Asia Times: China


	May 29, 2002	atimes.com

China

Taiwan: Game, set, stalemate
By Laurence Eyton

TAIPEI - "Things in Taiwan," said Ramon Myers of Stanford University's Hoover Institute, "are getting a lot worse."

Myers, despite his scholarly background, is a long-time fellow traveler of Taiwan's reunificationist conservatives, hence hardly an objective source. Nor is his mood improved, perhaps on finding that he, who used to have such great access to and a big welcome among Taiwan's movers and shakers, is a pariah among the new ruling class from the nominally pro-Taiwan independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).

But other visitors to Taiwan have also remarked that there seems to be a more radical polarization of views in the air two years after the DPP won the presidency, despite the party's attempts to disassociate itself from its radical past. Twice in May there have been street demonstrations of a size not seen for several years, one organized by a group in support of Taiwan's changing its name from Republic of China to Taiwan, another in support of reunification with China which involved the burning of the US flag and chants such as "I want to be a Chinese man, not an American dog." Is there something in the air?

The short answer to this is "as much as China wants there to be". To which might be added that one of the most baffling aspects of cross-Strait affairs is the extent to which China seems unable to perceive the damage that its own policy is doing its own better interests on the other side of the Taiwan Strait.

There is an emerging radicalism in Taiwan, but it has little to do with the DPP, which since it became the ruling party has backed away from its radical roots. Rather, it is the result of the formation last year by Lee Teng-hui (president between 1988 and 2000) of the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU). Lee was formally the leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), the party that ruled Taiwan for half a century until its defeat in 2000, largely as a result of its own internal divisions. In part, these divisions were caused by distrust in the party of Lee himself. The party was supposed to have a reunificationist agenda and yet Lee's every move as president seemed to be aimed at strengthening Taiwan's de facto independent sovereignty, no matter how this clashed with the perceived goal of a rapprochement with China.

A number of splits in the party took place between the "mainstream" - those prepared to accept Lee's leadership or at least to be bought with his powers of patronage - and reunificationist hardliners who saw him as an apostate.

Throughout the 1990s, Lee's enemies were marginalized and denigrated and were seen as part of the mainland China-born old guard of the KMT, opposed to Taiwan's democratization and the greater place given to "native Taiwanese" (a term of art for those whose families who arrived in Taiwan before the KMT "recovered" the island from Japan at the end of Word War II) because it eroded the privileged status they had enjoyed under the dictatorships of Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo. They were, it was said, a colonial class with, as decolonization (ie, democratization) took place, no mother country to return to in sulky exile.

That such a description was in great part true, in no way detracts from the fact that Lee's critics were, in fact, right. Rather than being the lunatic fringe that the KMT under Lee sought to portray them as, they had taken an accurate measure of the man and his goals, but were, because of the control Lee exerted on his own party and, through it civil society as a whole, prophets without honor.

The changes since the KMT's defeat in the 2000 presidential election have been dramatic. First, Lee was forced out, ostensibly to take responsibility for the defeat of candidate Lien Chan, forced on the party by Lee himself. Lien then took over the party and immediately swung it back to a reunificationist tub-thumping line that nobody had seen in Taiwan for over a decade, and which political commentators such as this one thought was buried with Taiwan's authoritarian past.

Lee went into hibernation for a year and then in mid-2001 founded the TSU, as a hardline, pro-independence party touting an inveterate suspicion of all things mainland Chinese and a total rejection of even the possibility of unification on any terms. The TSU would be called ultra-nationalist in any country with fewer neuroses than Taiwan about whether it is or is not a nation. The TSU was not the first ultra-nationalist party in Taiwan. Factions of the DPP used to be similar, until the responsibilities of government, first at the local, then at the national level forced the party to tone its rhetoric down. As a result it gave birth to entities such as the Taiwan Independence Party (which won a parliamentary seat in 1998), and the Nation Building Alliance, led by a former DPP presidential candidate disillusioned by the party's - sensible - drift to the center.

