I would suggest to you, as the paragon of democracy. It leads the region in terms of women's participation in politics, including the election of the president for two terms. Taiwan presents a model to the industrial world in terms of social policy. Its national health insurance program is a model that countries should emulate, and in terms of its progressive policies with respect to the LBGTQ community and so forth.
I also believe that Taiwan has lots to offer in terms of its lessons with respect to relations with its indigenous peoples, and I think there are plenty of opportunities for Canada to continue to collaborate with Taiwan on that front.
Of course Taiwan is an extraordinary economy, and we have seen that any blockages in the global supply chain, particularly as it relates to the semiconductor sector, can be crippling. It presents a strategic value that I think is quite unprecedented.
However, I say this to say that there is less and less space for Taiwan to manoeuvre, precisely at the time when Taiwan's value and the stakes of Taiwan's future is higher than ever before, which means the possibility of conflict, and the stakes of that conflict are ever more dire.
The question I want to contemplate, then, is this: What do we do with China? It strikes me that one way out of this very difficult situation is to increase the prospects for China and the Chinese regime to entertain the prospects of democratic transition.
Here I want to offer some reflections on this. Professor Laliberté, I think, has done an extraordinary job of describing to us the situation in Taiwan, and I want to talk a little bit about China.
The conventional wisdom in our theories of democratic transition is that democracies will emerge from the ashes of collapsed regimes, that we look for and wait for regimes to crumble under the weight of their own illegitimacy, and from that, then, democracy emerges. That is indeed one way in which democracy has emerged in a lot of the world.
However, the modal pathway for democratic transition in Asia, actually, is not democracy emerging from the ashes of a collapsed regime, but, rather, democracy emerging through the leadership of strong political parties. Indeed, Taiwan is the best example of this. The KMT was a regime that democratized during the late 1980s and into the early 1990s precisely at a time when it was weakening, but it was still a very strong political party. It was a party that was very confident. In other words, democracy proved to be incentive-compatible for this authoritarian regime.
This is a paradox, because what I'm essentially arguing here is that precisely at the time in which a regime is strong and it has little reason to democratize is also the best time for a regime to entertain democratic transition, because it's probably going to lead to the most stable democratic transition. I think everyone would agree that no matter what you think of the regime in Beijing, no one wishes for a regime that collapses, because under the weight of that collapse we're talking about potentially 1.4 billion people suffering.
That's the paradox here. What we should then think about are the implications of this, particularly as they relate to our own foreign policy and how we think about China.
First is that we ought not to wish for the collapse of China and we ought not to wish for the collapse of the Chinese Communist Party regime. I think that would be disastrous for a good portion of humanity.
Second is that it doesn't seem to me that isolation is in any way going to provide the kinds of inducements or incentives for the Chinese regime to entertain democratic transition. In fact, we know that isolationism will likely increase the authoritarian measures employed by the regime.
Third, and this is the most important, is that we should be thinking about the prospects of democracy in China being the result of strategic inducements on the part of the rest of the international community. The recognition that democracy is indeed incentive-compatible with the authoritarian regime, and that democratization of the regime is something that would not lead to the collapse of China....
It's through this that we can open up the political space for more opportunities on how we might be able to continue to recognize Taiwan as the sovereign democracy that it is.