Editorial: UN bid misses the point -- again

As expected, Taiwan's bid to re-enter the UN failed. It is a mark of how intractable this problem is that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs regarded the effort as well spent if only because the debate went on longer than usual and the US -- unlike during the last years of the Clinton administration -- didn't speak in opposition to the motion.

But there was a downside, too, if an event so formulaic with so inevitable an outcome can be said to have any meaning at all. China twisted a lot of arms to make sure that the number of those states speaking against Taiwan significantly increased. Defeat was inevitable but China wanted to ensure it was by as a large a margin as possible, thereby, we assume, thinking that it in some way more fully compromised Taiwan's claim to be a state.

Little marked this year's bid as being different from those before it. Once again the strategy was for Taiwan's diplomatic allies to propose to the UN General Committee, which draws up the General Assembly's agenda, that it consent to include on that agenda a motion to reconsider Resolution 2758 -- which replaced Chiang Kai-shek's (蔣介石) government with Mao Zedong's (毛澤東) in China's UN seat.

Once again the General Committee rejected the agenda proposal. Here in Taiwan there had been suggestions that Taipei should go about its bid in an entirely different way, perhaps by applying for membership as a new country, maybe even one that called itself Taiwan. As former US ambassador Harvey Feldman pointed out on this page last week (Letters, Sept. 12) since applications by prospective new members of the UN have first to be vetted and approved by the Security Council, China's membership on that council is an insuperable obstacle. Taiwan's attempt to have Resolution 2758 revised is in fact the only practical method by which it might regain membership.

If there is anything to regret about this year's performance it is that Taiwan so consistently refuses to describe itself as a state, that it harps on about 23 million people going without UN representation when the point is that people are not UN members, states are. If there is anything wrong with Resolution 2758 it is not that it left 23 million people unrepresented, rather that it adopted a totally unrealistic view of Chinese affairs, assuming one unitary government of all China either side of the Taiwan Strait. If bringing China into the UN was supposed to be a move toward realism -- abandoning the absurd fiction that the Chiang government was the government of all China -- then it should have admitted that China was split.

There is little point perhaps in rehashing what should have happened 30 years ago. But the UN bid reminds us how the DPP government has fallen into the trap of its predecessor by playing down the issue of Taiwan's statehood as a "goodwill gesture" toward China. We had hoped that after former president Lee Teng-hui's (李登輝) "state-to-state" interpretation of cross-strait relations in 1999 we would have seen a far more robust stance from Taiwan toward such issues as the UN bid.

We have, however, been disappointed, both by the KMT and the DPP in their willingness to trade Taiwan's dignity for the ever elusive benefits of Bei-jing's goodwill of which not a jot has ever manifested itself. What is needed is not protests about the lack of representation of the people of Taiwan, but rather the lack of representation of the state of the ROC on Taiwan. That is who is missing from the UN. Such a tack might not be any more successful, but if defeat is inevitable let the country keep some dignity in facing it.