The word “frenemy” was coined by someone to describe a kind of person who is a friend in some ways and an enemy or rival in others. For Taiwan, China is a frenemy. On the one hand, China and Taiwan have guns pointed at one another, but on the other they are so close as to be inseparable. In Taiwan, politicians form two camps with respect to their China policy — one follows a policy of resistance and the other one of obedience — and they can easily go to extremes. However, if China is our frenemy, can these two extremes be sufficient when dealing with relations across the Taiwan Strait?
Over the past five or six years, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) have cast aside their historical enmity. Their new cordial relations give the international community the impression that China and Taiwan will be united before very long. Apart from that, this cordiality is a source of severe annoyance for many Chinese officials who are not in the upper ranks of the CCP. The reason for that is that many senior KMT officials, or their sons and daughters, have taken advantage of the warm relations between the two parties to obtain management rights in companies in tightly restricted sectors in China. On one hand, this may shut out some Chinese officials from opportunities to make profits and on the other it may provoke resentment among ordinary Chinese who fall outside the privileged elite.
China’s biggest problem is domestic — the clashes of interest and friction between different economic classes. In 19th-century Britain, as described by philosopher Karl Marx, capitalists ruled the roost and workers had become alienated from the commodities they made. This was accompanied by land enclosures and the enrichment of the few through rent-seeking behavior.
These very conditions prevail in today’s China, causing great suffering for the country’s workers and peasants. It is hard to predict for certain whether these pressures will result in an explosion, but there are many CCP officials who are not afraid to point out these problems. Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) may be able to dodge the issue, but his successor may no longer be able to do so.
Chinese officials know that the pressure for democracy is unavoidable; they just don’t want it to happen while they are still in office. Once protests break out on a large scale, China, like other countries before it, is likely to see some party officials jumping off like monkeys from a falling tree, while others come to the fore on a wave of narrow populism.
A “Jasmine Revolution” is spreading like wildfire across Northern African and the Middle East. Although the recent coordinated protests in cities across China fell short of challenging the CCP’s legitimacy, the close contacts between activists in different places made possible by modern technology have become a big worry for the Chinese authorities, which placed units responsible for safeguarding stability on full alert. Many reporters stationed in China found that their instant messaging services were blocked.
It is hard to predict what China’s next step will be. As China’s frenemy, Taiwan is too close to China and too far from God. Here, the question is how to prepare for whatever changes may come in China in the future.
Obviously the KMT, whose busy interactions with the CCP are based on a tangle of interests, is quite unprepared for any coming changes in China. When such changes arrive, clashes between economic classes are very likely to break out. The KMT, through its exclusive interaction with the CCP, has itself become a group with vested interests in China, so one must ask whether it can avoid the anger that ordinary Chinese people harbor against special interest groups.
As for the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), when dealing with the unpredictable frenemy that is China, it may be safe to talk about coexisting peacefully and seeking common ground, but that is not really enough. In recent years, Taiwanese civic groups have gradually come to understand the importance of having pluralistic interchanges with Chinese non-governmental organizations and other social forces.
The DPP’s idea of “interchange with no preconditions” should also be broadened to include Chinese civic society. Only then can the party gain a full understanding and adequately prepare for such changes as may occur in China.
What the DPP should avoid is repeating the KMT’s mistake of only interacting with the CCP, which would make Taiwan into one of China’s special interest groups and put it on the wrong side of history.
Lee Tuo-tzu is a legislative assistant.
TRANSLATED BY JULIAN CLEGG
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