Forging Enmity in the Taiwan Strait: Attuned Misrecognition and Targeted Invalidation in the Making of a Hobbesian Culture

The Taiwan Strait conflict threatens to shatter the global economy and draw the world into war. What makes this increasingly heated perpetual standoff so uniquely intractable?

Forging Enmity in the Taiwan Strait explains the conflict as an existential collision between political communities expressing collective identities that are bedrock mutually exclusive. For the Chinese Community Party, Taiwan’s autonomy sabotages the “Great Rejuvenation of the Chinese Nation.” For the major political communities in Taiwan, cross-Strait unification would mean the annihilation of Taiwan’s cherished democratic autonomous selfhood.

This book uncovers the toxic dynamics that keep the rival communities locked in their spiral of hostility. The core of the cross-Strait conflict is not some tragic misunderstanding. It is instead a process in which each community supplies the others with attuned misrecognition.  The key actors – Taiwan’s competing Green and Blue camps, and the PRC’s Red leadership – all possess an acute understanding of the others, and all weaponize this understanding through targeted invalidation: deliberately denying the recognition that the others crave.

Based on a big-data-fueled analysis of Green, Blue, and Red political commentary, this book reveals how cross-Strait enmity is actively constructed. The book offers an essential explanation for why the key actors risk their physical safety – Taiwan’s and China’s both –  to defend their sense of a collective self, and why the Strait remains the world's most dangerous flashpoint.

Daniel C. Lynch is a professor of international relations at the City University of Hong Kong. Prior to 2017, he was for twenty years a professor of international relations at the University of Southern California.

Cody Wai-Kwok Yau is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Soochow University in Taiwan. He holds a PhD in Political Science from National Sun Yat-sen University.