|
|
|
|
KMT steals the show with China
visit
By Laurence Eyton
TAIPEI - When Taiwan's ruling party and
its allies failed to gain a majority of seats in
legislative elections in December, it was expected
that the same stonewalling of government
initiatives by the opposition parties that had
dogged Taiwan since the Democratic Progressive
Party (DPP) won the presidency in 2000 would
continue.
Far from delivering more of the
same, however, the opposition parties have taken
the initiative to such an extent that the
government is looking utterly impotent, while Lien
Chan, the leader of the Kuomintang (KMT), the
largest opposition party, who lost a presidential
election to the DPP's Chen Shui-bian by a hair in
March last year, is beginning to look as if he
never lost the election at all.
The current furor surrounds an eight-day trip
that Lien is to make to China beginning on Tuesday.
The highlight of the visit is a meeting with
Chinese Communist Party chief and President Hu Jintao
on Friday, after Lien gives a speech to students at
Beijing University.
The trip raises a
number of interesting questions, such as what is
Lien going for, what does he hope to achieve, and,
of course, how the government feels about being so
embarrassingly upstaged?
Had the visit
occurred before May 2000, when Lien was still
Taiwan's vice president, it would have been an
epoch-making event. After all, the Chinese civil
war has never formally ended, and a summit between
the two belligerents, the KMT and the Chinese
Communist Party, would have been a watershed event
in the region.
The KMT is certainly trying
to invest Lien's trip with the same sort of
significance. At a meeting of the party's central
standing committee, Lien did not tell his
subordinates what he intended to talk about in
China, but emphasized the idea that the two civil
war enemies were about to bury the hatchet.
When the trip was first mooted there was
talk of his signing a peace agreement between the
two sides. It was swiftly pointed out, however,
that the unresolved conflict is between the
government of Taiwan, which still calls itself the
Republic of China and styles itself the inheritor
of the mantle of Chiang Kai-shek's nationalists -
so roundly thrashed by the communists 56 years ago
- and the government of China, and that Lien
represents nobody but his own party. As such, to
conclude any agreements on behalf of Taiwan would
be illegal.
One of Lien's deputies, a
party vice chairman, Chiang Pin-kun, made a trip
to China in late March. While there he had talks
with Chen Yunlin, director of the Taiwan Affairs
Office of China's State Council, and reached a
10-point agreement on trade, tourism, media and
scholarly exchanges. Chiang also picked up Lien's
invitation to visit China from Jia Qinglin,
chairman of the People's Political Consultative
Conference. When he got home he found himself
under investigation for treason, which carries the
death penalty.
There is, however, a
certain amount of disingenuousness about the
investigation of Chiang, which illustrates just
how subtle a game of brinkmanship is being played
on both sides.
Chiang is being
investigated under Article 113 of the penal code,
which deals with providing aid to enemy nations
and details penalties for those who conclude
agreements with such nations without authorization
from the government. But in Taiwan, China might be
seen by many as an enemy, but it is not regarded
legally as a nation.
Until the early 1990s
the standoff between Beijing and Taipei was in
terms of which government, the exiles in Taipei or
the usurpers in Beijing, was the "real" government
of China. Taiwan subsequently modified its stance
to admit that there was a "political entity" on
the mainland which was the de facto government,
but it never claimed that China was another
nation. While president Lee Teng-hui made this
claim in 1999, reiterated by Chen in 2002, it has
never been formalized in law. Thus whatever the
entity Chiang signed his agreement with was, it
was not with an enemy nation.
The
interesting question is why Chiang is not being
investigated under the Statute Governing
Cross-Strait Relations, at least two articles of
which also criminalize unauthorized individuals
who conclude agreements concerning government
policy with the Chinese government without
authorization - with a penalty of up to five years
in jail. Securing a conviction under the statute
would almost certainly be far easier.
The
answer is, of course, that the government would
have liked to deter Lien from making his trip, but
it realizes that actually throwing Chiang in jail,
as some Taiwan ultra-nationalists have insisted
must be done, will only cost support to the ruling
DPP.
The government's problem, and the
KMT's advantage, is what the polls are telling
both sides. What that appears to be is: Taiwanese
see the relationship with China as having an
important effect on the economy; they would like
this relationship to be better if this were
achievable; they don't really care about whose
prerogative it is to talk to China as long as
China is willing to talk to somebody; they are
opposed, however, to anyone signing an agreement
with China without government authorization, and
they look to the government to read the "small
print" to make sure that Taiwan's basic interests
are not sacrificed.
There is something for
both sides here. The KMT gets the nod from the
public to go to China and see what it might
achieve, but this is within limits. Polls show a
majority opposed to Lien signing any agreement
while he is in China, and indeed, Lien has been
quick to say that this is something that he will
not do. Whatever the KMT might bring back from
Beijing, has to be followed up by the government.
Basically the public has seen that this
kind of formula has worked before and the people
don't see why it shouldn't be tried again. A group
of KMT legislators traveled to Beijing in
mid-January where they negotiated the basis for a
deal between the two sides on direct flights
Between Chinese cities and Taiwan for returning
Taiwanese businessmen over the Lunar New Year
holiday period. This was then followed up by
officials from both sides masquerading as advisors
to non-government organizations in whose names the
agreement on the direct flights was eventually
signed.
