Gordon Chang (章家敦), a China expert and author of The Coming Collapse of China, said yesterday that Taiwan will remain independent regardless of the outcome of the March presidential election.
Chang based his prediction on the emergence of a consensus among Taiwan's people to forge an independent culture and country.
Speaking at a press conference in Taipei yesterday to introduce the upcoming international conference on cross-strait exchanges and national security organized by the Taiwan Advocates think tank, Chang said China is mistaken to think it could ultimately achieve political integration by working with any of Taiwan's political parties.
PHOTO: LU CHUN-WEI, TAIPEI TIMES
"Chinese leaders don't have to talk to the people, and they thought they could do the same with the people of Taiwan," he said. "But with the emergence of the Taiwanese people's forging of a country of their own, China is mistaken to think they could control Taiwan through a government-to-government deal.
"Taiwan will remain independent no matter whether the DPP or the KMT [Chinese Nationalist Party] wins the election because no one could ignore the strong calls within Taiwanese society for democracy and a separate way from China's dictatorship," Chang told the Taipei Times yesterday.
Chang will attend the international conference tomorrow and Sunday where he will deliver a keynote speech entitled "The Future of Taiwan and China: Freedom and Democracy prevails."
Chang will participate in round-table discussions with former president Lee Teng-hui (
A Chinese-American lawyer formerly based in Shanghai, Chang is noted for having made predictions about an impending collapse of China. He believes the fundamental dictatorial nature of China's leadership will ultimately force the country's market to fail.
"When I first moved to China, I thought that Chinese leaders had been able to solve the problems of communism, and that they were capable of navigating the transition from a Marxist economy to a functioning free market. But I soon realized that the miracle was not as miraculous as it looked. There were problems in China. China was not a strong country, it was a weak one," he said.
Chang dismissed speculation that protests in Hong Kong over China's plans for an anti-subversion law would lead to democratization in China. He said Chinese leaders are not capable of change and that they had merely been forced to retreat.
In terms of the increasing cooperation between China and the US in the war on terrorism and in North Korea's nuclear crisis, Chang said the cooperation will only be temporary as the fundamental goals of the two government systems are inconsistent.
"The fundamental notions of government and human rights in the US are mutually inconsistent with those same notions in China. We are going to see the limits of cooperation between Beijing and Washington," he said. "I believe at the more fundamental level, the US stands firmly behind Taiwan because the interests and goals of Taiwan are consistent with those of the US."
Ross Terrill, a research associate of East Asian Studies at Harvard University, said yesterday that democracy can't work with Beijing's dictatorship because dictatorship, like terrorism, is not accountable to the people.
"Socially and economically, China has undergone great changes in the past few decades. But politically, less change happened," Terrill said.
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