Today is the eleventh anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, but you would be hard-pressed to know it in Taiwan. Aside from a small event at the Taipei City Council tonight, little attention has been paid to the anniversary.
Of course, all the commemoration activities worldwide have suffered a steady decline in enthusiasm. In part, this is simply a natural result of the passage of time. That the prospects for any change seem, if anything, ever more distant does not help to keep morale high. Most of the former student leaders and activists themselves, with a few notable exceptions, have turned their hands to the business of making money, whether as stock brokers in New York or Internet entrepreneurs at home. And the current generation of students is even more ravenously materialistic.
Nonetheless, over the past years, the commemoration movement in Taiwan has always been distinctly passive compared to most other countries. There are several reasons for this. One is simply that there is no obvious focus for demonstrations, such as the Chinese Embassy in Washington or the Xinhua office in Hong Kong. If people in Taiwan want to protest the actions of the Chinese government, where should they go? Another is that many of the people most actively calling for such activities are also those who identify with China instead of Taiwan; it is naturally difficult for them to generate much popular support. Finally, there are those who fear any contact with Chinese dissidents might be "provocative" to China.
Even though the Tiananmen movement itself may be a thing of the past, Taiwan has an abiding interest in China's democratization. But this interest does not come from the simplistic mantra "we are all Chinese." It comes from the fact that the Taiwanese people have adopted a set of universal values of freedom and human rights. By affirming these values for our own society, we assert that they should be applied to all people, certainly including our nearest neighbors.
Moreover, we need to defend these values at home, and the only external threat to them comes from the authoritarian Chinese government. It is plausible to assert that a democratic China would pose much less of a threat to Taiwan, and that therefore China's democratization might be the only way to ensure Taiwan's long-term security. Put another way, we should hope to move from an arms race to a "democracy race."
But this hypothesis ought not to be taken as an article of blind faith. The nearly complete victory of the communist regime in suppressing the Tiananmen movement (and in defusing condemnation by the international community) should serve to remind us that the process of democratization in China is guaranteed to be long. The interim period before a modern constitutional democracy emerges could prove quite dangerous for Taiwan.
On the one hand, serious instability and chaos could well trigger military adventurism. On the other hand, a weakly institutionalized democracy -- a Chinese replay of Weimar Germany or Yeltsin's Russia, or for that matter Habibie's Indonesia -- might be susceptible to an outbreak of rabid nationalism. The fact that nationalistic and xenophobic sentiments are clearly on the rise in China, largely replacing both communist ideology and democratic aspirations, makes such a scenario all too possible.
If the new government is serious about human rights diplomacy, China must be one of the primary targets. Taiwan ought at least to do as much as the Western democracies in supporting Chinese NGOs and activists, building goodwill for the future. But until these efforts bear fruit, we must maintain our vigilance, including an effective defense posture.
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