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Make a clean break with the past

`In order to make a clean break with the past, a new national name must be chosen to allow the Taiwanese people to take their rightful place in the world.'

On Sept. 6, up to 150,000 people marched on the Presidential Office in Taipei to press for a change in the country's official name to "Taiwan" and to enter the UN under that name, rather than the "Republic of China."

Former president Lee Tung-hui (李登輝) said that the Republic of China (ROC) has no territory -- because most of its area was taken over by the Chinese communists in 1949. Not surprisingly, the huge turnout for the march has illustrated the fissures within Taiwan over the question of unification and of whether changing the name of the country would be too much of a change in the status quo for a population famously more concerned with economics than politics.

Most observers watching recent events unfold are under the mistaken notion that the drive to change the nation's moniker represents the following:

One, Taipei is inching toward a declaration of independence.

Two, the ROC equals Taiwan. The act to change the name from ROC to Taiwan means that Taiwan is the descendant of the ROC directly and legitimately.

None of this is the case.

After being under the control of the Qing dynasty for 212 years, Taiwan was ceded to Japan in the 1895 Treaty of Shiminoseki. Tai-wan remained a Japanese colony for the next 50 years, until Tokyo surrendered to allied forces in 1945. At the same time, the victory of the Chinese communists over the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) drove Chang Kai-shek (蔣介石), his forces and his supporters to flee to Taiwan. Chiang's exiled government remained internationally recognized until the mid-1970s, when the UN admitted and recognized Beijing's government as the sole and legitimate government of China.

People in Taiwan (including Aborigines) originally accepted the KMT government. But the KMT's oppression and exploitation of the Taiwanese population greatly exceeded the suffering inflicted by the Japanese. This resulted in a resistance movement that culminated in the creation and eventual rise to power of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), finally giving the people of Taiwan a say in the status of their own country.

Since the end of the Chinese Civil War, Taiwan's people have been caught in the middle of this duel between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the KMT, and it is high time that the people of Taiwan seize their own destiny and cut all ties to this archaic KMT-CCP standoff.

Taiwan needs an internationally recognizable, legal name. As Lee indicated in his speech, Tai-wan has used 20 or so names at various events and in international organizations.

The global community needs to be made aware of the complete context of Taiwan's situation and realize that this is not a domestic problem within China.

The issue that Beijing repeatedly categorizes as one of its domestic issues is its relationship with the exiled KMT government -- an entity that no longer rules Taiwan or any other land mass.

To better illustrate the above statement, let's compare the exiled government of the ROC to the exiled government of Tibet. The Tibetan administration wants a "high degree of autonomy." It has three basic elements to run the exile government: territory, people and the government.

First, the exile government of Tibet largely corresponds to the geological plateau of Tibet, which consists of 2.5 million square kilometers. The exiled ROC government, for a long time, staked its claim over the immense territory over China and regarded Taiwan as a temporary home.

In 1991, the KMT dropped its claim to China, but still preaches about unifying with China under the framework of democracy. The KMT has also tried to show Taiwanese people that it is taking their interests into serious consideration. This implies that the KMT's strategy is to win voters' hearts, but die-hard unificationists now accuse it of cutting itself from the motherland and lowering itself to be the leader of this nation.

Second, the people in Tibet are Tibetan, and never considered themselves to be, and indeed are racially distinct from, the Chinese. The exiled ROC government consists essentially of members of the KMT who fled with the government in 1947. They consider themselves Chinese who live on an island called "Taiwan."

Third, the exiled government of Tibet was headquartered in Lhasa. It consisted of a head of state, a Cabinet, a national assembly and an elaborate bureaucracy to administer the vast territory of Tibet. The exiled KMT government once ruled the people of Taiwan under similar bureaucratic systems. But after the KMT lost the presidential election in 2000, its de jure governance of Taiwan came to an end.

In sum, this exiled ROC government bears little comparison to the exiled government of Tibet. And the current status of the ROC remains merely a title.

What is ironic is that the international community actually understands the idea of an "exiled ROC government" more clearly than the Taiwanese themselves. If you ask any Taiwanese on the street whether the ROC is an exiled government or not, eight out of 10 are not willing to give you an answer right away.

But the confusion of the Taiwanese about their national identity is a very interesting and observable phenomenon. This is because they have been shunned from speaking about reality for a long time under the authoritarian KMT regime, and still cannot see reality because they are confused with all these different pursuits from various interests groups in Taiwan.

What could make the situation worse? Most of the international agreements that have emerged relating to Taiwan since the end of the Chinese Civil War are relics of a bygone era, including the three communiques between the US and China and the Taiwan Relations Act. It's time that all of us, Chinese, Taiwanese and all other people concerned with the issue, move on and stop trying to settle a dispute between the KMT and CCP and deal with the facts on the ground.

What if the KMT wins the election next year? The people of Taiwan need to end the fruitless obsession with the rivalry between nationalists and communists. In order to make a clean break with the past, a new national name must be chosen to allow the Taiwanese people to take their rightful place in the world.

Whatever party rules the nation in the future, it should recognize Taiwan as a nation and run it as a nation. If the KMT is unable to leave behind its tussle with the communists, the people of Taiwan would be wise to reject them.

Yu-Wen Chen is a research assistant at National Taiwan University.
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