Can Taiwan Escape Hong Kong's Fate? Why the Two Stories Diverge

In a geopolitical climate full of gray zones, there is perhaps no zone grayer than the island of Taiwan. A territory that has ping-ponged between great empires for centuries, it is today a self-governing democratic country caught between politically charged narratives and the reality on the ground for the people who actually live there.

Strip away the diplomatic euphemisms and the situation comes down to two stubborn facts that point in opposite directions. Xi Jinping really, genuinely wants to bring the island under the control of the People’s Republic of China. And most Taiwanese really, genuinely do not want that to happen. For many years, that second fact was far less certain.

There was once broad support in Taiwan for eventual reunification under some version of the “One Country, Two Systems” arrangement that governed Hong Kong, a model created in large part to woo Taiwan into Beijing’s orbit by showcasing its success.

Then 2019 happened. The world, and especially the Taiwanese, watched in real time how serious the Chinese Communist Party truly was about preserving Hong Kong’s unique institutions and way of life. The answer, it turned out, was: not very. Today Hong Kong functions less as an enticement to the Taiwanese than as a warning of what their own future might hold if the CCP gets its way.

But how comparable are the fates of these two territories, really? And, more importantly, can Taiwan learn anything from the snuffing out of Hong Kong’s independent culture before the same thing happens to it? The honest answer is that Taiwan and Hong Kong rhyme, but they do not repeat: the differences in sovereignty, military strength, economic leverage, and national identity give Taiwan a fighting chance that Hong Kong never had.

A Tale of Two Outposts

For two centuries, Taiwan and Hong Kong have been subjected to the will of various global powers. The roll call of past rulers is long: the Qing Chinese, the Dutch, the Spanish, the Japanese, the British, and most recently the People’s Republic of China. Each left its mark, and each treated these places as outposts to be held, traded, or contested rather than as nations in their own right.

The similarities run deeper than a shared history of foreign domination. Demographically, both territories are predominantly populated by ethnic Han Chinese, and both were at one point or another controlled by pre-communist Imperial China. To Beijing, this shared lineage is not a historical footnote but a claim of ownership, a thread that ties the modern island and the former colony back to a single Chinese family.

That framing is central to how the Chinese Communist Party understands itself. The subjugation of Hong Kong and Taiwan by the CCP’s enemies is treated by the government in Beijing as a prime example of China’s “Century of Humiliation” in the 19th century, when foreign powers carved up a weakened empire. The effort to reclaim and control these territories, together with the quelling of independence movements in the western provinces of Xinjiang and Tibet, has been one of the key justifications for the rule of the CCP since it took over the country in 1949.

By Beijing’s own metrics, that effort has been a triumph. Of the four contested territories of Xinjiang, Tibet, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, three are now firmly back under Beijing’s control. Hong Kong was the most recent to fall fully into line. Taiwan remains the conspicuous exception, the one piece of the puzzle that has so far refused to fit.

The Long Reach of the United Front

All of these places have been targets of the shadowy United Front Work Department, a bureau within the CCP responsible for expanding Party influence over groups and individuals who are not directly affiliated with the Party, both inside China and abroad. It is one of the oldest and most durable instruments in the Party’s toolkit, designed to win loyalty, or at least compliance, without firing a shot.

Hong Kong and Taiwan make similar targets for the United Front. Both are highly urbanized, modern societies with robust civil institutions, and to the CCP those very institutions look like dangerous counterweights to its own power. A free press, independent courts, and an organized civil society are exactly the kinds of structures that can resist quiet pressure, which is precisely why they draw the Party’s attention.

The parallel between the plight of the Taiwanese and that of Hong Kongers has not been lost on the people themselves. There is an extensive history of cross-border activism between the two, driven recently by the migration of Hong Kong democracy activists to Taiwan, who have sought refuge from the long arm of the CCP. The two populations increasingly see one another as kindred spirits facing the same adversary.

That migration is itself a source of anxiety for Beijing. The fact that many of the most vocal activists from Hong Kong’s intense 2019 anti-CCP protests have fled to Taiwan turns the island into something dangerous in the Party’s eyes. Beijing cannot afford for Taiwan to be seen as “the Alamo” of democratic governance in greater China. So long as a flame of hope survives among activists who still remember the dream of a democratic Hong Kong, the central government in mainland China has a problem it cannot fully extinguish.

