Asia Times: China


	June 18, 2002	atimes.com

China

Taiwan: Island of insecurity
By Laurence Eyton

TAIPEI - For the second time this year Taiwan is in an uproar about loyalty. Three months ago the island was rocked by revelations of slush funds held and used by top officials to buy support for this embattled regime abroad. The reports came from the senior accountant to Taiwan's spymasters, who, wanted for fraud in Taiwan, had fled overseas and was apparently peddling a stash of records he had taken with him.

The government's attempts to suppress the revelations in the interests of national security - many of the details about which politicians in foreign countries were on Taiwan's payroll were hugely embarrassing to all concerned - instead seriously compromised its reputation for democratic openness.

Now once again the island is wrapped up in a security scandal and questions about its commitment to the values of liberal democracy. The new uproar is partly over a simple espionage case involving the sale of naval secrets to Chinam, but it is mainly over the government's wish to start vetting civil servants in sensitive agencies or positions for their loyalty.

These repeated worries about security show how insecure Taiwan and especially its government are. But what underlies them is less obvious, namely that so many Taiwanese ask the question of the ex-East German spymaster Markus Wolfe at his trial: "Which country am I supposed to have betrayed?"

The new furor started on June 7 when the government announced that it was going to introduce a system of vetting for civil servants in sensitive positions. The measure is intended to apply to new government employees and those transferred to new positions in fields related to foreign affairs, national defense, intelligence gathering, business, technology, the economy and relations with mainland China - with the security and intelligence services accounting for about 80 percent of the subjects for vetting.

The government was specific that such checks were to be made only on new employees or on officials when they changed their position. They would not be made on current employees or on elected representatives.

Security and background checks are, of course, far from unheard of in democracies. They are a routine feature of many US government jobs, while Germany has a whole department dedicated to the task. But these countries do not have Taiwan's recent past.

During the 38 years of martial law and the dictatorship of Chiang Kai-shek and his son Chiang Ching-kuo, a very active secret police poked and pried into every part of civil life looking for "communists" - as it deemed almost anybody opposed in any way to the Chiang regime. To keep the wrong company, be found reading the wrong book or to have made a flippant remark about the regime could have dire consequences: 4,000 died, 8,000 were imprisoned, and many thousands more had their careers destroyed and their lives disturbed in the years of "white terror".

The announcement that background vetting would be started drew immediate accusations from the political opposition that the current government is returning to "white terror" tactics. This was especially distasteful - and in a less politically amnesiac society than Taiwan would have provoked lashings of scorn - since many of the government's most senior members were victims of the white terror themselves. This even includes President Chen Shui-bian, imprisoned in the 1980s on a trumped-up charge of defamation organized by the man who is now Chen's chief rival for power, James Soong, leader of the opposition People First Party (PFP), and for 20 years a leading practitioner of the Chiang regime's darker arts.

It is ironic that the PFP and the other major opposition party of which the PFP is a breakaway offshoot, the Kuomintang (KMT) - Chiang Kai-shek's old party - are now worried that the government controlled by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) will use tactics against their supporters similar to those they used against democracy activists when they enjoyed power themselves. For the overwhelming majority of civil servants are PFP- or KMT-supporting pro-unificationist mainlanders, working for a government of overwhelmingly pro-independence Taiwanese.

How this came about is no mystery. For many years there was a deliberate apartheid-style policy of not letting native Taiwanese, who were thought politically unreliable, into government service. This has resulted in a civil service the ethnic makeup of which is almost exactly the opposite of Taiwan itself, where mainlanders make up less than 20 percent of the population.

The government simply does not see the civil service, with its reunificationist tendencies, as having Taiwan's best interests at heart. And it wants to find the bad apples in the barrel.

The opposition, of course, fears that this means a purge within the civil service of those who don't support the DPP or its Taiwan independence agenda. Their fears have not been allayed by the range of areas that the vettings will look at.

These include the obvious areas of previous criminal records, tax records and whether a subject has been disciplined for ethical problems; there are also to be checks on links with terrorist organizations. But they will focus particularly on links with China, paying special attention to contacts with Chinese officials - any of which have to be compulsorily reported by many officials in sensitive posts - and family connections to China.

Given the predominance of mainlanders in the civil service, this latter is a real bugaboo. Unsurprisingly, civil servants are worried as to what degree of Chinese connection might be a problem in their careers, especially with the growing trend among Taiwan's mainlanders of buying second homes or retirement homes in mainland China itself, as well as the near-inevitability of having relations involved in business in China as well as residual cross-Strait family ties. Is a civil servant with a father who lives or does business in China and has close official links suspect, for example?

The government has said that, unlike in the past, the subject of a vetting will be able to see the results of his or her vetting. People will also be notified in advance that a certain job will require a vetting. Lee Yi-yang, director general of the Central Personnel Administration, pointed out that if people don't want to be vetted then they simply need not apply for those positions - actually less than 1 percent of the total of civil service jobs - where vetting is a requirement. Also, he pointed out, the vetting would not include political affiliation.

