CHINA: The Volatile Ties With Taiwan

MADISON, WIS. â€”  For Communist leaders in Beijing, the results of last week’s election in Taiwan make the future of the island an even more complex and vexing question than it has been for the past half century. For the victor in the presidential race, Chen Shui-bian, who received 39% of the vote, is the leader of the Democratic Progressive Party, whose platform calls for an independent Taiwanese Republic. James Soong, an independent whom Beijing seemed to have favored, ran a close second, with 37%. The big loser was the Nationalist Party, which had ruled Taiwan since Chiang Kai-shek established his dictatorship there shortly after the end of World War II. The Nationalist Party was not only reduced to 23% of the popular vote, but its own supporters besieged party headquarters in violent protests, directed against former party head and President Lee Teng-hui, in the wake of the defeat.

It might have been expected that the disintegration of the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, against whom the Communists had fought a long and bloody civil war that ended with Chiang’s flight to Taiwan in 1949, would have brought rejoicing in Beijing. Instead, the demise of their old foes could well be a cause of despair among China’s Communist leaders.

The seeming paradox is not difficult to unravel. Historically, the 100-year-old Nationalist Party shares with its Communist rivals a firm commitment to the idea of “one China.� From the time of Sun Yat-sen, the “father of the nation� and the founder of the Nationalist Party, well before there was a Communist Party in China, the unification of the lands of the old Chinese empire, divided by warlords and foreign imperialists, was a sacred national mission. “China� included not only Taiwan, seized by Japan as war booty in 1895, but also such ethnically non-Chinese lands as Tibet and Mongolia.

In 1949, when Chiang fled to Taiwan with the remnants of his army and bureaucracy, after being defeated on the mainland by Mao Tse-tung’s Red Army, Taipei was presented not as the capital of an independent Taiwan but as the temporary seat of government for all China. The Nationalists vowed to retake the mainland, and elaborate preparations were made in the 1950s and 1960s for the great counterattack. The islands of Quemoy and Matsu, a few miles off the mainland shore, were heavily fortified by Nationalist troops and presented to the world (and particularly U.S. politicians) as forward bases in the coming war to retake the mainland.

For their part, the Communists ritualistically bombarded the islands, usually with shells filled with propaganda leaflets, but had no intention of occupying them. The offshore islands, of no real economic or military significance, were symbolic of a continuing civil war and therefore a symbol of the link between mainland China and Taiwan. Neither the Nationalist government in Taipei nor the Communist government in Beijing wished to remove the symbol.

Other symbols linking Taiwan to mainland China were also retained by the Nationalists. For example, Taiwan’s legislature, the Legislative Yuan, was dominated for many decades by delegates selected from China’s various provinces and territories before 1949. Though it had no real power, the composition of the Legislative Yuan personified the Nationalist claim to be China’s legitimate government.

Things began to change with the end of the Chiang family dictatorship. Chiang died in 1975. With the 1988 death of his son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo (who pursued somewhat less-repressive policies), the long-suppressed forces of Taiwanization and democratization blossomed. Those forces were felt even within the Nationalist Party, which had been under the control of “mainlanders�: those who fled to Taiwan with Chiang in the late 1940s and their descendants, now only 15% of the island’s population. The new leader of the Nationalist Party, and Taiwan’s first democratically elected president in 1996, was Lee Teng-hui, a native Taiwanese.

But Lee, though Taiwanese, could not make a credible case for an independent Taiwan. He is, after all, head of a Nationalist Party whose entire history and raison d’etre revolves around Chinese nationalism. Chinese nationalism, at a minimum, demands “one China,� including Taiwan. Lee’s rather awkward comments about “state to state� relations between Taiwan and China were not taken seriously in Beijing. Communist leaders were no doubt biding their time, waiting to deal with Lee’s successor, whom they expected to be a Nationalist Party official or an ex-Nationalist Party leader such as Soong. It has long been the Communist expectation that, sooner or later, the Nationalist Party, if not Lee, would cut a deal for some sort of “reunification� to achieve common Chinese nationalist goals.

