Last week, Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) announced a four-point guideline on Taiwan policy, setting the tone for the "anti-secession" law, which has been passed by the National People's Congress (NPC). Although Hu's guideline lambasted Taiwan's independence forces, he toned down his speech and seemed less harsh than before. All in all, his speech was the mildest in memory.
Mainstream opinion in Taiwan is that Hu's moderate tone was a response to the 10-point agreement reached by President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) and People First Party (PFP) Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜). This interpretation was reinforced when Hu remarked that certain signs of detente had emerged in cross-strait relations.
I believe Hu had other reasons for adopting a softer tone.
First, the softer tone of Hu's four points should be looked at in the context of the large increases in China's military budget, which are an embodiment of the new guidelines for Taiwan policy approved by Hu last May -- which advised patience and said that preparations should be made to meet "hard with harder" and "soft with softer." They are also a necessary adjustment in response to the strong reaction from the international community and Taiwan against the anti-secession law.
More importantly, the law does not make sense from a juridical point of view, because the questions of whether or not to unify with or secede from a country and whether or not to go to war are political questions that cannot be regulated by law. Nowhere in the world, including in the US prior to the Civil War and the war in Iraq, does a country have to enact a law before an attack. Finding a legal basis for a military attack on Taiwan is thus not a problem for Beijing. On the contrary, enacting anti-secession legislation will instead limit Beijing's political decisions on the cross-strait issue.
Furthermore, since there will be a law, the act of secession has to be clearly defined. If it is a matter of secession, then war has to be waged immediately, and if it is not, why would Beijing have to pursue unification? Thus, the definition of the cross-strait status quo has become a big problem.
In the past, Beijing defined the cross-strait situation as a three-phase theory that the sides have yet to be unified, that they belong to one and the same China, and that national sovereignty cannot be divided. The first phase describes what the cross-strait status quo ought to be, while the second and third phases express what the nation should do.
The logic is clear. This three-phase theory defines the status quo as being what it ought not to be -- a state of separation, or a continuing state of war remaining from the civil war between the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). This means that Beijing is free to take the initiative and choose whether or not to strike at any time. But because the international conditions for waging war do not exist, they have chosen to not strike.
This makes the reckless hawks within the CCP so disgruntled that they believe they have to emulate the US' Taiwan Relations Act and unilaterally enact a law to cope with the current situation. However, even if the law is enacted, the conditions for waging war will not improve. If China decides to go to war with Taiwan because it has seceded as defined by the law, it will certainly meet fierce resistance; if it decides not to attack in the wake of "secessionist" behavior, it will have violated the law, with disastrous results for the leaders.
To resolve this predicament and the possibility of being subjected to criticism, Beijing adjusted the three-phase theory into a two-phase theory, saying that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait have yet to be unified and the contention that the two sides belong to one and the same China has never changed. They therefore changed the "one China" concept from dealing with what "ought to be" into what "is the case."
This is illogical, because if the "reality" of "one China" is unchanged, then Taiwan has not seceded. Yet that which must be unified is this same "one China."
Although this logic is strange, it has solved a real problem. Since the "reality" of "one China" remains unchanged, there is no need to wage war, which is used to cover up the awkward fact that China cannot go to war.
The new two-phase theory should have been complemented by the third phase, that China -- given the status quo described in the first two phases -- does not have to launch a military attack on Taiwan. But doesn't this mean that the anti-secession law, which the hawks in the CCP were so eager to have passed and which was supposed to provide a legal basis for invading Taiwan, is in fact providing a legal basis for not invading Taiwan? How totally absurd.
Regardless, a China that is in such a rush to attack Taiwan has to recognize the fact that it cannot easily do so. Beijing has therefore lobbied for support for the anti-secession law in several countries. In the end the main appeal was that the law was intended to maintain the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.
This redefinition is tantamount to an attempt to push both sides away from a situation where civil war seems imminent. Beijing's change in approach is so significant that it amounts to a paradigmatic change. This was completely unexpected from the hawks' point of view. From this perspective, we see that although there were sinister motives for enacting the law, the results have instead limited Beijing's strategic space.
With regard to taking Taiwan by force, the law, though annoying, fires blanks. However, Taiwan's political parties have overestimated the power vested in the law and overreacted, enabling Beijing to score points. In order to get the legislature to pass a resolution opposing the anti-secession law, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) even agreed to say that "the Republic of China has been a sovereign state ever since its founding," which is a unificationist definition of the nation. Elsewhere, former president Lee Tung-hui (
More importantly, Beijing's original intention was simply to deter Taiwanese independence forces without trumpeting extravagant hopes for unification. But the unexpected appearance of the 10-point consensus has made Beijing feel that this goal has been reached, and the next goal should therefore be to promote unification. Although certain signs of detente have emerged across the Taiwan Strait, Taiwan's strategic space has also shrunk. Beijing is already aware of this, and thus Hu's four-point guideline places a lot more emphasis on pushing for "one China" than "anti-Taiwanese independence" in the hope of paving the way for unification.
While the anti-secession law mess has placed Beijing in a difficult situation both legally and internationally, even inducing a paradigmatic shift in its Taiwan policy, Taiwan has also suffered strategic losses as the result of misjudgments by its political parties. This is a great pity. Fortunately, we have seen that the general public are wiser than the politicians -- they have showed their antipathy and opposed the law while showing more confidence and a lack of fear. Such people are a wonderful asset for Taiwan to have.
Lin Cho-shui is a DPP legislator.
Translated by Daniel Cheng
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