Vice President Annette Lu (
Speaking at the opening ceremony of a symposium on the "one China" issue held by the Institute for National Development (IND), Lu stressed she was speaking personally without having consulted President Chen Shui-bian (
"I am speaking here as the founder of the IND, not as someone authorized by President Chen, Lu said.
While Chen said in his inaugural speech that "we believe that the leaders on both sides possess enough wisdom and creativity to jointly deal with the question of a future `one China,'" Lu appeared yesterday to take a more hard line stance.
"If Taiwan wants to dance to Beijing's music, then Taiwan will never vanquish this spell," she said.
Lu said Beijing still regarded Taiwan's status as that of a local government and claimed the "Taiwan issue" was a "left-over problem" from the civil war between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in 1949, when Mao Zedong's (
"Since Beijing's ideology is built on the perspective of the civil war, I think the `one China' principle should become redundant after the KMT's loss of power on May 20," said Lu.
Lu, who holds a master's degree in law from Harvard University, pointed out that Beijing's claim to sovereignty over Taiwan has no support from any international treaty.
"Although Japan gave up Taiwan in the San Francisco Peace Treaty in 1952, this treaty did not assign this island to China," Lu said.
"This part of the final version of this treaty was not written with carelessness," said Lu; "it was intentional to ignore this issue, because of the CCP's backing of North Korea's invasion of South Korea."
"The international community did not want to transfer Taiwan from one war-mongering country [Japan] to another [China]," Lu said.
She stressed that Beijing's claims over Taiwan -- which the CCP regime has never ruled -- were totally based on the view of maintaining its sovereignty and territory and that such claims "ignored the wishes of Taiwan's 23 million people."
Concerning Beijing's formulation of its "one China" principle -- that there is only one China in the world and Taiwan is a part of China -- Lu said that Taiwan had no intention of challenging the fact that "there is only one China in the world."
This, she said, was like saying there was only one US or one Japan in the world.
It was the second part of Beijing's "one China" formulation, that created problems for Taiwan.
"If Beijing insists that `one China' means the PRC, than the 23 million people in Taiwan should unequivocally deny that `Taiwan is a part of the PRC,'" Lu said.
"If we continue to dance to Beijing's tune, we will never be able to be our own masters, like the Monkey King in the Chinese novel Journey to the West (
Despite his ability to undertake supernatural feats, the Monkey King is never able to escape from the control of his master Tang San-tzang (唐三藏), a Buddhist monk, during their journey to India.
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