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Editorial: A referendum is essential

As we await the precise wording of the latest edict from the US, we had better refrain from obvious cat-calling of a country born as a result of a popular rebellion against unelected authority, which has been an ardent proselytizer of democratic values, conspiring with the unelected dictators in Beijing to frustrate popular democracy in Taiwan.

Let us, more usefully, reiterate just why a referendum is in fact the most pressing political issue in this country today.

If reports are accurate, China has said, and the US "acknowledged," that it is opposed to a referendum on anything in Taiwan as it sees this as a Pandora's box for Taiwan's independence. No matter how local the issue is, nor how contentious -- the Fourth Nuclear Power Plant is the obvious choice -- China sees the use of a referendum to decide such issues creating a precedent for decision making on contention issues that it does not want to see.

Of course it is not in Beijing's interest for its own people to see Taiwanese being consulted directly on issues of importance, although, given China's media control and widespread ignorance about Taiwan, this is a secondary problem.

What China wants is sovereignty over Taiwan, pure and simple. And it understands one central point: a referendum motion to reunify with China will never secure majority support among Taiwanese, not now, and while the communists remain in power, not ever. That does not mean that it cannot "recover" Taiwan; simply that, for it to do so, Taiwanese must not be allowed to have a say.

To this end, for the last couple of years it has been planning with various emissaries from the KMT and PFP the terms of a deal to be proposed to Taiwan if the blue-camp parties were to recover power, something both Beijing and the parties themselves expect to happen at the next presidential election.

Interestingly -- and the US should pick up on this -- the most reliable reports of what has been talked about come from US academics with their contacts among Beijing's cadres and think tanks.

What appears to be the deal on offer is that the blue camp will accept something close to the expanded "one country, two systems" deal that has been on offer for well over a decade. In return Beijing will support the transition of Taiwan back to a one-party state with the blue camp in charge. Having lost power once, the blues have decided that they will never run that risk again and Beijing can help them in this regard. The emasculating of Taiwan's democracy and the erosion of its civil liberties -- think here of post-handover Hong Kong -- will swiftly follow.

For this ugly scenario to play as scripted it is essential that the people of Taiwan never have a chance to vote on the reunification question. They must be allowed to vote in the presidential election -- which the blue camp thinks it can win on the economy -- and then never consulted again. It is essential to the reunificationist plan, a plan that, by the way, will destroy democracy in anything but name in Taiwan -- even the Soviet Union held elections, remember -- that there is no precedent for asking the people, via a democratic process, what they think.

And this is where the US seems to have fallen badly for a piece of Chinese flimflam. The referendum question has never been about Taiwan voting for independence. That is not what referendum advocates -- at least the realists among them -- seek. It is about Taiwanese being consulted about any change to their future, as a safeguard from having reunification thrust unwillingly upon them. That is why China and the blue camp are so opposed to referendums, because they think they can, on the basis of a presidential election win and platitudes about "representative democracy," bring off this coup through an undemocratic end-around.

Is this really what the US wants to support?
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