The direct-flights agreement laid
out a pattern whereby opposition parties, which -
since they do not embrace Taiwan independence -
are welcome in Beijing, bring the makings of a
deal back to Taiwan, which the government then
tidies up. For China and the opposition parties
there is, they think, much to be gained in making
the DPP government appear impotent, pouncing on
the bones it is thrown. The government resents
this deeply, but such is the nature of public
opinion that it cannot really go against it.
Indeed, with the investigation of Chiang ongoing,
Chen nevertheless gave his reluctant blessing to
Lien's trip, as long as it "abided by domestic
laws", shorthand for not attempting to impinge on
the prerogatives of the government.
In Washington
the attitude toward the trips, at least from
the State Department, has been cautious. Official
statements have twice said that the US welcomed
any talks if they contributed to the lessening
of cross-strait tension. But last Tuesday,
Randall Schriver, the United States' deputy
assistant secretary of state in charge of China
and Taiwan issues, offered a caveat, saying that
Beijing had to understand that for any real
progress to be made on the cross-strait impasse,
it would sooner or later have to talk to the
government itself. The KMT is hoping, of course,
that bringing home something positive from China
will propel it in 2008 to become the government
with which China has to talk.
But what,
exactly, might it bring home? Lien will not
publicly reveal what is on his agenda, but the KMT
appears to have cautiously retreated from the
"peace agreement" idea, once again because polls
show that Taiwanese see the civil war conflict as
irrelevant to the current Taiwan-China
relationship, and any talk of peace would
emphasize the KMT's non-Taiwanese origins. What
else might be left on the table is hard to say,
though something to please the business class,
such as an agreement on investment protection and
the permanent establishment of direct transport
links would go down well in Taiwan, as would a
commitment by China to reduce the number of
ballistic missiles it has targeted at Taiwan (and
which are about to be replaced with cruise
missiles anyway).
Lien, however, is going
to have to tread cautiously. To return with
something useful he needs some kind of commitment
from Beijing to deal directly with Taipei,
whatever "hands-free" fiction is used to disguise
this. This means that he cannot broker any
possible deal containing conditions that the Chen
government would then reject out of hand.
Beijing has said it will talk
about anything with Taiwan as long as it signs up to
the "one China" principle, ie, the idea that Taiwan
is a part of China - which sometimes is and
sometimes does not have to be the People's
Republic of China, depending on the audience at
the time. The Chen government flatly refuses to do
so, and polls show this is supported by a majority
of Taiwanese.
The result of this for Lien
is that if he wants to return to Taiwan as a
bringer of largesse, he has to obtain something
about which China will not insist on its "one
China" principle.
Chen's endorsement of Lien
has shocked many in the pro-independence lobby,
who see Lien's behavior as treacherous and the
government as weak in tolerating it - the Taiwan
Solidarity Union, a small independence-seeking
party, for example, is encouraging
supporters to throw eggs at Lien at his
departure on Tuesday.
Independence
fundamentalists think that the Chinese government,
keen on reunification as it is, needs to have an
opposite number in Taiwan with whom it can
negotiate the topic. For this reason, it therefore
wants to get the KMT returned to government. After
this happens, they claim, the KMT will "sell out"
Taiwan by doing a unification deal which will
leave it as the permanent governing authority in
Taiwan in return for giving up sovereignty - with
the dismantling of Taiwan's democratic system and
freedoms that this would entail.
Elements
of this thinking carry weight. After all, Beijing
has long said that it was willing to talk about
Taiwan on a "party-to-party" basis, thereby
avoiding the question of Taiwan's status. When the
KMT was in office this is something it refused to
do, partly because of its loathing for the
communists, and latterly, during the Lee Teng-hui
presidency, from democratic conviction - the fate
of Taiwan being seen not as something that parties
alone had the right to decide. In going to China,
say the independence hawks, Lien has given Beijing
the idea that a party-to-party solution is
available, if only the DPP could be ejected from
office.
The problem with such thinking is,
however, that it is utterly unrealistic to think
that any unification deal could be forced through
without endorsement by Taiwan's electorate. This
could, in fact, be the most useful message that
Lien might deliver to his hosts, except that
understanding it requires a grip on political
reality that Lien himself has for the past year or
so failed to show.
Lien's trip is to
be followed up in late May by one from James
Soong, chairman of the People First Party. Soong -
who was Lien's vice-presidential candidate on the
joint "pan-blue" ticket last year - has however
let it be known that he will talk to his Chinese
hosts about the 10 items of agreement he reached
with Chen Shui-bian on February 24. Since this is
a known quantity and, with electoral reform
looming, the future of Soong's party is uncertain,
this is not generating nearly as much interest as
Lien's trip, which threatens to occupy Taiwan's
political agenda for some time to come.
Laurence Eyton is the deputy
editor in chief of the Taipei Times newspaper and
a columnist for the Chinese-language Taiwan Daily.
He has lived and worked in Taiwan for 18 years.
(Copyright 2005 Asia Times Online Ltd.
All rights reserved. Please contact us for
information on sales, syndication and republishing.) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
|
All material on this
website is copyright and may not be republished in any form without written
permission.
© Copyright 1999 - 2005 Asia Times
Online Ltd.
|
|
Head
Office: Rm 202, Hau Fook Mansion, No. 8 Hau Fook St., Kowloon, Hong
Kong
Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
|
|
|
|
