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Taiwan: Losing friends and influencing
people
By Laurence Eyton
The
Economist once described Taiwan's diplomatic allies as
consisting in large part of remote lumps of bird
droppings in the Pacific. Nauru is not a large pile of
guano, however. Rather, it is a large chunk of
phosphate, most of which has been mined, leaving the
inhabitants of one of the world's smallest nations with
90 percent of their 21-square-kilometer island
uninhabitable. What remains consists of little more than
a strip of beach in severe danger of being washed away
by rising sea levels.
If the outlook for Nauru
is less than optimistic, that has never bothered Taiwan.
This tiny republic, barely clinging to existence, has
the one thing that Taiwan, for all its technological
prowess and prosperity, lacks: a vote in the United
Nations. And for the past 20 years Taiwan has been able
to buy that vote for its own campaign to achieve
recognition - in some form - by the international
community as a state. Until last week, that is.
Nauru has been wooed into Beijing's fold and the
Taipei government is smarting. Well, "wooed" is not
quite the word, since Nauru's defection cost Beijing
some US$60 million - equivalent to a year's gross
domestic product (GDP) for the island - in aid and a
further $77 million in debt relief.
Not that the
deal has been without controversy in Nauru itself. The
joint communiqué to establish diplomatic ties with China
was signed by Nauruan President Rene Harris in Hong Kong
on July 21. Just in case Nauru was not aware of its
insignificance, the somewhat lowly Assistant Foreign
Minister Zhou Wenzhong represented China. Harris
apparently had informed neither his prime minister nor
the cabinet of his intentions; after receiving medical
treatment for an eye complaint in Australia, Harris had
announced that he was going to Hong Kong to have some
clothes tailored. As soon as the signing of the joint
communiqué was announced, Nauru's acting president, at
the urging of Taiwan's ambassador, sent a letter to
Harris expressing both his and the cabinet's
disagreement with the China deal.
China chose to
milk Nauru's defection for the maximum amount of
embarrassment for the Taiwan government and President
Chen Shui-bian, announcing it the very day that Chen
assumed leadership of the ruling Democratic Progressive
Party (DPP). Unsurprisingly, Chen's response was the
harshest that this once-fiery independence supporter has
made toward mainland China in the 27 months of his
presidency. From the day of his inauguration, Chen has
repeatedly made goodwill gestures toward China. Among
them have been promises not to change Taiwan's name or
flag and not to hold a referendum on independence as
well as the abandoning of restrictions on investment in
China and the opening of direct transport links between
Taiwan's outlying islands and the People's Republic of
China (PRC) mainland.
But none of these gestures
has been reciprocated, and Chen's response to Nauru's
defection showed that patience in Taipei is wearing
thin. "We hope to knock on the door with goodwill and
sincerity ... I hope the other side can reciprocate. But
if Taiwan cannot get a response from China we will have
to consider whether to walk down our own Taiwan road
toward out own future," Chen said.
While Chen
did not clarify his remarks, "walking down our own
Taiwan road" has been interpreted in Taipei as
forgetting any kind of rapprochement with China and
pursuing a strategy aimed at obtaining wider
international recognition of Taiwan's permanent and de
jure sovereignty. And this begs a few questions. Is he
serious? What might he do?
The second is the
easier to answer. What Chen is most likely to do is
simply to reverse himself on one of his key earlier
promises, specifically, not to give formal standing -
particularly by writing it into the constitution - to
his predecessor Lee Teng-hui's description of
Taiwan-China relations as "state to state" in nature.
Lee's announcement of this doctrine in July 1999
precipitated tension between China and Taiwan almost on
a par with that of the 1996 missile crisis. Lee's
comments constituted nothing less than a formal "two
Chinas" policy, something that if pursued could bring
the two sides to the verge of war.
Chen has
never gone as far as Lee is his open espousal of Taiwan
separatism - at least, not as president. That does not
mean that he couldn't. Of course he would be pilloried
by the reunificationist media and the opposition parties
for doing so, but that might not do him much harm; after
Lee stated his formula, at the height of the Chinese
saber-rattling that followed, polls showed more than 60
percent of Taiwanese supported him. Chen's abandoning of
his previous nice-guy stance might therefore win him
valuable support with a presidential election campaign
little more than 18 months away.
But whether
Chen might be willing to take a more confrontational
attitude toward China, even if it won't hurt him in the
polls, is more difficult to say. Certainly there is a
large number of grassroots members of the DPP who would
like to see Taiwan stress its de facto independence more
forcefully. For example, a plan to put "issued in
Taiwan" on the cover of Taiwan's Republic of China
passports, hoping thereby to better differentiate them
from their PRC counterparts, has only last week been
stalled by the foreign ministry because the wording has
been deemed too weak in expressing the separateness of
Taiwan and China. And much as the opposition deplores
it, almost any move calculated to poke Beijing in the
eye is received with glee by the majority of Taiwanese.
But there are also complicated external factors
in play. First there is the overwhelmingly pro-Taiwan
position of the George W Bush administration in the
United States, which, while paying lip service to the
"one China" idea, seems determined to make sure that
this remains a fiction. In fact, the US seems so eager
to retain Taiwan's de facto independence that the
Defense Department has recently criticized the island
for not spending enough to keep its defense abilities
ahead of Beijing's military buildup. But Washington has
other concerns at the moment, namely the "war on terror"
and the mess in the Middle East, which suggests that
cross-Strait tensions provoked by Taiwan would be
greeted with anything but pleasure.
There is
also the fact of mainland China's imminent change of
leadership. Beijing's Taiwan policy has essentially been
frozen since 1995. Interesting trial balloons regarding
of rapprochement with Taiwan have been floated in China
over the past three or four years only to be immediately
shot down in a competitive atmosphere where nobody can
afford to be seen to be "weak on Taiwan". Once the power
transition has occurred and the new incumbents are used
to office, this might change, or so many cross-Strait
analysts think. Taiwan's taking a more assertive line
over sovereignty would, however, result in such changes
being stillborn.
Much of Taiwan's attitude
depends on the extent to which China is now prepared to
trump Taiwan's so-called dollar diplomacy. Actually
dollar diplomacy has served the island well allowing it
to keep a stable of between 25 and 30 diplomatic allies
- enough to sponsor the issue of Taiwan's representation
being raised in the United Nations and its agencies. But
dollar diplomacy has gotten harder with the replacement
of easy-to-buy-off military juntas with democratic
regimes in most of Central America and with China's own
burgeoning financial clout. China is now in a position
to outbid Taiwan for the favors of nations such as
Nauru, Tuvalu and the Marshall Islands. Will it?
That remains to be seen. Certainly the Nauru
case was in itself no evidence that Beijing plans a
concerted effort to win more of Taipei's allies away by
dipping into the cash box. It was Nauru, frustrated
after having begged currently cash-strapped Taiwan for
aid on several occasions, that went to China, not China
that came to suborn Nauru.
Nevertheless, the
loss of Nauru can only heighten anxiety in Taiwan about
its dwindling foreign relations. The problem is that
Taiwan simply doesn't have too many alternatives. As the
Taiwan News editorialized last week, dollar diplomacy
was never a real policy so much the practical result of
a lack of alternatives. Much has been made in Taiwan of
trying to base its diplomacy on other criteria, such as
its support for non-governmental organizations, more
generous international aid, the peddling of its
democratic credentials. But after two years of thought
the current government has no more succeed in moving
away from simply buying its international support than
its predecessor.
Much is said of "abandoning the
numbers game", ie, stopping the competition between
Taipei and Beijing over diplomatic representation, but
the perception in Taiwan is that it must have formal
diplomatic relations with somebody - despite its
unofficial relations with another 62 countries - or risk
diminishing in status to a breakaway statelet with which
the rest of the world may be reluctant to do business.
(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights
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