Article #2
Taiwan is Already and Will Continue to Be
an Independent Nation: Beware the Chinese Response
On Tuesday, October 10, of this week, the government and people of Taiwan celebrated the eventknown as “Double Ten,” recalling the day in 1911 when Chinese revolutionary forces overturned the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty, leading to replacement with the Republic of China. Celebration of this day is now essentially an anachronism, traceable to the beginning of Kuomintang rule on Taiwan that commenced when that party government of Chiang Kai-shek lost the Chinese Civil War (1945-1949) to the Chinese Communists of Mao Zedong and had to beat a retreat to Taiwan during the late 1940s.
With the Chinese Communist victory, the Republic of China was replaced by the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which (led since 2013 by party head Xi Jinping) is the government in power in China to the present day. Until Chiang Kai-shek’s death in 1975, his regime maintained the fiction of representing the legitimate government of China, still under the banner of the Republic of China (ROC), which purportedly would one day return to conquer their Chinese Communist foes.
But against a backdrop of growing political opposition that by 1986 had formed the rival Democratic People’s Party, President Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law in 1987 and tapped the talented native Taiwanese official Lee Teng-hui as his successor as head of the Kuomintang. Lee oversaw an astounding political transformation; in 1996, he won Taiwan’s first democratic presidential election.
In the year 2000, Chen Shuibian, of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), won the presidential election and ended the dominance of the Kuomintang. The DPP lost control of the presidency to the Kuomintang in 2008 but regained the top office in 2016, when current president Tsai Ing-wen prevailed. Right now, DPP candidate William Lai seems likely to win the looming presidential contest in January 2024; the Kuomintang’s Hou Yu-ih is polling third, behind Ko Wen-je, the nominee of a new party, The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), with former Foxconn CEO Terry Gou running fourth as an independent.
Taiwan’s leading Democratic People’s Party had nothing to do with the documents and agreements so often given reference in the press; those were generated when the Kuomintang was still leading a one-party police state on Taiwan. The Shanghai Communique, issued in 1972 during the Nixon and Mao administrations, acknowledged that “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain that there is but one China.” This position was consistent at the time with the official positions of Mao’s PRC (which claimed legitimacy as government of China) and Chiang Kai-Shek’s ROC (which still made the same forlorn claim from its Taiwan redoubt). And in an agreement known as the “1992 Consensus,” the PRC and the KMT (still clinging to diminished power on Taiwan) affirmed that, “There is only one China.”
But the presidential elections of 1996 and 2000, reinforced by those of an ever-maturing democracy from 2004 through 2020) transformed the government and polity of Taiwan. The governmental moniker of the “Republic of China” is retained for expedient maintenance of the status quo, whereby the PRC governs China and the ROC governs Taiwan. Today’s dangerous situation results from the increasingly bellicose insistence that the PRC leadership makes that Taiwan is part of China and the equally forceful position on the part of the DPP that Taiwan is a de facto independent nation that is most decidedly not part of China.
The current political contest became more acrimonious when the DPP announced that this year’s Double Ten would be celebrated as “Taiwan National Day,” with the slogan of “Democratic Taiwan, resilience and sustainability,” thus distancing the holiday from origins in a revolution that took place over one hundred years ago in China, not Taiwan. Terry Gou objected vociferously to this diminution of association with the ROC, while KMT candidate Hou and TPP candidate Ko registered less stringent but still clear disapproval. These latter candidates are more inclined toward economic and cultural linkages with the Chinese regime than is the DPP, but they do not seem likely to join forces against the DPP, whose William Lai holds a substantial plurality in recent polling.
The United States public needs to have a better understanding of the history of Taiwan on its ownterms. The Qing Dynasty claim on Taiwan, only made in 1683 after vigorous court debate as to the pros and cons of governing Taiwan, had been preceded by the claims of the colonial regime of the Dutch (1624-1661) and the administration of anti-Qing rebel Zheng Chenggong (often known in the West as Koxinga, 1661-1683). But the Qing lost Taiwan to the Japanese in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-1895; the Japanese ruled the island through the end of World War II in 1945. Hence, Taiwan has not been governed by any force claiming control over all of China for 128 years.
Taiwan is a de facto nation with a unique history. The island nation ranks number 12 among thenations of the world in GDP per capita (ppp indices) compared to number 73 for China) and is rated number 10 as a “full democracy” by the highly respected Freedom House and Economist Intelligence Unit indices (China, brutalizers of the Uighur and Tibetan peoples, is ranked “authoritarian”).
Taiwan is no more part of China than the United States is a colony of Great Britain; the island’speople have long identified primarily as Taiwanese, not Chinese. In the likelihood that Xi Jinping,faced with numerous economic challenges and the reality of another DPP victory in the loomingpresidential election of January 13, 2024, takes an even more violent posture, the United States andallies must as a moral and geopolitical imperative give firm military assistance to democratic Taiwan.
No comments:
Post a Comment