People around the world remembered the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre on June 4, the 25th anniversary of the massacre. However, Beijing found itself in a sticky situation.
The international community encouraged the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to tell the truth and give civic rights back to the Chinese, 180,000 people attended an event held in Hong Kong demanding political rehabilitation for those caught up in the massacre, and some people dressed in black took the risk of holding a remembrance event in Tiananmen Square itself.
A quarter of a century on, the CCP is still unwilling to face history and give Chinese freedom and democracy. The world will not ignore that 1.3 billion people in China are still living under political oppression.
Taiwan needs to pay attention to this, not only because the Tiananmen Square Massacre is closely related to the issues of universal values and basic human rights.
Political oppression in China is worse now than it was in 1989, and Beijing wants to influence the economic, political and social situation in Taiwan, with the goal of annexing it. This is why civic groups have been stressing that interactions with Beijing must be based on the precondition of human rights. One of the Sunflower movement leaders, Lin Fei-fan (林飛帆), put it well when he said that the Taiwanese should not be concerned about the Tiananmen Massacre, in the nationalistic sense that the Chinese people are compatriots, but rather because we are concerned about the Chinese public.
Apart from being concerned about whether Chinese have basic human rights, the Taiwanese government should also reflect on the failures of Taiwan’s China policy following the Tiananmen Massacre, as this is the only way to improve the situation in the face of constant pressure from Beijing.
The US is a case in point. After the Tiananmen Massacre, the US and other countries in the West imposed economic sanctions and an arms embargo on China, and when he was running for president in 1992, Bill Clinton described China’s leaders as the “butchers of Beijing.”
Although the Tiananmen Square Massacre and economic sanctions caused some temporary disruption to China’s economy and foreign investors were still staying away in 1991, former US ambassador to China Winston Lord recently told the US Congress that the US government at that time was not internally consistent in its dealings with China.
Lord said trade departments within the government were not overly concerned with human rights and economic sanctions and that Clinton did not support the State Department after he was elected. The result was that human rights were disconnected from trade and economic issues, and the pressure on China to implement human rights ended up having no effect.
In comparison, after the Tiananmen Massacre, the Taiwanese government strongly condemned the Chinese authorities and assisted some of the key individuals in the Chinese student movement. However, the response among the public varied. There were demonstrations in support of the Chinese democracy movement. However, just as the West was imposing economic sanctions on China and travel there was declining rapidly, many Taiwanese took advantage of the situation to travel around China cheaply while Taiwanese businesspeople moved into China in a big way, completely ignoring the warnings that over-reliance on the Chinese economy would cause damage to Taiwan.
By ignoring the moral issues related to the Tiananmen Square Massacre for their own short-term, personal interests, Taiwanese businesspeople assisted China by propping up the decline in foreign investment, the slack tourism industry and the economy.
In 1992, former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s (鄧小平) southern inspection tour helped speed up economic development and Taiwanese businesspeople began to invest even more in China. This caused former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) to propose ideas such as the “go south” policy (南向政策), which was aimed at Southeast Asia, and the “no haste, be patient” (戒急用忍) policy aimed at stemming investment in China, but these measures were not enough to close the floodgates that had already been opened.
The result was that Taiwanese businesspeople made the largest contribution to China’s economic takeoff in terms of capital, technology and management skills. While some benefited from this, following the recent restructuring of the Chinese economy, China now wants to get rid of Taiwanese businesspeople who have either had problems pulling out of China or have been forced to move their operations to ASEAN countries like Vietnam and Cambodia.
The nation’s main industries were moved to China long ago, jobs are hard to come by, salaries are decreasing and the economy is in a bad state, making an economic recovery difficult. After the Tiananmen Massacre, Taiwanese businesspeople who thought they had a plan that could not fail rushed to move Taiwan’s most successful industries to China and this has caused massive damage to the nation.
These have not been the nation’s only troubles. As China’s economy took off, its military began to expand and aimed thousands of missiles at Taiwan. Not only does Beijing claim that the Separate Customs Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu, as well as the islands in the South China Sea, are all its sovereign territory, China has also had endless territorial disputes with its other neighbors and is still disagreement with Vietnam, the Philippines and Japan.
During the recent Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore, China used its idea of a new Asian security concept in response to the US rebalancing to the Asia-Pacific, which many view as a battle between China and the US for dominance in Asia.
More importantly, the Chinese government has been treating its own people in an even harsher manner. Not only does it continue to withhold the truth about the Tiananmen Massacre, it has also implemented tight Internet controls, detained dissidents and shown a strong resistance to democratic reforms. The longstanding hopes in the West that the human rights situation in China would improve via trade and that Beijing would become a responsible member of the global community have not come to fruition.
Taiwan has suffered a lot from its poor China policies after the Tiananmen Square Massacre. The first lesson to be learned from this is that Taiwan cannot blindly pin its whole economic future on China and that it must expand its international presence and join the Trans-Pacific Partnership.
The second lesson is that Taiwan must not be led astray by politicians and businesspeople merely concerned with personal, short-term and tangible benefits; freedom, human rights and sovereignty are all values that we must remember when dealing with China because giving up these universal aspirations will only bring disaster to Taiwan.
Lastly, the most important lesson is that opinion polls show that 60 percent of the public believe Taiwan is a different country to China and that relations between Taiwan and China are state-to-state in nature.
Taiwan should actively focus on carrying out economic, political and military reforms, so as to ensure democracy, freedom and human rights are alive and well in the nation. This would stop Beijing from polluting Taiwan with its tyranny.
Translated by Drew Cameron
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