Trump’s return to power rattles nerves in Taiwan

Hualien, Taiwan: From the second floor balcony of his modest home, Lee Jin-He can see over a barbed wire fence into an airfield where F-16 fighter jets scream down the runway on a near daily basis.

The 68-year-old has lived in this small east-coast village in the shadow of Chiashan Air Force Base for 40 years, where the spectre of a conflict between Taiwan and China has become more of a quotidian annoyance than an existential threat.

“The sound is ear-piercing when the jets take off. It’s almost every day and is very disturbing,” Lee, a retired construction worker, says. He lives here with his son and three grandchildren.

The firepower of the F-16s – which scramble when Chinese jets encroach on Taiwan’s defence zones and for their own training drills – sends vibrations through the concrete walls of nearby homes and rattles the window panes.

The scrambling has intensified since Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te, who is loathed by the Chinese government for championing the island’s sovereignty and democracy, came to power last May.

Lee is indigenous Taiwanese, as are many of his neighbours, meaning they trace their ancestral roots to the tribes that inhabited the island before Han settlers arrived from China in the 17th century.

Their homes are about as close as civilians can get to the air force base, which is strategically critical to Taiwan’s defence and contains a massive underground network of heavily fortified hangars designed to protect about 200 aircraft in the event of a Chinese attack.

The fighter jets, along with the other defence systems Taiwan buys from America, are a symbol of US power in the region and a linchpin of the self-governed island’s security.

For years, US policy on Taiwan has centred on the idea that Washington must deter Beijing from annexing the island by holding out the prospect that it may, without giving a guarantee, come to its defence – a move that would escalate a regional conflict into a catastrophic all-out war with no winners.

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But with the second-coming of President Donald Trump to the White House, American foreign policy is being turned on its head. His broader China strategy is yet to take shape as officials and analysts in Washington, Beijing, Taipei and elsewhere try to parse his administration’s contradictory signals.

The strategy will be closely scrutinised in Canberra, as China ramps activity in the Indo-Pacific region. Beijing tested the ever volatile Australia-China relationship last week when its warships conducted live-fire exercises in international waters off Australia’s east coast, forcing commercial flights to divert course.

For 23 million Taiwanese, many of whom have grown weary of being endlessly strategised by foreign governments and war-gamers, Trump’s return adds another layer of uncertainty to a destiny they feel is largely beyond their control.

“I don’t think Trump will be good for Taiwan’s future. He is too crazy and arrogant,” Lee says.

“We should just try to coexist peacefully instead of confronting the regime on the other side of the Taiwan Strait.”

His concerns are not grounded in fears that Trump’s isolationist tendencies will weaken America’s resolve in defending Taiwan. Rather, he is worried that Taiwan’s pledge to ramp up its purchase of American weapons – one of Trump’s key demands and something that already infuriates China – will rupture the uneasy, yet peaceful, status quo that underpins life on the island.

It is a view that is common among supporters of Taiwan’s opposition Kuomintang Party, which wants to foster closer ties with Beijing and counts Hualien as one of its political strongholds.

A few streets away, Zhou Jun Qi, a 30-year-old kitchen manufacturer, is collecting lunch from a motorbike delivery driver. He doesn’t know much about Trump, except that he is a businessman, and that Taiwan is a pawn on the chessboard between the United States and China.

“If Taiwan becomes more alienated from the US, then there’s a higher chance of China launching attacks on Taiwan. Trump will be a big determining factor in that,” Zhou says.

Taiwan’s silicon shield

Trump was a popular figure in Taiwan during his first administration. He was seen as a strong supporter of the island, and approved almost $US19 billion in arms sales, including dozens of F-16 fighter jets. As president-elect in 2016, he famously took a congratulatory call from then-leader Tsai Ing-wen, in an unprecedented departure from US policy that enraged Beijing.

But his recalibration of the US-Taiwan relationship in transactional terms is now triggering fresh anxiety within the Lai government about how much it can count on America being in its corner in coming years.

Irritated by Taiwan’s record-level trade surplus with the US, Trump has repeatedly accused Taipei of stealing America’s chip industry and last week signalled he would slap a minimum 25 per cent tariff on semiconductor imports from April.

“It’s not exactly treating Taiwan the way you treat a friend,” Wen-Ti Sung, a Taipei-based specialist on China-Taiwan relations at the Australian National University, says.

“Undermining Taiwan’s economic vitality through tariffs, while asking Taiwan to more than double its defence budget, is not economically viable for Taiwan.”

To prove its value to Washington, Lai has pledged to increase Taiwan’s defence spending from 2.5 per cent of GDP to more than 3 per cent – still well below the massive 10 per cent Trump has called for – and is reportedly in talks with the Trump administration about a multibillion-dollar arms purchase. Taipei also dispatched two economic envoys to Washington this month to try to talk the Trump team around on chip tariffs.

Hsinchu Science Park, dubbed Taiwan’s Silicon Valley, about an hour’s drive from Taipei, is the epicentre of Taiwan’s so-called silicon shield, which produces 65 per cent of the world’s semiconductors and more than 90 per cent of the most advanced ones. The industry is an immense source of national pride and the “ace up its sleeve” to protect Taiwan from Chinese aggression, while incentivising its international friends to help stave off that threat.

