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EDITORIAL: Hypnotism and the '1992 consensus'

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, White House security advisers will eventually come to believe it. So it is with the stubborn myth of the "1992 consensus" between Taiwan and China, which now has the distinction of tricking Stephen Hadley, national security adviser to US President George W. Bush, into thinking that it ever existed.

Discussing a telephone conversation between Bush and Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), Hadley said: "The interesting thing is whether this [Hu's reference to the `consensus'] is an indication or a signal of a willingness to open dialogue on a basis that in previous years had been accepted by both parties."

The problem with this, of course, is that no such basis has ever been accepted by Taiwan's government, and any hope of a true consensus -- formalizing the idea of "one China," but with different interpretations -- was overwhelmed by former president Lee Teng-hui's (李登輝) dictum of "state-to-state" cross-strait relations a few years after the 1992 Hong Kong conference.

The "1992 consensus" has new impetus today partly because of its utility for the incoming administration of president-elect Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and partly because the DPP has been characteristically inept in highlighting its fictional birth. With the highest US officials now subscribing to mythology, the ramifications of this ineptitude are plain to see.

In 2006, Lee repudiated the term "1992 consensus," and in so doing it emerged that the term was manufactured by Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) think tank guru and former legislator Su Chi (蘇起) just before President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) took office. In doing so, Su also misrepresented the 1992 meeting's outcome, a conceit that turns out to have had a lasting impact on the cross-strait debate.

These days, it seems, fiction has a role to play in cross-strait affairs if it fits the template of peaceful deference to Chinese sensibilities.

For Hadley's benefit, it should be said that Su is no stranger to creative tweaking of reality. He had a role to play in the dissemination to the US Congress of the Bulletgate leaflet composed by KMT think tank members. This ham-fisted propaganda campaign meant to serve as a framework for the pan-blue-camp fantasy that the assassination attempt on Chen and the vice president on the eve of the 2004 presidential election was staged.

Then there were his allegations in late 2005 that the Taipei Times was being manipulated by the DPP government -- a laughable insult for which no evidence was presented.

At the time this all seemed more hilarious than offensive. But with Su in the running for secretary-general of the National Security Council, things are not so funny anymore.

Whether in the habit of slandering media outlets that oppose his ideology, fabricating the diplomatic record or actively eroding confidence in the nation's prosecutors and police, one must ask whether a politician who can hypnotize people with such bunkum -- at home and abroad -- should be allowed anywhere near an institution that is charged with monitoring the security of a free country.

Then one must ask what comes next if that person actually gets the job.
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