Portugal's handover of Macau to China tonight is supposed to be of great significance to Taiwan. Beijing has recently been ratcheting up its rhetoric about the final step to "reunification of the motherland." There is talk of how Macau has to be a model for the success of "one country, two systems" or else Taiwan will be "lost." Yet what is baffling is not what Beijing's strategy is, but why anyone would consider it even coherent, let alone potentially winning.
Beijing's aim has been, of course, to project first Hong Kong, then Macau, then Taiwan as a natural sequence in the recovery of "Chinese territory." The idea is that international opinion might be less resistant to Taiwan's being pressured if it can see reunification as part of an "inevitable" trend utilizing a method of "one country, two systems" that has already worked successfully elsewhere.
Forget for a moment the fact that "one country, two systems" has not worked well in Hong Kong, whatever the Beijing-appointed Tung Chee-hwa might say. Also forget the fact that Portugal has shown how deeply it is committed to making sure Beijing keeps to its promises over Macau by declaring the formula a success even before it has even been instituted.
Instead look at the dissimilarities between the Hong Kong and Macau handovers themselves, and the difference between both of them and the circumstances affecting Taiwan.
In Hong Kong's case, the legalistic British felt bound by the 99-year lease on the New Territories, without which they deemed the enclave ceded to them in perpetuity -- Kowloon and Hong Kong island itself -- not to be viable. The Portuguese, on the other hand, have been trying to give back Macau since the fall of the Salazar dictatorship in 1974. Tonight's events could have happened any time in the past 20 years if Beijing had wanted it.
Ultimately, the picture that appears is of two external powers, for vastly different reasons, giving away territory they controlled without asking the people affected whether that is what they wanted. Had they done so, it is possible that the answers from reluctant Hong Kong and relaxed Macau might have been very different.
But Taiwan's case is altogether different. Not only is it vastly bigger than either Hong Kong -- the size of greater Taipei -- or Macau -- the size of Chiayi. More importantly, Taiwan is not the adjunct of an exhausted colonial power. It cannot be given away by a third party; it can only in some way be given up by the Taiwanese themselves. This raises two questions: how and why.
How, because in Taiwan's case there would be a problem about whom China could negotiate with. China could deal with Portugal and Britain as equals in deciding what to do with their colonies. But since Beijing refuses to talk to Taiwan as an equal, how might such negotiations be conducted? The negotiation mechanism for Hong Kong and Macau seems to have no application in Taiwan's case whatsoever.
But the stronger question is why. Why would the Taiwanese want to subsume their own interests within those of China as a whole? Put another way, what is in reunification for the Taiwanese. So far, all China has offered is either mystical nonsense about a "motherland" at least as foreign to most Taiwanese as, say, Japan, or the less than reassuring promise that it will stop threatening Taiwan militarily. Talk of the cases of Hong Kong and Macau as providing a blueprint for Taiwan's reunification seems to neglect a crucial point. The two colonies were like an arranged marriage: those most deeply concerned had no choice in the matter. Taiwan, however, is not the same. Lacking a colonial parent to give it away, it has to be wooed, something China still cannot understand.
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