Wed, Aug 10, 2005 page8

• Wrestling meaning from the title `ROC'

  • By Shen Chieh 沈潔
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  After adding the word "Taiwan" to the Presidential Office's Web site last week, President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) proposed a four-stage theory of the Republic of China's (ROC) development that stressed that today's ROC is Taiwan.

  Because the name ROC includes the word "republic," it is easily mistaken to mean that the ROC is a state.

  However, the name ROC initially symbolized a government or a dynasty, and it was also the official name for China.

  After the People's Republic of China (PRC) replaced the ROC as the ruler of China, the only remaining meaning was "government," with the other meanings being supplanted by the PRC. This now means that the PRC is China and China is the PRC.

  The ROC only remains as the government's name and its organization. It no longer has the original sense of "state."

  Chen is being polite when he describes the second stage of his theory as the ROC "moving" to Taiwan, when it in fact was exiled here and proceeded to -- without passing through any democratic or legal procedures -- begin to occupy Taiwan and Penghu after Japan gave up its claims in a treaty.

  In 1971, the UN decided to expel the delegate representing president Chiang Kai-shek's (蔣介石) regime and proclaimed that the PRC was the legitimate representative of China. Afterward, Chiang's son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) began implementing limited localization and promotion of Taiwanese. Taiwan was thus used to fill the empty ROC shell, and the ROC began its transformation toward becoming Taiwan.

  Former president Lee Teng-hui's (李登輝) "ROC on Taiwan" and "ROC Taiwan" still contained the word "republic" and the confusion remained.

  In 1999, Lee proposed his "special state to state" model for cross-strait relations, clearly defining the ROC as a "state" rather than a "government." Since both the PRC and the ROC are states, with neither having any jurisdiction over the other, this is clearly a matter of two different countries.

  A majority in the international community do not recognize the ROC because they do not view it as a state, but rather as the name of a government that has been replaced by the PRC. If the national title remains unchanged and if we want to maintain that Taiwan or the ROC is a sovereign state, there are only two approaches to altering the definition of the ROC.

  First, that Taiwan is a sovereign state whose national title is the ROC. Second, that the ROC is a sovereign state whose territory is limited to the Taiwan region and the sovereignty belongs to the 23 million Taiwanese.

  Chen's four-stage theory defines the ROC as a state, but in using territory and population to define the scope of this state, he makes the ROC Taiwan. This is in response to the fact that while the national title "ROC" cannot be altered at this stage, most people believe that Taiwan is a sovereign state. Since any sudden change is impossible, this is a necessary and natural development.

  Shen Chieh is a political commentator based in Washington.

  Translated by Daniel Cheng
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