Introduction
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1 Introduction Lowell Dittmer China’s contentious relation to Taiwan began when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was founded in October 1949 and the defeated Kuomintang (KMT) set up an exile regime on the island two months later. Without now delving into the rich legal and historical complexities, suffice it to say that the island’s autonomous sov- ereignty has been in contention ever since, initially because of the KMT’s stubborn insistence that it continued to represent not just Taiwan but all of China, and later, when the tables had turned, because Taiwan refused to cede sovereignty to the now dominant power that had arisen on the other side of the Strait. At this writ- ing, the election of a Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government under Tsai Ing-wen in January 2016 brings the island to a new inflection point. For, like the Chen Shui-bian administration in 2000–2008, the incoming DPP regime would really prefer to drop all claim to be part of the Chinese mainland and to embrace political independence. Of course they dare not say this in so many words because it would infuriate Beijing, which continues to insist that there is one China, that Taiwan is a part of it, and that any assertion otherwise by Taiwan constitutes an il- legal attempt at secession that Beijing has the legal right to prevent by force. China would prefer that contingency not to arise. Its use of force against Taiwan would result in great damage to the lives and property of people with whom mainland- ers share a Chinese ancestry (compatriots in an ethnic or cultural sense, tongbao) whom the PRC aims to return to the motherland’s embrace and possibly to the mainland as well. Chinese military forces still respect the striking power of Tai- wan’s armed forces and wish to avoid the possibility of US intervention to defend the island’s sovereignty (even though the United States no longer formally recog- nizes that sovereignty). Such escalation could well cause great harm to China, to 1 2 Chapter One Taiwan, and indeed to the United States. In other words, the Taiwan Strait remains an international flash point, one of the few places in the world that could unleash war between two great powers, both of which are nuclear weapon states. But one of the things that makes Taiwan so politically difficult and so intellectu- ally fascinating is that it poses not merely a security problem but a nexus of interre- lated puzzles. The following chapters focus in turn on three of its aspects. The first is “national identity.” This is a problem that Taiwan should not be permitted to have, according to mainland critics, because it is not even a nation. Yet Taiwanese do share a sense of collective identity that is widely perceived there as distinct, which they seek to preserve and profess to be willing to fight for. This has greatly compli- cated Beijing’s quest to promote reunification, particularly after the post-1979 shift from a focus on “armed liberation” to a focus on peaceful reunion, for to be peace- ful it must also be voluntary. The second aspect of the problem is socioeconomic. The post-1979 shift to peaceful reunification was premised on the assumption that through “three direct links”—postal, transportation, and trade—the embittered gulf dividing the two peoples at the Strait could eventually be bridged. While the “three links” met with an immediate “three nos” (no contact, no compromise, no negotiation) from the Chiang Ching-kuo regime, Beijing nevertheless persevered by accommodating “three indirect links” (mainly via Hong Kong), and these infor- mal connections, unsuccessfully repressed but ultimately tolerated by the Taiwan authorities, have proved surprisingly robust, paving the way for their formalization in 2008. Yet communication has not exactly blossomed into fraternal love. The third dimension of the problem is political-strategic. This has both national and international aspects. Nationally, what do China and Taiwan expect of their future relationship—what adjustments will each demand of the other in terms of structur- al political changes, or what nonchanges will each tolerate—and how do they plan to effect such changes? Internationally, how will reunification be achieved—or, how can Taiwan’s autonomy be preserved—in the prevailing balance of power, and what impact will either outcome have on that balance? NATIONAL IDENTITY A sense of national identity has long been conceived by political scientists to be a vital part of nation building, as it instills loyalty and participatory zeal in an ethnoreligiously heterogeneous citizenry and a sense of collective coherence and international affiliation or direction in the nation-state. At the same time, in ex- treme cases it can drive blind and ultimately self-destructive international ambi- tions. The Chinese sense of identity with regard to Taiwan and other