These expectations were shattered by Chen’s surprising electoral victory. For he can make a far more credible historical case for Taiwanese independence--to the world at large if not to Beijing--than anyone elected under a Nationalist Party banner. Chen is not only a native Taiwanese (born in southern Taiwan in 1951, the son of poor peasants), but he is also the leader of a party that is the contemporary political heir to the long-banned Taiwanese independence movement. From the mid-1940s to the late 1980s, members of that movement were jailed, executed and exiled by the Nationalist Party dictatorship. Indeed, Chen first appeared on the political scene in 1980 as a lawyer defending (in vain) two Taiwanese independence activists charged with sedition. In 1986, Chen himself was jailed on a trumped-up charge of libeling a Nationalist official. He was released in 1987, when the Nationalist regime’s 40-year-old declaration of martial law was suspended.

Thus, Chen can make the historical case for an independent Taiwan more convincingly than any Nationalist Party leader. What, briefly, is that case? Will anyone in Beijing be listening?

An argument for an independent Taiwan cannot be made on the basis of international law, which favors Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is an integral part of the Chinese nation in virtually all respects. Nor can the Taiwanese claim a cultural and linguistic distinctiveness sufficient to support the demand for nationhood. The great majority of the island’s inhabitants, the so-called “native� Taiwanese, are descendants of families who emigrated to Taiwan from the mainland, especially Fujian province, in the 18th and 19th centuries, when Taiwan was part of China’s Qing dynasty. Culturally, ethnically and linguistically, the Taiwanese are no more distinctive than the distinctions that exist on the mainland among Chinese from different regions.

The case for an independent Taiwan is a historical one, indeed an accident of China’s turbulent modern history, that begins with a war that modernizing Japan waged against the decaying Chinese empire in 1894-95. As a result of that war, Taiwan was turned into a colony of imperial Japan and remained so until the defeat of Japan in World War II in 1945. The main results of that half century of Japanese colonial rule were three-fold. First, the people of Taiwan were cut off from the crucial political and intellectual developments of modern Chinese history: the 1911 republican revolution, the May 4th movement, the anti-Japanese resistance movement and the Communist revolution. The Taiwanese, thus, did not experience the events that fostered the growth of modern Chinese nationalism.

Second, Japanese colonial rule brought political centralization, economic development, the growth of a sizable middle and professional class and the breaking down of traditional local loyalties. These forces promoted a sense of Taiwanese national consciousness quite separate from Chinese nationalism on the mainland. Third, resentment against the harshness of Japanese rule and the domination of key positions by the 300,000 Japanese who immigrated to the sparsely populated island intensified Taiwanese nationalist feelings and also promoted a popular democratic consciousness far more profound than on the mainland.

The Taiwanese sense of a separate national identity, and their democratic strivings, were reinforced by the Nationalist military occupation of the island after World War II. While Chiang’s troops were initially welcomed as liberators from Japanese colonial rule, they treated Taiwan as conquered territory. Corruption, exploitation and political repression soon provoked a massive Taiwanese nationalist revolt against their “liberators� from mainland China. The heroic Feb. 28, 1947, Taiwanese uprising was put down with great brutality by the Nationalist Army. More than 10,000 Taiwanese were executed or imprisoned.

The division between “mainlanders� and “native Taiwanese� that was so prominent a feature of Taiwan’s life in the 1950s and 1960s was muted by Taiwan’s remarkable economic and technological development--and then by political liberalization. But the division remains and reemerged to a significant degree in the recent election with the victory of a political party that grows out of the once-banned Taiwanese independence movement.

The problem is not so much the reopening of old fissures within Taiwanese society but rather Taiwan’s relations with the mainland. Communist leaders in Beijing have little understanding of Taiwan’s unique modern history and have demonstrated scant interest in learning it. They are accustomed to dealing with Nationalist Party officials, mostly “mainlanders� with whom they share a common Chinese nationalism. Taiwanese nationalism and the democratic strivings personified by the newly elected Chen are beyond their comprehension. Beijing’s insistence that all discussion of Taiwan’s future begin with the universal acceptance of the principle of “one China� is obviously incompatible with Taiwanese nationalism.

For the time being, both sides have moderated their rhetoric. Chen, for example, has dropped the slogan “Long live Taiwan independence� and abandoned plans for a popular referendum on the issue. But prospects for accommodation in the long-term seem dimmer than ever.