But these organizations only ever existed on the lunatic fringe of Taiwan's political scene. The TSU, however, has brought anti-China sentiment and outright rejection of unification into the center of the political stage to an unprecedented degree.

Long-time Taiwan watchers might say that rejection of unification used to be strong at the end of the 1980s in the DPP itself. And so it appeared to be. But opposition to reunification in those days was in fact opposition to a policy described by an unelected government as fundamental, by a people who wanted to be consulted in a democratic manner about how fundamental it really was. By 1995, parliamentary candidates for the DPP who had no other platform than Taiwan independence on which to stand were turned out in droves by the voters. Anti-unification was a symbol of a cause, it was not the cause itself.

Today it is different. The election last December of 13 legislators under the TSU banner was a significant victory for a party that had been founded less than six months before the election. But that election victory also shows in part the weakness of the new nationalism that people like Myers are worried about. None of the 13 elected had any previous experience and several of them were rejects as candidates from other parties. They were elected therefore solely on Lee Teng-hui's endorsement.

Lee, and the respect in which he is held by a great many Taiwanese for his past achievements in bringing democracy to Taiwan, is therefore, central to the new nationalism. There is no other leader in Taiwan with anything like the charisma and authority to replace him. And, given that Lee is 79 years old with a heart condition, that might mean that the TSU and the nationalistic fervor it has whipped up may be short-lived indeed.

But while it is around what damage does it have the capacity to do? Myers says he notices a coarsening of ethnic relations in Taiwan. Certainly, mainlanders are unhappy with a DPP government with what they construe as a covert separatist agenda, all the more so because of the obvious support given to it by the Bush administration in Washington, the most pro-Taiwan of any US government in, literally, decades. Hence the burning of the US flag, a gesture that will, of course, not endear Americans to the reunificationist cause.

Taboos on ethnic slurs are becoming more readily broken, the most recent case being a Kaohsiung city government official who blamed the city's water shortage on an influx of "mainlanders" provoking street demonstrations that became a mini-riot and rumpus in the media. Taiwanese appear to be more outspoken in telling mainlanders (their former political masters) how unwanted they are: "Why don't you go home to China?" is becoming a commonly heard refrain.

This coarsening of ethnic relations is not entirely due to the TSU. The KMT's ardent embrace of what most Taiwanese think of as alien and outmoded political ideals and the restoration of a reunificationist old guard, previously marginalized by Lee Teng-hui, at the center of the party, has strengthened the hand of reunificationists, even while they think the political tenor is moving against them.

Nevertheless, if ethnic divisions are hardening and tolerance diminishing, it is still hard to imagine the situation degenerating into violence. There is a long way to go even to reach the degree of tension felt in Taipei at least in 1994, where one picked one's taxis with care or might risk being abused, even roughed up, by the driver for being of the wrong ethnicity.

Perhaps the most serious downside of the new animosity is that, by raising the ante of rhetoric and posturing, it makes it all the harder for common sense to inform an understanding of cross-Strait possibilities. Taiwan's main consideration is, of course, security. The threat to its security comes from China's wish to reunify. Only a negotiated settlement is going to end this threat and a negotiated settlement means making trade-offs.

Taiwan has to accept in the end something less than independence and China has to accept that it cannot strong-arm Taiwan into accepting a Hong Kong -style "one country, two systems" settlement, and that negotiation cannot even begin until it accords the Taiwan side the equal status that it has so far steadfastly refused to do - deeming Taiwan a provincial-level government only.

China's intransigence over making concessions to Taiwan, or even allowing discussion of whether concessions might be made, is almost as powerful a recruiting factor to the TSU as Lee Teng-hui himself. After all, Lee is seen as the man who faced down Beijing during the missile crisis of 1996 (though it would be more accurate to give that credit to the US) and many think he still remains the only Taiwan politician with the chutzpah to do so again. China's intransigence just plays into his hands.

Lee's project, of translating Taiwan's de facto independence into the de jure kind, might in the end, be doomed to failure. But the further away China pushes the Taiwanese - into Lee's camp - the harder they are going to be to embrace in the future.

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