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A SENSE OF ASIA

Nimble tiny Taiwan vs huge hamhanded Mainland


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By Sol Sanders
SPECIAL TO WORLD TRIBUNE.COM

Sol W. Sanders

May 5, 2005

As this is written a second leading Taiwanese politician is being wined and dined in Beijing. It is ostensibly an effort to work toward a settlement between the two Chinese entities. Beijing's refusal to abjure military subjugation of Taiwan's 23 million people despite rapidly growing commercial relations and cultural interchange is potentially one of the greatest threats to world peace. The U.S. is committed to seeing to it the issue is not settled by force of arms.

James Song, although he represents a minority splinter party which lost ground in the parliamentary elections late last year, is nevertheless an important messenger. Song apparently dickered to head a coalition cabinet as prime minister under President Chen Shui-bian. And he and Chen drew up one of those arithmetical statements of policy [10 points] that both sides of the Taiwan Straits seem to love so much.

Song is an intelligent, attractive, and wily politician in Taiwan's infant complicated [aren't they all?] democracy. And a few weeks ago, he made the rounds of Washington officials and nonofficials – he is a former student of former UN Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick at Georgetown University. So this time, Beijing is talking with someone who [as much as that is possible] would know who's on all the bases.

And unlike the earlier emissary who just wound up a similar mission, Kuomintang Party chairman Lien Chen, he is not a failed politician: Lien lost to Chen in two presidential elections [even though the KMT had the support of Song’s smaller breakaway party]. Lien’s pilgrimage to the old Nationalist capital of Nanking and Beijing was his last hurrah. It was, of course, a propaganda victory for Beijing in signing an agreement [alas! how many of those through the last hundred years of Chinese history!] between the Nationalist Party of Sun Yat-sen [a Communist ikon too] and Chiang Kai-shek and the Communist Party of China and Mao Tse-tung.

Chen’s hamhanded handling of the Lien “mission”, first opposing it, and then decrying it, and then giving Lien a “message” for Beijing, has played the Mainland’s game of trying to pry open divisions in the Taiwanese electorate on Mainland relations. Chen plays his own difficult balancing game with a wing of his Democratic Progressive Party [DPP] which demands the Party follow through on its original program calling for independence. It’s pretty clear the Taiwan majority would like to just continue in the present limbo – and peace. Chen has been aided by Beijing’s maladraoitness until recently – for example, shooting missiles near the Island which assured a swing to the DPP in the first president election, and then the so-called “Anti-Secession” law which was neither a law nor very smart propaganda.

It’s likely that Song has a long political career still ahead of him. And as a spokesman for closer relations with the Mainland, even though there seemed to be a growing sympathy in Taiwan for a continued differentiation from Beijing, he apparently does carry the popular Island mandate for peace. The question now is whether Beijing leadership, given their continuing proved ineptitude – demonstrated in the recent off and on anti-Japanese campaign – can actually make any “concessions”.

There may simply be irreconcilable differences. Deng Hsiao-ping, the late Paramount Leader, laid out the concept of “one country, two systems” when Britain negotiated the return of Hong Kong to China.

And it was seen to have been a model for Taiwan. Yet, the differences are perhaps greater than the similarities. And Beijing has blotted its copy book by retreating from what had been a vaguely stated – but very much hoped for – expansion of popular government in Hong Kong. Beijing’s appointed chief executive in Hong Kong, afflicted with terminal foot in mouth disease, Tung Chee-hwa, is being followed by Sir Donald Tsang, once a loyal [if not fawning] colonial executive, who now is being given a try-out as Beijing’s new gauleiter in the erosion of Hong Kong’s tradition of the rule of law.

Serious young Communist foreign service types have argued Taiwan is a real and serious “domestic” issue for Beijing. They reason fragmentation has always been the bane of Chinese regimes through the ages.

The very success of Taiwan as an alternative Chinese regime, economy, and lifestyle, eggs on those elsewhere in the vast China domain who would like to break away from Beijing’s crippling hand. That is particularly true as disparities grow in income, between the booming coastal belt and the interior, between urban and rural, and more and more flashfire breakdowns of law and order occur. Jiang Zemin’s “West Development”, a supposed plan to expand into the interior, is largely slogans with the regional differences growing and central planning become irrelevant. The likely coming crash of the China’s overheated economy will only add more guck to the swamp.

Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@comcast.net), 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.

April 20, 2005

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