Yet for all these genuine similarities, there are also genuine differences between the situations of the Taiwanese and Hong Kongers. Understanding those differences may be the key to understanding Taiwan’s potential future.

Sovereignty: A Conquest, Not a Crackdown

The first major difference is sovereignty, and it is the one that shapes everything else. When the British handed Hong Kong back to China in 1997, that was effectively the end of the argument. In the eyes of international law, the question of who legally controlled the territory was settled. China owned Hong Kong, full stop.

It could do what it wanted within its own borders. The only thing standing in the way was a promise: that Hong Kong would be governed under a “One Country, Two Systems” framework outlined in the Sino-British Joint Declaration. A promise, as it turned out, is not the same as a guarantee.

Taiwan’s backstory is far more ambiguous. The island has been self-governing since 1949, when the Nationalist Kuomintang government fled there after losing the Chinese Civil War. For over 75 years now, Taiwan has had its own government, its own military, its own currency, and its own political story, including a hard-won transition to democracy after the end of a KMT dictatorship in 1987. None of that history runs through Beijing.

The implication is profound. Any move by Beijing to take control of Taiwan is not about tightening its grip within territory it already controls. It is about conquering a place it has never actually governed. That is a fundamentally different proposition, both legally and practically. Crushing dissent in a city you already rule is one thing. Seizing a functioning democracy across a body of water, against the will of its people and the gaze of the world, is something else entirely.

Military Capability and the Strait

The second major difference is military capability, and here the gap is even starker. Hong Kong never had its own army, navy, or air force. For its entire history as a major city it has lived under the protection of either the British or the Chinese. It was a place defended by others, never by itself.

So when Beijing decided to crack down in 2019 with a sweeping national security law, Hong Kong’s only real defense was its people in the streets, armed with umbrellas and fireworks. Brave? Absolutely. But one city of about 7 million people standing against the full weight of a superpower was never a contest that could be won on those terms. They never stood a real chance.

Taiwan is a different story altogether. The island maintains a standing military of roughly 215,000 active personnel, with reserves numbering in the millions. It has fighter jets, submarines, and missile systems, and it sits behind a geography that makes invasion extraordinarily difficult. The Taiwan Strait alone is a formidable defensive barrier, 130 kilometers of rough water that any invasion force would have to cross before it could even reach the beaches.

Amphibious assaults are among the hardest operations in all of warfare, and the strait turns Taiwan’s coastline into a natural moat.

This does not make Taiwan invincible. But it does mean that taking the island by force would be a vastly more costly, complicated, and uncertain undertaking than anything Beijing faced in Hong Kong. A crackdown is an act of administration. An invasion is an act of war, with all the risk, expense, and unpredictability that word implies.

The American Question and Strategic Ambiguity

Then there is the big red, white, and blue elephant in the room. While the United States does not officially recognize Taiwan as an independent country, it has long maintained what is known as “strategic ambiguity” about whether it would defend the island militarily. The deliberate vagueness is the point: it keeps Beijing guessing and discourages reckless moves on both sides of the strait.

The substance behind that ambiguity is considerable. The United States has sold Taiwan tens of billions of dollars in weapons, and multiple American presidents have suggested they would come to Taiwan’s defense, most recently Joe Biden. Donald Trump, by contrast, has chosen to keep his cards closer to the chest, refusing to say definitively whether he would defend the island. That uncertainty cuts in two directions, complicating Beijing’s calculus while also leaving Taipei without an ironclad guarantee.

Hong Kong had no such ambiguity to begin with. No foreign power was ever going to go to war with China over Hong Kong, and everyone understood as much. Taiwan is a genuinely different case. The possibility, however hedged, that an attack could draw in the United States and its allies introduces a level of risk into Beijing’s planning that simply did not exist over Hong Kong.

The Silicon Shield

There is one more layer of Taiwanese leverage that no amount of military planning in Beijing can easily neutralize: chips. Because of its near-monopoly on the advanced computer chip industry, even a temporary loss of supply from the island could be devastating to the modern global economy, particularly to heavily digitized economies like that of the United States.

The numbers explain why this matters so much. Taiwan produces over 70 percent of the world’s smartphone chips and about 90 percent of the most advanced chips. Those chips go into everything, from iPhones to fighter jets to the servers powering artificial intelligence. Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, is arguably the most important company in the world for the development of modern digital infrastructure.