The jewel in the island’s chip crown is the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), often called “the world’s most important factory”. Its chips are the most advanced available and used in everything from cars and phones to weapons systems. If the industry were to shut down or be destroyed in a war it would level a massive economic blow to the US and its allies.

“Trump’s comments are a reflection of how much he distrusts and discredits Taiwan’s efforts in the semiconductor industry,” says Tracey Ling, 35, a TSMC worker as she walks home after a shift on a crisp February evening.

“Everything is more uncertain now.”

Around the corner from TSMC is the United Microelectronics Corporation headquarters, Taiwan’s first semiconductor factory founded by billionaire Robert Tsao, an outspoken critic of Beijing.

Aaron Huang, a 41-year-old UMC employee, believes Trump’s accusations about Taiwan stealing the chip sector are unfair and that the tariffs will hobble the industry’s progress, but he is not worried about the US cutting a deal with Beijing.

“It’s just politics,” he says. “Taiwan plays an irreplaceable role in the semiconductor industry. I don’t think that will be traded off in a deal with China.”

Trump’s star fades in Taiwan

The Chinese Communist Party has never ruled Taiwan, but claims the island as part of its territory and views any moves to secure the island’s independence as a red line that would trigger war.

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In recent years, Chinese President Xi Jinping has escalated Beijing’s bellicose rhetoric about “reunifying” the island with the mainland by force and, according to US intelligence, has instructed the army to be operationally capable of executing a takeover by 2027, though his actual intentions are unknown.

It’s a timeline that overlaps with Trump’s second stint in the Oval Office – one that has already, in its opening weeks, alarmed America’s closest allies. They have been left scrambling amid an onslaught of tariff threats, US withdrawals from international bodies, axing of foreign aid funding and the confounding thought-bubbles of buying Greenland and turning Gaza into the “Riviera of the Middle East”.

But it is Trump’s approach to brokering peace in Ukraine directly with Russian President Vladimir Putin that is being closely watched with apprehension in Taipei. By excluding Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky from peace talks in Saudi Arabia this month, the Trump administration signalled its willingness to side with the aggressor at the expense of a democracy. Trump then stunned US allies by falsely suggesting Zelensky had started the war and was a “dictator”.

“It’s a big warning sign to Taiwan,” says Lev Nachman, a political scientist at National Taiwan University in Taipei.

“It leads to the potential that, under certain conditions, maybe Donald Trump is willing to negotiate with Xi over a deal with Taiwan in a scenario in which Taiwan has no agency and is not directly involved in its own future.”

However, senior members of Trump’s team, including Vice President JD Vance, have also argued that the US should stop helping Ukraine so that it can focus on countering China.

“This shows the importance of Taiwan,” says Su Tzu-yun, a senior official at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defence and Security Research. But he adds, Taiwan’s highest priority must be strengthening itself “rather than guessing when Beijing will strike and whether Washington will help”.

Trump has not publicly committed America to defending Taiwan if it were attacked by China, as his predecessor Joe Biden did while insisting that US policy had not changed. Instead, Trump has demanded Taiwan pay the US for its defence. At the same time, the Trump administration last week deleted the phrase “we do not support Taiwan independence” from a fact sheet on the US State Department website, infuriating Beijing.

He has stacked his cabinet with China hawks such as new Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a staunch supporter of Taiwan, while elevating billionaire Elon Musk to a right-hand-man figure. Musk has close business ties to China and has mused in the past that Taiwan should accept a Hong Kong-style “one country, two systems” deal with Beijing.

“The odds of Trump seeing the attraction of a big deal where he’s the guy who ‘solves the Taiwan problem’ is something that can’t be ruled out,” said Bill Bishop, a China analyst who is plugged into Washington’s political circles, in recent podcast for his Sinocism newsletter.

Everyday life infused with messy geopolitics

It’s a Sunday afternoon at the Huashan creative arts precinct in the heart of Taipei where locals are soaking up the last few hours of weekend sun in a nearby park. Families are out parading their manicured dogs, kids are flying kites, and people are queuing at a sausage stand that is tantalising customers with wafts of sizzling pork.

It’s a wholesome snapshot of everyday life, a world away from the messy geopolitics that swirls around Taiwan. Zheng Kaiyuan, 49, is picnicking with his wife and daughters, but like so many Taiwanese he can flick the switch to a political chat with ease.

“The next four years will be worrying,” says Zheng, an internet salesman. Taiwan’s political classes are already deeply polarised, he says, with regularly unedifying clashes in parliament between pro-Beijing opposition MPs and the independence-leaning government camp that sees the CCP as a threat.

“Taiwan needs to come up with some deals for Donald Trump, but policymakers cannot agree on this – it’s chaotic, there’s no togetherness.”

On the other side of the park, Allan Tsai, a 28-year-old medical lab worker, sees a silver lining in Trump’s White House return, so long as it keeps the international focus on Taiwan.

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“Trump is tough on China. That could increase Taiwan’s leverage and our visibility in the world,” he says. “I think Trump brings more good to Taiwan than bad.”

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