Tsai Ing-wen: The president who reset Taiwan’s relationship with China

It is a properly- known truth that the little, soft- said chairman of Taiwan does not like doing interviews.

Never long before she leaves her eight-year term and is transitioning to her son William Lai, it took months of silent discussions to sit down at Tsai Ing-wen’s dining table in her Taipei home.

Even so, the leader seems more interested in talking about herself than in asking about me. She is undoubtedly more at ease showing us her dogs and cats than she is answering issues in front of a moving camera.

” That’s Xiang Xiang”, she says, pointing to the big, dark kitty eyeing me curiously through the open doorway. ” Would you like to join her”?

She was criticized as a” cat girl” and called a” rabbit lady” when Tsai Ing-wen took office in 2016 as a middle-aged, young man. She held Xiang Xiang in her hands and took the picture, which was appearing on publication covers. Soon, her followers adopted a novel moniker: Taiwan’s Iron Cat Lady.

Tsai admits to a walking admiration for Margaret Thatcher, although she’s quick to put it’s because of her endurance as a sexual head, never her social plans.

In Tsai Ing- ming, Taiwan found an improbable hero. She carefully and safely re-established the partnership with Beijing, which has for 75 years owned the individually run island.

Under the leadership of Xi Jinping, she stood away to an increasingly autocratic and violent China; she supported and supported a critical US empire under Joe Biden. At house, she expanded the planet’s defence and legalised exact- sex marriage, the former a second for Asia.

While Tsai shied away from the spotlight in Taiwan’s loud politics, Xiang Xiang became a star. She played a starring position in Tsai’s 2020 r- election strategy, along with the government’s different cat, a ginger tom called Ah Tsai.

Tsai has her opponents. Beijing is no lover, and neither are the some older Taiwanese, who want better relations with China, where they have family and business objectives. Domestically, she has been criticised for not doing enough for the business – the rising cost of living, costly cover and a lack of employment cost her party younger voters in January’s vote.

And her biggest critics fear that she has made the area of 23 million more, rather than less, illegal.

Put crudely, this is what any Taiwan head faces: a little bigger, wealthier, and stronger ally, who says he owns your home, is ready to let you hand it over without a battle, but is ready to apply force if you refuse. What do you do?

Tsai’s predecessor, Ma Ying- jeou, chose conciliation and a Beijing- friendly trade deal.

However, he incorrectly predicted how young Taiwanese would respond to what they perceived as appeasement. In what became known as the Sunflower Movement, thousands of people took to the streets in 2014. When President Ma refused to back down, they occupied parliament.

Tsai Ing- wen was elected two years later based on a completely different calculus: Beijing only comprehends strength as the only language.

Now, as she prepares to step down, she says she has been vindicated:” China has become so aggressive and assertive”.

” Wow, you’re really tall”, the president exclaims, craning her neck at a lanky, young soldier standing stiffly to attention.

He tells her he is 185cm and she asks, with genuine concern,” Are the beds here big enough for you”? They are, he reassures her.

This occurred on a recent April morning at Tsai’s newly opened new special forces training facility on the outskirts of Taipei.

When the relaxed and chatty president walks into the cramped dining room, where hundreds of crew-cut recruits glare on and yell” Zong Tong Hao”!, or” Hello, President!”

She almost looks out of place in these settings. Her speech is worthy and matter of fact, with no soaring rhetoric. And yet, they happen frequently to check on how effective the military reforms she has pushed through are.

One of the most challenging things for all men over the age of 18 was returning to a year of military service. While she admits it is not popular, she says the public accepts it is necessary:” But we have to make sure that their time spent in the military is worthwhile”.

Tsai has spent a surprisingly long time as president wearing camouflage fatigues, for a former law professor and trade negotiator. In one famous image she’s seen shouldering a rocket launcher. She believes Taiwan must have a modern, well-trained military in which young Taiwanese are proud to serve.

