Sun, Mar 11, 2001 page8

• 'Open minds' are only relatively so

  • By Wang Dan 王丹
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  Last week, a delegation from the Taiwan Affairs Office of China's State Council barraged New York with their united front campaign, engaging in intensive contact with members of US think tanks and the overseas Chinese community.

  The team was led by the new deputy director of the Taiwan Affairs Office, Zhou Mingwei (周明偉), who has been the focus of great interest in the outside world. Young and having studied at Harvard University, Zhou is widely believed to represent the "open-minded" faction in the government. Zhou's background is in Shanghai's Taiwan-affairs bureaucracy. He comes from the staff behind Wang Daohan (汪道涵), who has always advocated a moderate policy toward Taiwan. This fact made the outside world even more interested in his views.

  However, the tone of Zhou's stand on the Taiwan issue was more strident than anyone had expected. Immediately after arriving in New York, he released a statement emphasizing that "the only alternative to unification between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait is war."

  Of course, this line has been promulgated by the Chinese Communist Party all along -- that the unification question will not be allowed to drag on too long.

  But given that both the attitude of people in Taiwan and the US policy toward Taiwan are clearly oriented toward "maintaining the status quo in the Taiwan Strait," Zhou's stand shows no moderation or compromise whatsoever. His hardline tone was virtually no different from that of the hawks in the Chinese military.

  To a certain extent, Zhou's hardline position contains elements that he has expounded upon himself.

  For example, the CCP has made no official statement regarding a possible link between Beijing's bid for the Olympic Games and its Taiwan policy. There even seems to be a dovish bent in some occasional news reports -- which said Beijing might consider holding one or two Olympic events in Taiwan or let the Olympic torch pass through Taipei.

  But in New York, Zhou unexpectedly gave an unequivocal answer to this question. "The Olympic Games are not one of the three major tasks facing the country. Regardless of the future international environment, China will correctly face the Taiwan problem. There won't be any changes made due to interference from other countries," he said. This amounts to a definitive announcement that China won't soften its stance for the sake of the Olympics.

  Even if Zhou's statements merely reflect Beijing's policy positions and as an official representative he had no choice but to adhere to the party line, officials still have some room for flexibility in their overseas speeches.

  If Zhou really desired to show his open-mindedness, he could have found a way. He would only have needed to take a position that left room for discussion on some issues that are still hanging. Or he could have read verbatim from Beijing's book when making hardline policy announcements without chiming in with presentations of his own creation. But Zhou's statements in New York didn't show any open-mindedness whatsoever.

  Actually, this isn't strange because young communists are still communists. Their "open-mindedness" has its limits, and it can be abandoned at any time.

  Former Shanghai political scholar Wang Huyu (王滬宇) was an active advocate of political reforms in the 1980s. But now, after transforming in a flash into the deputy director of the CCP's Central Policy Research Center and becoming Jiang Zemin's (江澤民) close personal advisor, we no longer see him proposing "political reform."

  Beijing scholar Wang Qisi (王緝思), director of the Institute of North American Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has always been considered part of the open-minded faction. But not long ago at a symposium on the Taiwan issue sponsored by Harvard University's Fairbank Center, he had someone else say on his behalf, "if the people of Taiwan want independence, it's enough just to give us that chunk of land" -- a statement which immediately aroused the antipathy of US professors.

  Those scholars probably should be counted among the open-minded faction. But this is only relative to Beijing's "conservative faction" and it certainly doesn't mean they can open their minds very far. If anyone still is overly concerned with the shifting positions of the open-minded faction and the conservative faction in Beijing's ordering of personnel, they will be disappointed.

  Wang Dan was a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations in Beijing. He is currently a graduate student at Harvard University.

  Translated by Ethan Harkness

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