That single fact means everyone, friend and rival alike, has a vested interest in its facilities not being blown up or captured.

This is sometimes called a “silicon shield,” and it has no real equivalent in Hong Kong’s story. Hong Kong was certainly important as a financial hub for China while the mainland built up its economic power in the early 21st century. But that value was always destined to diminish as the financial markets in Shenzhen and Shanghai grew to surpass the Hong Kong index itself. Once the mainland had its own world-class financial centers, Hong Kong’s unique role became, from Beijing’s perspective, expendable.

Because of that, there was no longer any compelling reason for the CCP to let Hong Kong keep its unique style of governance and relative independence. Classical liberalism, it was decided, had run its course there. And the Western financial firms with vested interests in Hong Kong proved unwilling to stand up for the liberal institutions that underpinned their entire way of doing business once it threatened their bottom line on the mainland.

The CCP simply does not hold the same pressure points over international firms in Taiwan. The Taiwanese economy has always maintained more independence from the mainland than Hong Kong did, and the CCP has no direct control over Taiwan’s legal institutions.

A Distinct and Hardening Identity

The last critical difference is the most decisive of all: cultural and national identity. By the time Beijing cracked down on Hong Kong in 2019, a growing number of Hong Kongers self-identified as distinct from mainland Chinese, but they were still a minority. Taiwan’s sense of separate identity is far more developed and far more entrenched.

The polling tells the story bluntly. Over 60 percent of people in Taiwan now identify solely as Taiwanese, and another 35 percent identify as mixed. Fewer than 5 percent self-identify as only Chinese. And the share of self-identifying Taiwanese has been growing year over year, especially among young people who have known nothing but a free and democratic island.

To put it plainly, Taiwan has had over seven decades to develop its own culture, its own political traditions, and its own national identity. Its people have enjoyed free speech, free press, and free assembly for a full generation. That is not something 23 million people are likely to surrender easily. Hong Kong’s independent identity, by contrast, was younger, less distinct, and ultimately existed at Beijing’s pleasure.

The relative strength of Taiwan’s identity is probably the single most crucial difference across the entire comparison.

None of which means Beijing has given up on reversing the trend. The CCP has a deep bag of tricks for influencing the island, and it has been reaching into it for years.

Infiltration and the United Front Playbook

When it comes to infiltrating and influencing a society, the CCP has a few old favorites it returns to time and again. The biggest is the United Front Work Department. It is best understood as a combination of a lobbying firm, an intelligence agency, and a propaganda ministry, all rolled into a single opaque government bureaucracy.

In Hong Kong, the United Front worked through several key channels. It cultivated business elites, offering them lucrative deals on the mainland in exchange for political support. It infiltrated civil society organizations, funding groups that would promote pro-Beijing narratives. And it worked through community organizations, particularly those serving older populations who felt more nostalgic about Chinese identity.

The strategy was to weave a web of economic dependencies and social pressures that made opposing Beijing politically and financially costly. A business owner who spoke out might suddenly find his mainland contracts drying up. A pro-democracy candidate for local office might find himself isolated as civil society groups quietly distanced themselves.

In Taiwan, Beijing has been running a similar playbook, but with far more uneven results. The United Front has actively targeted Taiwanese business people with investments on the mainland, trying to turn them into lobbyists for Beijing’s interests. It has funded media outlets that push pro-unification messaging, and it has worked through temples and cultural organizations to promote the idea of a shared Chinese heritage.

It has also poured enormous effort into Taiwan’s political parties. Although the modern Kuomintang is directly descended from the party that lost the Chinese Civil War to the communists, it has become the major party whose words and actions align most closely with the CCP on reunification. Having ruled the island as a nationalist single-party state from 1949 until martial law was lifted in 1987, the KMT may actually have more in common with the CCP than first meets the eye, particularly when it comes to governing tactics.

Despite all this, Taiwan remains far tougher terrain for the United Front than Hong Kong ever was. It has a free press that can expose covert operations from the mainland, an independent stock exchange and business community, and, crucially, no history of deference to CCP authority, because it has never been under the control of the People’s Republic.