Although China’s threat of an invasion is not new, President Xi Jinping has only recently acquired the military capability to launch what would still be a massive and risky operation. His threats have also grown more ominous and urgent. He has stated twice that a Taiwanese resolution cannot be passed down from one generation to the next, which some have assumed would be the end of his life goal.

On the other side of the strait, Tsai has set about rebuilding Taiwan’s outdated, demoralised and ill- equipped ground forces. It has been an uphill struggle, but results have begun to show. Defense spending has increased significantly to about$ 20 billion ( 16 billion ).

” Our military capability has significantly increased compared to eight years ago. The investment we have put in to military capacity is unprecedented”, Tsai says.

I have spoken to many in Taiwan’s opposition who genuinely believe Tsai’s strategy of building up the military is naive, if not dangerous. They point to China’s powerful navy, the world’s largest, and more than two million active troops. Taiwan’s forces are not even a tenth of that.

To Tsai and her supporters, that is insufficient. They claim that Taiwan is attempting to deter a Chinese invasion by dramatically raising the price.

” The cost of taking over Taiwan is going to be enormous”, Tsai says. ” What we need to do is increase the cost,” he says.

Tsai was no stranger to Beijing, or the Chinese Communist Party, when she became president. Her unconventional ascendancy to power began in the middle of the 1990s when she began working as a trade negotiator. The first president of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party ( DPP ), Chen Shui-bian, caught her attention. He appointed her to be the head of Taiwan’s top organization for dealing with China. She then revised the book to include a suggestion for how Taiwan should approach Beijing.

She has long understood where the lines are, and she thinks Taiwan needs allies to withstand China:” So strengthening our military capacity is one, and working with our friends in the region to form a collective deterrence is another.”

Many in Tsai’s party, the DPP, now talk of a new alliance that stretches from Japan and South Korea to the north, through the Philippines to Australia in the south – with the US as quarterback, holding the team together. This is at best theoretical, though. Taiwan and Asia do not have any formal military ties. Tokyo and Manila are both incredibly reluctant to pledge support for Taiwan despite their shared animosities toward Beijing. Even that most important ally, Washington, has stopped short of guaranteeing it would put boots on the ground.

But Tsai is optimistic. She makes reference to rival claims made by Beijing, Tokyo, and Manila over disputed waters and islands, noting that” a lot of other countries in the region are on alert and some of them may have a conflict with China.

” So, China is not an issue for Taiwan only. It is an issue for the whole region”.

Painting China as a big, bad bully is not hard for a Taiwan president. Finding allies would be harder to find because they would conceivably irritate the world’s second-largest economy.

And that’s why Taiwan leads such an increasingly lonely diplomatic existence. Only 12 of the island’s allies are still alive today, the majority of them tiny Pacific Island and Caribbean micro-states, which China has since imposed on many of the island’s allies.

Tsai believes that forming alliances with what she refers to as “like-minded democracies” is the best way out of this diplomatic isolation.

In order to meet foreign dignitaries from nations that do n’t view Taiwan as a legitimate one, she hosts dozens of parliamentary delegations from all over the world. I went to Holocaust Memorial Day last month. There was poetry and music, as well as a powerful speech from the representative from Germany to never forget.

There are also more unusual events. Tsai Ing- wen hosted a drag performance by Taiwanese-American Nymphia Ward earlier this week as Xi Jinping prepared to welcome Vladimir Putin to Beijing. Nymphia reportedly told Tsai,” This is probably the first presidential office in the world to host a drag show.”

Both are good examples of Taiwan as a democracy that the rest of the world should be concerned about losing.

People claim that Taiwan should lose support because we are more important than Ukraine because of strategic reasons for our position and supply chain. We say no. The democratic countries need to support Ukraine”, Tsai says.

Rather than Taiwan’s wildly successful chip industry, which could be replicated, instead Tsai wields the one thing she has and the Chinese Communist Party does n’t: the soft power of democracy.

In the run up to January’s election, the rainbow flag was hard to miss at every DPP rally.

” We are free to live as we please in Taiwan.” We could not do this in China”, one couple told me.

