Will Democracy Bring Peace Across the Taiwan Strait

Abstract

The Taiwan question is the most important issue in US-PRC relations. A decision by the PRC to resolve the issue militarily would jeopardize major US interests in the East Asian region. Drawing largely on democratic peace theory, which asserts that democracies do not go to war with one another, some assessments of the Taiwan question argue that peaceful resolution of the reunification issue must rest on the transformation of the PRC's authoritarian political system into a democracy. This belief also has been an implicit premise of the US approach to engagement with the PRC. The US policy of engagement focuses on democratic peace as a panacea for the Taiwan question, assuming that a democratic China will not forcibly reunite Taiwan with the mainland. This thesis questions that assumption and argues that there are solid grounds for suspecting that were the PRC to become a democracy, the Taiwan issue may not be any more amenable to peaceful resolution. Resolution, in fact, may be even more difficult to achieve between two Chinese democracies.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2000
Accession Number
ADA381076

Entities

People

  • Jenifer M. Greenough

Organizations

  • Naval Postgraduate School

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Biomedical
  • Counter WMD
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Space
  • Weapons Technologies

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Commerce
  • Economic Development
  • Economic Systems
  • Foreign Relations
  • Governments
  • Intergovernmental Organizations
  • International Law
  • International Organizations
  • International Relations
  • Investments
  • Law
  • Market Economy
  • National Politics
  • National Security
  • Political Systems
  • Recreation
  • War Colleges

Fields of Study

  • Political science

Readers

  • Asian Economic Studies
  • Strategic Security Studies