This has done little to allay opposition fears, and even in the DPP itself there has been dissent. DPP legislative whip Wang Tuoh said that such a measure would sully Taiwan's reputation for the advancement of liberty and human rights, a key element in its retention of the moral high ground vis-a-vis China.

Unfortunately for the opposition, just as it was mounting a "protection of civil liberties" attack on vetting, a case broke that demonstrated exactly why such "loyalty checks" might be necessary.

A navy petty officer, Liu Yueh-lun, was arrested on June 5, though the arrest was only made public a week later, for leaking military secrets. What Liu appears to have done is to pass a highly secret book of navy communication codes to China. While the case is still under investigation, it appears that Liu, who served on a destroyer in Taiwan's navy and had access to code information, passed the material to his father, who did business in China and was being blackmailed by Chinese authorities.

The elder Liu was an ex-air force officer who started doing business in China in 1988. At some time in the past 10 years he fell foul of the Chinese authorities, being detained for two years on charges of smuggling both antiques and people - Taiwan has a considerable appetite for mainland Chinese prostitutes, as well as document forgery. He was then persuaded to buy his freedom by working for Chinese intelligence. For the past two years he had been obtaining information on codes and naval installations from his son and passing it on to China on his business trips, being paid about US$3,500 each time.

The Liu case is a matter of simple espionage, and is not the kind of matter that vetting civil servants will safeguard against. But that it should make headlines in the middle of the debate about vetting - whether accidentally or otherwise - has certainly taken the wind out of opposition sails. It is hard to protest that the government's concerns about loyalty are part of a politically and perhaps ethnically motivated vendetta when such a flagrant case of treachery is making daily headlines.

And all this comes on top of a debate at the beginning of the month as to whether Taiwan's most notorious defector, Justin Lin, an army officer who swam to China from the island of Kinmen nearly three decades ago, should be allowed to return to the island for his father's funeral or whether he should be prosecuted by the military if he does.

It also follows the release of an alarming statistic by the Ministry of National Defense according to which more than 3,000 former Taiwan military officers are now either doing business or working in "consultancies" in mainland China. There is an overwhelming impression that Taiwan is in the midst of a security crisis. Is it?

Certainly the loss of political power of the pro-unification mainlanders who staff the civil service, the officer corps and the intelligence services, their feeling of alienation in a regime that stresses Taiwan's de facto independence and the interests of ethnic Taiwanese, has been traumatic. They find themselves in the position of a colonial administrative class which, now that their colony has achieved independence, find themselves unwelcome and yet have no "home" country to return to.

They find that in the People's Republic of China they are wealthy and have freedoms that many PRC citizens can only dream of and they start to think that mainland authoritarianism in which they can live well is to be preferred to Taiwanese democracy from which the Taiwanese wish to exclude them, a society where Taiwanese roots are becoming a sine qua non for advancement.

They feel that in Taiwan they lack a future, while the society that they have been taught to admire, China with its 5,000 years of history, is ignored and denigrated on a daily basis.

It is not surprising that an increasingly nationalistic mainland China should seem to such a group to be more in line with their sentiments and loyalties than a Taiwan vigorously pursuing "nativization".

The root of Taiwan's security problems can be found, therefore, in the disaffection of its administrative class, members of which are only now realizing that the country in whose interests they were raised and educated to work - the authoritarian non-communist Republic of China, with boundaries stretching from Taiwan to Xinjiang, Tibet to Manchuria - does not exist.

The country in which they actually live, however, the democratic 23 million-strong area that others wish to call the Republic of Taiwan, does not really want them.

It is, therefore, to the PRC they look, as the safeguard of so much they hold dear, a Greater Chinese nationalism, territorial integrity, Chinese culture.

Seen this way, a criticism might be made of Taiwan's new political masters that they have not done enough to integrate mainlanders into their new democratic society. This is true, but it might also be said in their defense that it is hard to integrate - rather than alienate - a group when part of that democratization means stripping that group of its former privileges.

Some of the more thoughtful DPP politicians such as Wang Tuoh have suggested, however, that the question of security clearances and beefing up the intelligence services, even purging them of their mainlander personnel - which would leave them with a crippling manpower shortage - is not the answer to the problem Taiwan faces. It is not that a small number of people are disloyal, they point out, but that a large social group feels that Taiwan has no future for it. The DPP and the more radical Taiwan solidarity union stresses "Taiwan for the Taiwanese", and non-Taiwanese have to ask, "What about us?"

After a century of colonial oppression, first by the Japanese and then by the "mainlander" exiles of the Chiang dynasty, it is perhaps understandable that Taiwanese show little interest in answering such a question to the satisfaction of those asking it. Understandable but hardly wise, politically or socially. The loyalty crisis is just a symptom of this wider problem.

A solution lies in a consensus between Taiwanese and mainlanders as to where Taiwan should be heading and what their various roles should be. So far almost no thought has been given to the question by either side, and real change is probably a generation away.

(©2002 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact ads@atimes.com for information on our sales and syndication policies.)