It’s a remarkable change over the course of more than 30 years when I first arrived here as a student. Taiwan was still in its early years of military rule. A gay friend I know is trying desperately to find a way to get to America. If you were discovered to be homosexual while serving in the military, you could be sent to prison or a mental health facility.

Although that changed, the Tsai Ing-wan government went further than any other Asian government when it passed legislation to legalize same-sex unions in 2019. More than half of the electorate was still against it. Some, including church and family groups, ran a vociferous campaign against it. It was a big political risk, and one that could have cost her re- election.

Tsai calls it a “very difficult journey” but one she saw as necessary:” It’s a test to society to see to what extent we can move forward with our values. Actually, I’m very pleased that we managed to resolve our differences.

Taiwan is still conservative and patriarchal. I ask Tsai if she’s worried it might return to being a “boys club” once she, the island’s first female president, steps down. ” I have a lot of opinions about that boys club”! she says but does not elaborate.

The island’s strength, in her opinion, is its mixed heritage – it’s a society of immigrants.

The Chinese arrived in numerous waves, sometimes centuries apart, and they accompanied hundreds of thousands of indigenous peoples.

” In…]such a] society, there are a lot of challenges”, Tsai says. ” People are less bound by the traditions. The main goal is to survive]as a society]. This is why we have been able to transition from an authoritarian era to democracy.

And that is why she believes that no matter who makes it to the White House after November, Taiwan’s most significant alliance, which is with the world’s most powerful nation and democracy, will survive.

After Donald Trump’s stunning victory in 2016, Tsai Ing- wen rang to congratulate him – and she was put through. Since Jimmy Carter had received a call from the president of Taiwan, there has n’t been a US president since. Tsai has described the call as short but intimate, and wide- ranging.

Trump is a wild card for Taiwan, in fact. He’s criticised the island for” stealing America’s semiconductor industry”, but, as Tsai points out, he has also approved more arms shipments to Taipei than any of his predecessors. But she does n’t want to discuss him, or the possibility of his return to the Oval Office.

She does want to put emphasis on the perception of a growing threat from China.

” The rest of the world is telling China that you ca n’t use military means ]against Taiwan ]. I believe China has the message, and I think unilateral action and non-pacifical means are prohibited.

That might be wishful thinking. Military pressure has not decreased in any way. Instead, China frequently sends dozens of military vehicles and ships across the median line that divides the Taiwan strait’s airspace and waters. Beijing declared in 2022 that it no longer recognizes what was essentially the border. The trigger was one of Tsai’s diplomatic coups.

US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s historic visit in 2022 was celebrated in a Taiwan starved of international recognition. But China was furious, firing ballistic missiles over the island, and into the Pacific Ocean, for the first time ever.

It was a warning. Even some inside Tsai’s own administration worried quietly that Pelosi’s visit had been a mistake.

” We’ve been isolated for such a long time”, she says. You simply ca n’t resist a visit like Speaker Pelosi’s. Of course it comes with risks”.

Her voice is tingling with tension. Her opponents claim Taiwan was made more vulnerable by the Pelosi visit. Even Vice President Biden is thought to have opposed the trip.

Tsai claims that this is the boundary that Taiwan must cross.

Tsai Ing-wen recalls her time as the DPP’s leader,” I had to turn a party of revolutionaries into a party of power.”

When she took over, she was an economics graduate leading a group of older, male radicals who had spent their early lives fighting for Taiwan’s independence– or serving time for it.

There is no need for Taiwan to hold a referendum or declare independence, she says, because it is already an independent, sovereign nation.

” We are on our own. We make our own decisions, we have a political system to govern this place. We have a constitution, we have laws, we have a military. We think that we are a country, and we have all the elements of a state”.

What they are waiting for, she says, is for the world to recognise it.

The Interview

Tsai Ing-wan travelled around the country with Rupert Wingfield-Hayes for an inclusive interview to discuss her legacy in the final days of her presidency with her.

Watch now on iPlayer

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