Legal Shenanigans and the Battle Over Status

So what is an authoritarian superpower to do when its shadowy department fails to deliver the goods? Not warfare, at least not yet. Instead, Beijing has turned to legal instruments and reinterpretation.

In Hong Kong, China leaned on the Basic Law, the territory’s mini-constitution, and on its own interpretations of it, to drag Hong Kong steadily closer into its orbit. The framework of “One Country, Two Systems” gave Beijing the legal cover it needed. When it finally wanted to crack down, it passed the National Security Law in 2020, citing its sovereign right to protect national security in its own territory. In Beijing’s definition, of course, those seeking democratic governance for Hong Kong were themselves a threat to national security, which cleared the way for the crackdown the world watched unfold.

The international community objected, arguing that China had violated the spirit of the Sino-British Joint Declaration. But it ultimately could not do much, because international law on sovereignty was on China’s side. Hong Kong was Chinese territory, and what China did there was, legally speaking, an internal matter. That legal reality is exactly what Taiwan does not share.

For Taiwan, Beijing relies on different legal tools. The most important is the Anti-Secession Law, passed in 2005, which authorizes the use of “non-peaceful means” if Taiwan moves toward formal independence, if the possibilities for peaceful reunification are exhausted, or if Taiwan experiences major internal unrest. It is a deliberately vague law that hands Beijing maximum flexibility.

The CCP also cites UN Resolution 2758 from 1971, which recognized the PRC as “the only legitimate representative of China to the United Nations” rather than the representatives of the Republic of China, Taiwan’s formal name. Beijing interprets this as the UN recognizing Taiwan as part of China.

Taiwan disputes that reading, arguing that the resolution only addressed which government represents “China” at the UN, not whether Taiwan is part of that China. In a strange way, this legal ambiguity actually works in Taiwan’s favor. It keeps the status quo in a fuzzy middle ground, where Taiwan remains de facto independent while not provoking Beijing by formally declaring independence.

It satisfies no one completely, but it has allowed both sides of the strait to hold on to their own narratives. That is a fundamentally different legal situation from the one the people of Hong Kong found themselves in during the crackdown, and Beijing knows it. So it looks to flip the script in arenas outside the courtroom and the halls of the United Nations, which brings us to China’s final major gambit: social control.

Social Control and Information Warfare

If there is one thing the CCP has always understood, it is good old-fashioned social control. The tool has been used in both Hong Kong and Taiwan, but the key differences between the two have caused the outcomes to diverge in important ways.

In Hong Kong, the CCP gradually tightened its grip on the flow of information using the National Security Law first proposed in 2019. Pro-democracy media outlets were first pressured, then shut down. Apple Daily, one of Hong Kong’s most popular newspapers and a fierce critic of Beijing, was forced to close in 2021 after its assets were frozen and its executives arrested. Those executives did not stew in jail alone.

Journalists were jailed too, while academic freedom was curtailed at universities by administrators compromised by the United Front. The internet remained relatively free in technical terms, but the National Security Law made people genuinely afraid to speak out online. Self-censorship became the norm. When people fear that a single social media post could land them in jail, they tend to keep their opinions to themselves.

The goal was not merely to silence dissent. It was to make people forget that dissent had ever been possible, to reshape the entire information environment so that questioning Beijing became unthinkable. It is a quieter, more insidious form of control than mass arrests, and in many ways a more permanent one.

Taiwan is a tougher target for this strategy, because China does not control Taiwan’s law enforcement institutions and cannot simply jail its critics. So Beijing has tried alternative approaches built on modern information warfare. CCP disinformation campaigns in Taiwan are sophisticated and relentless. They deploy fake social media accounts, manipulated videos, fabricated news stories, and coordinated trolling campaigns to push narratives that serve Beijing’s interests.

During elections, these efforts go into overdrive.

This was on full display in the 2024 presidential election, the first of the AI age. The political media space was flooded with a torrent of AI-generated videos, articles, and even full books slandering candidates for office. The messaging varies.

Sometimes it promotes pro-unification candidates, sometimes it sows distrust in democratic institutions, and sometimes it simply spreads chaos and confusion to make democratic governance seem impossible to the average voter. One particularly effective tactic has been exploiting existing social divisions, the generational divides, regional differences, and political polarization that exist in any free society. CCP information operations amplify these fault lines on social media, making every disagreement feel like an existential crisis.

