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EDITORIAL: What Taiwan can offer China

The sight and sound of British Foreign Secretary David Miliband bowing and scraping to Beijing this week on the issue of cross-strait tensions and the relationship between the Olympics and human rights was disgusting, though expected.

But Miliband's parroting of Chinese slogans -- instead of sober reference to the complicated problems of the region -- reminds us that there is a more complex relationship waiting to develop between Taiwan and China.

Close Taiwanese engagement with China is inevitable; equitable engagement is not. But on the assumption that Taiwan can engage with China from a position of strength, it is clear that the Taiwanese government can express this strength through many means -- not just defensiveness.

Taiwanese-Chinese links are largely limited to the commercial sector, but this will eventually change as the two governments become more comfortable with each others' civic and political groups.

It is easy to overstate a potential Taiwanese contribution to a liberalizing China; certainly, considerations of face dictate that Beijing should never need assistance from Taiwanese on matters that would point to deficiencies in governance.

But provincial and lower governments may take a different attitude. It is therefore also easy to underestimate the good that could come of a Taiwanese presence in China on any number of issues.

Eventually, if Taiwan is to fully enter the diplomatic network and enjoy international recognition and membership of world bodies, it must have a long-term strategy of adaptation to a deepening relationship with China and the complex range of links with Chinese society that this requires.

Cultivating goodwill with scrupulous Chinese individuals and organizations wishing to strengthen civic society and democratic institutions should be embraced, and the sooner the better.

Taiwan must retain its sovereignty and its democracy. This is non-negotiable. But sovereignty and democracy do not equal isolationism and parochialism. Neither do these remove the need to project a more virtuous picture of Taiwanese as constructive, humane and concerned for their closest neighbors.

How to deal with the enemy is the dominant discourse in cross-strait relations. But ordinary, struggling Chinese have never been the enemy; it is the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) ultranationalism and system of exploitation and suppression that threatens Taiwan, though nowhere near as much as its own people and future.

The Democratic Progressive Party government has not been able to explore this issue adequately lest it weaken the party's support base. And the build-up to the presidential election is not the time to expect level-headed discussion of this problem.

Yet it is also too early to say that a Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government would be any more level-headed. With so many abysmal legislators in the game to rake in the dollars -- regardless of the consequences for Taiwan -- the idea that a Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) government could rely on legislative action to cultivate a healthier relationship with ordinary Chinese is laughable.

Most of the opportunities outside the commercial sector that China offers to Taiwan, and vice versa, rely on the foundation of a democratic political mechanism, or at the very least, a massive loosening of restrictions on speech and political activity.

May that day come soon. But until then, when Taiwanese can contribute to a healthier and wiser China, they should feel no guilt at being remote from the wretchedness of so many Chinese. This burden belongs to the CCP, which promised the world to the peasantry but consistently delivers to urban dwellers and party hacks at the peasants' expense.
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