China’s soft power strategy towards Taiwan

Since the beginning of this century China has been expanding its influence in the South-East Asia region and beyond. It has introduced a new term to describe its pre-superpower status - a “peaceful development”. The PRC has been creating a new country brand for its legitimacy as a rising power - it underlines that it doesn’t want to interfere in any country’s internal matters, and relationship with China is mutually beneficial to all, who choose to cooperate with it. The brand-creation process reached its peak during the recent Olympic Games held in Beijing in August 2008. China showed its rich history and tradition, connected with high level of governmental and individual entrepreneurship, which has brought it to the position of the fastest growing economy in the world. The same brand creation strategy, as in the case of international strategy, has been used towards the Taiwanese in order to fulfill the big dream of “One China”- to reach the strategic goal of unification. Taiwan Strait has been considered as one of the potential trouble spots in the rivalry between the current (USA) and coming (PRC) superpowers. For this reason, researchers, political advisers and decision-makers need to keep a close eye on the events in the Strait. Currently the Taiwan – China relations seem to experience a détente, but as Taiwan is a democratic country and there are other than KMT players on the domestic political arena, next president might change his perspective and lead the Formosa to the collision course with the PRC and the PLA. Therefore the matters regarding bilateral relations of the ROC and the PRC need to be handled with a particular care in order not to cause an unnecessary military confrontation, most likely even the nuclear one. The general interest of this paper is to assess the influence of the rising interdependence between Taiwan and China on the Taiwanese people, and try to predict the future of Taiwan and the development of its relationship with the PRC. That is why this study wants to empirically examine China’s means to achieve its most wanted goal - incorporation (integration) of Taiwan and obtaining territorial integrity of the “Greater China” area