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If you believed some Taipei media in mid-May, Chinese Communist Pres. Jiang Zemin’s son, known as a businessman rather than a politician, was visiting Taiwan businesses incognito. Probably it was just an echo of that earlier bizarre story of North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il’s son caught secretly entering Japan. But that it was taken seriously [and might even have been true] is part of the incredibly complicated relationships building between Communist Mainland China and what now really can be called Free China on Taiwan.
Even a superficial examination suggests the American debate over U.S. policy toward China turning on Taiwan may be ignoring what’s happening on the ground. Talk about confrontation is obscuring opposite trends, which could, in time, and with a proper understanding and perseverance in Washington, provide long-term solutions.
A former Taiwan prime minister, Kuomintang Vice Chairman Vincent Siew, in mid-May is on the Mainland attending Asia Pacific Economic forum meetings with a delegation headed by Chen Poh-chih, chief of Taiwan's Council for Economic Planning and Development. The APEC is one of the very few international organization where both Chinas are represented. And Taiwan President Chen Shui-bian endorsed Siew’s proposal for a customs union between Taiwan and the Mainland as a first step in a process of peaceful integration.
Siew is certainly trying to build on firm economics. Taiwan is now third largest investor on the Mainland with over $50 billion. Its dynamic economy [the 17th largest in the world] trades with the Mainland now at a fast clip — over $35 billion last year [half its trade with the U.S. in 2000 as our eighth largest trading partner, up 20 percent from 1999]. Earlier this year as a peace offering Taiwan permitted direct trade [instead of via Hong Kong] between three of its offshore islands and the Mainland’s Fukien province. [Only those who went through the wrenching 1958 Taiwan Straits crisis when Washington threatened nuclear strikes to protect the Chiang Kai-shek government from invasion, sitting on the little fortified island of Quemoy staring down the barrels of Communist guns a few miles away, can appreciate the gesture.]
Does this mean that it is all over but the shouting, that Taiwan is moving inexorably toward the Mainland maw?
No, not at all. The Chinese on Taiwan — both the feuding Mainlanders and their offspring, who came when the Nationalists lost the civil war on the Mainland in 1949, and the “native” Taiwanese — have repeatedly told pollsters they do not accept Beijing’s offer of “one China, two systems”. No one appreciates more than the Taiwanese the oppression, corruption, and traditional Chinese failures to find a decent government, represented by the present Beijing regime.
President Chen, whose Democratic People’s Party won office last year in the first peaceful transfer of power in China’s long history, once courted Taiwan independence. But office has a way of sobering campaign rhetoric. The Taiwanese didn’t need President Bush’s recent admonition [that U.S. policy would oppose “independence”] when announcing new arms transfers to Taiwan for defense against the Mainland threat of force, to make them understand they could not wave that red flag at the Beijing bull.
Listening to Taiwan politicians and reading the Taipei press, messy as it often sounds whether wrestling with the on-and-off again Fourth Nuclear Power Reactor or the preliminaries to this year’s parliamentary elections, is a classic expose of democracy’s foibles. But democracy it is. Just as Hong Kong’s dynamic economy, even under a colonial government, paved the way by setting the example that old Communists like Deng Hsiao-peng had to follow to make economic progress on the Mainland, Taiwan is presenting the model for what a progressive, modern Chinese society could be.
The test of American diplomacy — and the Bush II Administration — is going to be whether Washington can continue a firm line that upholds the right of the Taiwanese to make their own decisions in regard to their relationship with the Mainland in the face of Beijing’s threats and bluff. Part and parcel of that policy will have to be supplying arms and helping to defend Taiwan against any threat of force.
The long history of Chinese Communists’ use of negotiations for wearing down opponents is not to be forgotten. That tactic is all the more a threat today when Beijing uses the bait of increased trade and profits to seduce businessmen who may not see national interest as part of their relationship with government-owned companies. The recent trial balloon that Beijing may try to solve one of its most difficult economic problems by selling Western financiers discounted debt of the huge and largely bankrupt state enterprises suggests their audacity. It is the kind of chutzpah that some Americans spreading the gospel of “a Greater China” solution have been all too eager to accept.
Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@abac.com), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International.
He writes weekly for World Tribune.com.