But Taiwan has fought back. It has established fact-checking organizations, passed laws requiring transparency in political advertising, and created government agencies specifically tasked with countering disinformation. The battle is ongoing and far from won, but Taiwan can mount defenses that Hong Kong was never able to deploy. And the effort has clearly paid off: for all the sophistication of Beijing’s propaganda, it failed to sway the outcome of the 2024 election.

The winning candidate turned out to be the one least amenable to China’s position.

Identity, Democracy, and the Macau Contrast

At the end of the day, the questions surrounding the fate of Hong Kong and Taiwan are ultimately questions of identity and political values. And while many people in each territory see the other as kindred spirits, each has its own distinct outlook.

In Hong Kong, the relationship with Chinese identity was always hazy. Many Hong Kongers felt culturally Chinese but politically distinct. They valued their Cantonese language and their cosmopolitan lifestyle, yet the lines between them and the mainland grew increasingly blurry as China modernized and developed a market economy resembling their own. Beijing exploited that blurriness, appealing to ethnic solidarity, cultural heritage, and the idea that Hong Kongers and mainlanders were all one family separated only by a history of colonialism.

For some, especially older generations, the message resonated.

A useful contrast is the city of Macau, a former Portuguese colony also governed under the “One Country, Two Systems” framework. Hong Kongers had received assurances from the British government that they might one day enjoy universal suffrage under Chinese sovereignty, even though the British themselves never granted them democratic rule while they were in charge. That dream of democracy, alive in Hong Kong’s public discourse, is a major reason the city remained difficult for the CCP to fully control despite the deep cultural ties.

In Macau, universal suffrage was never on the table, so its people do not feel they are being cheated out of their end of the bargain with the CCP. Expectations shape grievance, and Hong Kong’s expectations had been raised in a way Macau’s never were.

Taiwan’s identity evolution has been different and more definitive. After decades of self-governance, Taiwanese identity has solidified into something distinct from Chinese identity for a majority of the population. Young people in particular have no memory of authoritarian rule. They have grown up with free elections, a free press, and free assembly.

They have traveled the world on Taiwanese passports and built careers and lives in a system that, however imperfect, is fundamentally their own. For many Taiwanese, the democratic question is bound up with identity itself. It is not just about ethnicity or geography. It is about values, institutions, and a way of life.

So when many Taiwanese look at China today, they no longer see a motherland. They see an authoritarian state that would strip away the freedoms they have fought for over generations. The 2019 crackdown on the Hong Kong protests crystallized that fear and turned it into a political force.

How the Crackdown Backfired

Here lies the great irony of Beijing’s approach. If “One Country, Two Systems” was meant to be the model that would entice Taiwan into peaceful reunification, then overruling the second system by force was, to put it mildly, not the brightest idea. Beijing always wanted the pitch to be a reassuring one: look at Hong Kong, thriving under the warm blanket of Chinese protection while keeping its unique character intact.

But when Hong Kong’s freedoms were crushed, that entire narrative collapsed. Taiwanese people saw exactly what “One Country, Two Systems” meant in practice, and a majority wanted no part of it. Support for full reunification, already in decline, fell off a cliff. According to the Taiwanese Public Opinion Foundation, support for reunification dropped from 22.7 percent in January 2019 to 13.6 percent in June of the same year.

Over the same period, support for Taiwanese independence rose from 35.1 percent to 49.7 percent.

This makes Beijing’s task immeasurably harder. Not only are the strategies it used in Hong Kong now more difficult to apply, but the very fact of having used them in Hong Kong hardened Taiwanese identity, loosening its historical ties to mainland China a little more with each passing day. Beijing reached for an example that would draw Taiwan in, and instead created a warning that pushed it further away. The most powerful argument for Taiwanese independence turned out to be Beijing’s own conduct in Hong Kong.

The Road Ahead

So after weighing all of this, where does Taiwan actually stand? Can it escape Hong Kong’s fate? The honest answer is that no one knows for certain, and anyone who claims otherwise should be treated with suspicion.

What can be said is that Taiwan’s situation is fundamentally different from Hong Kong’s in ways that improve its chances of holding on to de facto independence, at least for the time being. The military deterrence, the international support, the economic leverage, the developed democracy, and the distinct identity are all factors that Hong Kong either lacked or had never fully developed. But none of that means Taiwan is safe. Far from it. The signs are pointing in some dangerous directions.