peripheral regions has been fairly stable, even spanning both Nationalist and communist revolutionary eras: the understanding is that all of these areas should be assim- ilated into the motherland as soon and as fully as possible, making minimal Introduction 3 allowance for ethnolinguistic differences.1 In contrast, the sense of national identity in Taiwan has varied greatly over time, recurrently tending to destabi- lize the relationship. Taiwan attained provincial status in the Qing Empire only ten years before being forfeited to Japan as part of the Shimonoseki peace settle- ment at the end of the first Sino-Japanese War in 1895, thenceforth remaining a Japanese colony for the next fifty years. Upon occupying the island after 1945, the Nationalist forces reintroduced a Chinese identity for it, initially as a backward outpost of the lost republic but after loss of the civil war as temporary capital of a government in exile. While there had been resistance to the Japanese occupation regime, it seems to have been less than in the contemporaneous Korean colony, and postcolonial Taiwan has also remained friendlier to Japan than either South or North Korea, affiliating Taiwan during the Cold War into a US-Japan-Taiwan security network. All these identity adjustments were superimposed from the top down on a relatively passive populace. With the introduction of democracy in the twilight years of the Chiangs’ reign at the end of the 1980s, the evolution of national identity on the island was stimu- lated by diverse impulses, including a scrambled international scene at the end of the Cold War, an attractive offer for peaceful reunification from the mainland, and the aspirations of the newly enfranchised Taiwanese electorate. As Yi-huah Jiang, former premier of the Republic of China and professor of political science at Tai- wan University, indicates in chapter 2 of this volume, the overall thrust of Taiwan’s evolving identity tended to be “modernist.” Drawing on the pattern-variable dis- tinction between ascribed and achieved identities, he shows how the primordial division, a “subethnic” split between original inhabitants of the island (benshen- gren) and the wave of Chinese who fled the mainland at the end of the civil war (waishengren), has gradually faded over time. This is evinced not only in the grow- ing number of citizens who answer the survey question “I am” with “Taiwanese” (as opposed to “Chinese” or “both”) but in more refined survey instruments of his own devising that measure identity in terms of various constructed variables. And this corresponds with a “future nation preference” shifting ever more toward inde- pendence and away from any interest in reunification. All this is quite contrary to the preferences of the mainland, of course, which is thereby incentivized to recon- sider its option to resort to force if Taiwan moves toward formal independence. Yet ironically Jiang finds that while majority preferences have shifted toward in- dependence they are not strongly held: only a small percentage would still pursue independence in the face of a credible threat of force. The Taiwanese electorate is pragmatic, willing to subordinate ideal preferences to political survival. Hence the consistent majority preference for “no independence, no reunification” (bu du bu tong). In view of the fairly invariant attachment to a cross-Strait status quo, Jiang argues that the more relevant issue is not identity but the interpretation of “one China.” If the PRC and ROC agree that, despite the existence of two governments 4 Chapter One that claim to be “China,” there is only one China in the world, who is its legitimate representative, and what repercussions do differing interpretations of “one China” have for policy and diplomacy? In other words, the essential question is one of sovereignty: Who rules? In chapter 3, one of the few extant studies of the evolution of national identity in Taiwan during the Ma Ying-jeou era, Jean-Pierre Cabestan arrives at the rath- er startling finding that despite a landslide victory for this Nationalist president in 2008, followed by rapid and successful moves toward reconciliation with the mainland, the Taiwan electorate’s interest in reunification has only waned. And this, he argues, is not because the “Blue” camp (a coalition of parties, most pre- dominantly the KMT and the People First Party, that takes a softer position toward the PRC, supporting a reunification that is often envisioned as long-deferred and as dependent on the PRC’s fulfillment of many conditions, as well as an increase in ties with the mainland) simply avoided an unpopular issue. To the contrary, the Nationalists made a concerted drive during their eight-year control of both execu- tive and legislative branches to reverse the DPP’s foregoing “de-Sinification” move- ment and restore faith in “one China,” interpreted as the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan.