Anti-secession law may backfire in
Taiwan By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI - Taiwan will be watching the four-day
meeting of the Standing Committee of China's National
People's Congress which begins Christmas Day with some
concern in the wake of reports from the state-controlled
Xinhua News Agency that Beijing is considering passage
of an "anti-secession law", which is expected to be
discussed at the session.
Originally it was
expected that Chinese President Hu Jintao would announce
the proposal of the law at a ceremony to mark the fifth
anniversary of the Macao hand over on Monday. While Hu
sung the praise of the "one country, two systems" rule
for both pacific Macao and restless Hong Kong, no
mention was made of Taiwan.
This did not mean,
however, that the law was not still on track. On
Tuesday, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesman Liu Jianchao
told reporters that "the initiation of the
anti-secession law ... has as its sole purpose
containing Taiwan independence forces separatist
activities."
Details of the law have not been
released, and the Standing Committee meets behind closed
doors, so it is uncertain whether the contents of the
proposed law might be made public anytime soon.
Taiwan is awaiting the United States' reaction
to the proposed law, and Washington has not been
publicly forthcoming. Having been heavily criticized
several times in the past year for "trying to change the
status quo" across the Taiwan Strait by the
administration of US President George W Bush, Taipei is
very interested to see if Washington will react to the
proposed law with the same degree of vehemence (and
apply the same standard to China). Washington says it
cannot comment until it knows the content of the
proposed law.
An immense amount of speculation
abounds about what the law might contain and what its
purpose might be. Will it, for example, mandate
reunification by a certain date? Will it in some way
criminalize pro-independence sympathies in a way that
might be used against Taiwan in China (blackmail on some
trumped-up accusation is particularly feared by the
business community)? How will it define secession and
will it simply be against a formal declaration of
independence - which nobody in Taiwan is going to
declare soon - or will it attempt to map out some kind
of calibrated response to other Taiwanese actions as
well - changing the constitution or the national flag,
for example?
Since the precise contents of the
bill are not known, there is little point in speculating
about such details. Irrespective of the fine points of
the anti-secession law's actual content, however, the
law cannot deal with what is actually the biggest threat
to the goal of unification, and it might well be
seriously counterproductive in other ways.
The threat of Taiwan's cultural trend Such a law, whatever its content, cannot stop
growing separatist sentiment and the proposed
legislation and the enacted law will quite probably
contribute to it. China has threatened Taiwan with
attack if it moves toward independence for well over a
decade. This might have deterred a de jure declaration
of independence, but it has hardly interfered in any way
with the reshaping and defining of "Taiwanese
consciousness".
China interprets separatism as a
political movement driving a cultural agenda of
de-sinicization. This involves the downplaying of
traditional links between Taiwan and China and its
culture and the discovery - or invention, as
unificationists either side of the Strait see it - of
something sui generis in the Taiwan experience, around
which a sense of separate nationhood can be developed.
But de-sinicization will happen in any case,
whoever holds political power. It is simply the
inevitable result of democratization, which means
majority rule by the native Taiwanese, whose links to a
Chinese motherland are no stronger than, for example,
those of Australians to Britain.
Taiwanese see
themselves as having been kicked around by others, be
they Chinese imperial officials, Japanese colonialists
or the mainlander exiles of Chiang Kai-shek, for
centuries. Now they control their own destiny, they seek
to redefine their collective historical experience as
the story of the building of a new nation by a settler
community. It is this wider cultural consciousness that
is driving politics, not, as Beijing mistakenly
believes, the other way round, of the actual
secessionists driving the Taiwanese majority.
For example, Taiwan is changing its schoolbooks
to give far more emphasis to Taiwanese history and to
put 20th century Chinese history into the foreign
history syllabus. This is obviously a case of
de-sinicization. It certainly needs political will to
bring it about. But the demand for this has existed for
a long time and the current Democratic Progressive Party
(DPP) government is only extending measures originally
initiated by its pro-unification Kuomintang (KMT)
predecessor.
The problem for China is that
de-sinicization is now a mainstream cultural trend in
Taiwan which will persist irrespective of which
political camp holds power, and there is nothing at all
that Beijing can do about this.
Problem 1:
Limitations on creative thinking The first way in
which the law might prove counterproductive depends on
the degree to which it might constrain intelligent
discussion and treatment of the Taiwan question in China
itself.
Taiwanese do not see themselves as
Chinese and no amount of Beijing's huffing and puffing
can make them. But they would like to get on with China
if they could. The hard-line independence movement
actually gets most of its oxygen from Beijing's
bellicose and hegemonic behavior. If China could come up
with an acceptable modus vivendi, Taiwanese, in spite of
the de-sinicization movement, would probably be willing
to trade some of the trappings of sovereignty for
lasting security. Some kind of confederal arrangement,
or some kind of European Union-style integration might
be acceptable.
The problem is that China simply
will not consider anything except "one country, two
systems", but more than seven years after the Hong Kong
handover, the former British colony's situation, and
perhaps its fate, is seen by Taiwanese as a dire
warning, rather than an attractive solution.
Taiwan's democratic system means that, in the
end, however much Beijing dislikes it, peaceful
unification will never occur without a vote of approval
by Taiwan's electorate. This means that Beijing has to
make an offer the Taiwanese find attractive, which in
turn means China has to accept that "one country, two
systems" has zero appeal in Taiwan - and then start
thinking creatively about what might take its place.
The problem with the anti-secession law is that
it might seriously hinder this much-needed creative
thinking. Some Chinese scholars argue that the
anti-secession law is not designed to bring about
unification, but rather establish a holding pattern that
will prevent Taiwan from moving further toward formal
independence. But if unification is ever to be a goal,
then the longer the de-sinicization trend continues, the
further away Taiwan will drift, irrespective of its
formal status. The only thing that might militate
against de-sinicization is a sensible policy from
Beijing offering the Taiwanese something they might find
acceptable. So anything that precludes China from
working out what such a policy might be can only
contribute to the growing distance across the Taiwan
Strait.
Problem 2: Taiwanese
reprisals The second problem is the likelihood
that the Taiwan government will counter with a law of
its own. As early as Sunday, DPP legislators announced
they were working on drafting an "anti-annexation law".
What this would contain depends on the as-yet unknown
content of China's anti-secession law. But there is wide
agreement among advocates of such a measure by Taiwan
that it would include an immediate declaration of formal
independence were Taiwan attacked. And, according to
legislator Trong Chai, it would be likely to mandate a
referendum on any move designed to change the status
quo, as well as serious lobbying in Washington for
revision of the Taiwan Relations Act to contain a
commitment for the US to help Taiwan if the status quo
is endangered without a referendum by the Taiwanese
people.
Currently, under the Taiwan Referendum
Law passed last year, questions about unification or
independence cannot be put to Taiwan's voters. The irony
of Beijing's move is that it might cause a popular
clamor for the law's amendment to allow such questions,
as well as a new law mandating referendums on any
proposed unification arrangement or even as a show of
will, should China cross as yet undefined "red lines",
such as the missiles aimed at Taiwan reaching a certain
number or Taiwan's diplomatic allies falling below a
particular threshold. If Beijing is serious about
unification this is exactly what it should not want.
Problem 3: Weakening the position of
allies China might think that the opposition's
control of the legislature may stymie passage of such
measures. But some sort of reprisal is likely to prove
so popular with the public that the opposition "pan-blue
alliance" of the KMT and People First Party, which is
seen as being more pro-China than the ruling DPP, will
have no choice other than to back it - as they had to
back the referendum law last year.
Actually, the
topic of the anti-secession law has been seriously
damaging to the pan-blues. After their unexpected
triumph in the December 11 election, it was thought that
this would mean that China's pressure on Taiwan might
ease, now that President Chen Shui-bian's hands had been
tied for the remainder of his term. The pan-blues were
seen as the party of the status quo. But now it appears
that such hopes were misplaced. China's interpretation
of the election appears to be that pressure works, so
apply more pressure. Taiwan's view of this is de cun,
jin chi or "give them an inch, and they take a
foot."
The idea that favoring the pan-blues over
the independence-minded DPP and its allies can mollify
Beijing has received a severe blow, and the end result
of the anti-secession law might well, ironically enough,
be a growth in support for those who favor secession,
who are seen as able and willing to "stand up to Chinese
bullying."
Laurence Eyton is deputy
editor in- chief of the Taipei Times. He has worked in
Taiwan for 18 years.
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