Several days ago, an official spokesperson for the Chinese government said that Taiwan’s future should be “decided by all Chinese people, including [our] Taiwanese compatriots.”
Although this is simply a reiteration of Beijing’s long-held position, the directness with which it was articulated on this occasion caused quite a stir among the general public here in Taiwan.
These words came as a slap in the face for the 23 million people living in Taiwan. Not only do they reflect China’s domineering attitude, but they also demonstrate once again the dictatorial nature of a regime that has no idea of what democracy is.
One of the features of the Chinese is that they are keen to take other peoples — kicking and screaming if necessary — into their fold, and yet do not seem to be able to achieve the ideal of “benevolent rule” to “attract people from near and far” of which the ancient Chinese classics spoke.
Beijing’s policy toward Tibet and Xinjiang are cases in point. Its rule in these two regions has met much resistance, and in Tibet there have been more than 130 instances of people self-immolating in protest over the past five years.
China wants to force people from surrounding regions to become Chinese, but the authorities fail to treat their own people well.
In politics, they enforce one-party authoritarian rule; in economics they countenance crony capitalism, labeling it “socialism.”
Internationally, they are regarded as among the biggest offenders against freedoms of expression, of the media and of religion, and have a terrible record on human rights: The Nobel Peace Prize winner Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) is still being kept in solitary confinement.
The very name of the country they control, the People’s Republic of China (PRC), is a misnomer, a misrepresentation of the reality.
A recent online survey of Chinese people found that 65 percent of respondents would prefer not to be Chinese at all. This sentiment prompted the Hong Kong author Joe Chung (鍾祖康) to write his 2010 bestseller I Don’t Want To Be Chinese (來生不做中國人).
It is because of this that even the most basic democracy has failed to take root in China. It is no wonder, then, that the people living in a democratic Taiwan would react in this way to “magnanimous” official pronouncements that we will be included in decisions about our own future, but this should not be up to the Taiwanese.
The Chinese have their own doubts about their own government, and should the leaders in Beijing not be chosen by the 1.3 billion people living in China?
It is still fresh in Chinese people’s minds how, on Human Rights Day five-and-a-half years ago, Liu and others produced their manifesto, Charter 08, advocating the establishment of a modern democratic, republican, constitutional political framework compliant with the universal values of freedom, equality and human rights.
These sentiments — moderate, legitimate and just though they were — were suppressed by the authorities. It goes beyond the pale that this same government is saying that we can all decide Taiwan’s future together.
It cannot be stressed enough that Beijing simply will not tolerate democracy or dissent, and this is even more the case in Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) era.
The Chinese government recently published a white paper clarifying its position on the “one country, two systems” model with which it governs Hong Kong.
The white paper says that, although the former British colony has full governance rights, executive, legislative and judicial decisions are still ultimately subject to the central government’s authorization. In other words, the idea of “two systems” is subjugated to that of “one country.” Hong Kong’s Basic Law clearly states that it enjoys “a high degree of autonomy,” and this has been the case up until this declaration.
Before this, former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) had made assurances that Hong Kong would “remain unchanged for 50 years” and former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (江澤民) described his vision of how the two countries’ relationship would operate using his well water and river water metaphor, with each side — China and Hong Kong — operating separately and minding their own respective affairs.
This white paper sweeps Deng and Jiang’s assurances aside. Beijing has tired of the charade it played prior to the 1997 handover to assuage the concerns of Hong Kongers and to maintain appearances for the Taiwanese understandably watching on with interest. It no longer wants to keep up this pretense, as we see with its response to Hong Kong activists’ democratic demands in the Occupy Central movement.
This is a matter of concern for Hong Kongers, and should also serve as a warning for the Taiwanese.
The “one country, two systems” model has always been a tough sell in Taiwan, and following the controversy over the attempts to pass the cross-strait service trade pace through the legislature and the student-led Sunflower movement, the public here is even more wary of the government conspiring with Beijing at Taiwan’s expense. With this announcement, that the Chinese will have a say in Taiwan’s future, the reaction here in Taiwan was always going to be all the more vociferous.
That said, Beijing has made no secret of its ambitions to annex Taiwan, so this announcement is simply the latest iteration of an open policy. The thing that the Taiwanese have to be most wary of is their own government, which under President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) is proactively colluding with China in allowing it to decide our future.
Are not the ideas articulated by this official Chinese spokesperson — that there is but “one China,” to which both sides of the Strait belong, and that cross-strait affairs are “not international relations” — the same as those held by the Ma administration? After all, even before he was president, Ma said that the Taiwan question should be decided jointly by the peoples on either side of the Strait.
In addition, after he had taken office, Ma immediately set about redefining cross-strait relations, dropping both former president Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) “special state-to-state relations” and “two states” model and former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) “one country on each side” and replacing them with former National Security Council secretary-general Su Chi’s (蘇起) fabricated “1992 consensus” and “one China with each side having its own interpretation.”
Beijing has been loving this, and has been quite happy to play along. Now, in the context of the “one China” principle, Beijing can have a say in Taiwan’s future.
In fact, China is already making headway in deciding Taiwan’s future. It has already successfully influenced the results of presidential elections here and infiltrated our media, and secured a full opening up of exchanges between the two sides of the Strait.
The upcoming visit by China’s Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) Director Zhang Zhijun (張志軍) is geared toward facilitating this “jointly deciding Taiwan’s future.”
The Taiwanese are the only people who have the right to decide Taiwan’s future, and they cannot allow anybody to try to convince themselves otherwise. As soon as we allow the idea that others share this right, we will lose control over the situation, and things will quickly deteriorate. We should use Zhang’s visit as an opportunity to demonstrate our resolve not to tolerate such insults to our dignity.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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