Xi Jinping has made clear that reunification with Taiwan is a priority for his legacy. The Chinese military is modernizing rapidly, specifically preparing for a Taiwan scenario. The window during which US military superiority could guarantee Taiwan’s defense may be closing, especially given Donald Trump’s reorientation of US defense policy toward the Western Hemisphere, which could weaken American military influence in the Asia-Pacific region. The balance that has held for decades is not guaranteed to hold forever.

One thing Hong Kong taught the world is that Beijing is willing to sacrifice international goodwill, accept economic costs, and break its own promises once it decides that political control is the priority. The comfortable assumptions that economic interdependence would prevent conflict, or that international pressure would constrain China’s actions, have proved naive. Every Taiwanese citizen knows what happened in Hong Kong. They watched the protests, the crackdowns, the arrests, and the systematic dismantling of a free society.

They know what their future holds if Beijing has its way.

But unlike Hong Kong, Taiwan has the capacity to resist. Whether it can resist forever, or whether it can find some third path between surrender and perpetual confrontation, remains one of the defining questions of our era. One thing, at least, is certain. Many people in Taiwan deeply value their democracy, their freedom, and their identity, and they are in no hurry to give those things up. That democratic will, expressed through the ballot box, is something Beijing will have to contend with, one way or another.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why is Hong Kong now seen as a warning rather than a model for Taiwan? Hong Kong was originally meant to showcase “One Country, Two Systems” as an attractive arrangement that would draw Taiwan toward reunification. But after Beijing’s 2019 crackdown and the 2020 National Security Law dismantled Hong Kong’s freedoms, the Taiwanese saw what the model meant in practice. Instead of an enticement, Hong Kong became a cautionary tale of what could happen to Taiwan if the CCP got its way.

What is the biggest difference between Hong Kong’s and Taiwan’s situations? There are several, but the most decisive is identity, closely followed by sovereignty. Hong Kong’s sovereignty passed legally to China in 1997, and its separate identity was young and existed at Beijing’s pleasure. Taiwan has governed itself since 1949, has never been ruled by the People’s Republic, and has developed a strong, distinct national identity, with over 60 percent of its people identifying solely as Taiwanese.

Why does Taiwan have so much economic leverage? Taiwan dominates the advanced semiconductor industry, producing over 70 percent of the world’s smartphone chips and roughly 90 percent of the most advanced chips through companies like TSMC. These chips power everything from iPhones to fighter jets to AI servers. That gives the entire global economy a powerful interest in Taiwan’s facilities remaining intact and operational, a form of leverage Hong Kong never had.

What is the United Front Work Department? It is a bureau within the CCP responsible for expanding Party influence over groups and individuals not directly affiliated with the Party, both inside China and abroad. It functions like a blend of a lobbying firm, an intelligence agency, and a propaganda ministry. It cultivates business elites, funds friendly media and civil society groups, and works through cultural and community organizations to build economic dependencies and social pressure.

How did Beijing’s pressure on Taiwan show up during elections? Through sophisticated disinformation. The CCP uses fake social media accounts, manipulated videos, fabricated news stories, and coordinated trolling to push pro-Beijing narratives and amplify Taiwan’s social divisions. The 2024 presidential election, the first of the AI age, saw the media space flooded with AI-generated content slandering candidates. Despite all of it, the candidate least amenable to China’s position won.

What legal tools does China use to press its claim over Taiwan? Beijing relies chiefly on the 2005 Anti-Secession Law, which authorizes “non-peaceful means” if Taiwan moves toward formal independence, if peaceful reunification becomes impossible, or if Taiwan suffers major internal unrest. It also cites UN Resolution 2758 from 1971, interpreting it as recognition that Taiwan is part of China. Taiwan disputes that reading, arguing the resolution only settled which government represents “China” at the UN.

Does Taiwan’s better position mean it is safe? No. Taiwan’s military, international backing, economic leverage, developed democracy, and distinct identity give it far better odds than Hong Kong ever had. But Xi Jinping has prioritized reunification, China’s military is modernizing rapidly for a Taiwan scenario, and a shift in US defense focus could weaken American influence in the Asia-Pacific. Whether Taiwan can resist indefinitely remains an open and defining question.

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