The other day, Wang Zhen-min (王振民), dean of the School of Law at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and Sun Zhe (孫哲), director of the Center for US-China Relations at the same university, revealed that China is currently looking into a so-called “Taiwan law.”
This news sent shock waves through Taiwan’s academia. In fact, the goal of this nascent legislation is to realize the last of the six proposals for cross-strait relations outlined by Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤), or “Hu’s six points” as they are commonly referred to. The first five points have already been taken care of, this last one involves preparing a legal basis for political dialogue.
According to the logic of the dialectic, if Beijing wants to put an end to the political legitimacy of the Republic of China (ROC) on Taiwan, it first has to accept the political reality of such an entity. Somewhere in the process of first accepting the existence of the ROC and then abolishing it, Beijing will need to have a legal basis for formally recognizing Taiwan as belonging to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). And that is the reason for creating the Taiwan law. Given this, we can extrapolate that China’s policy on Taiwan in the post-Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) era will come in three stages.
The first stage is to complete the Taiwan law. According to the dictates of the dialectic, there would be two major underlying principles. We expect these to be an insistence on the “one China” policy on the one hand and a provision for Taiwan’s maintaining its present high level of autonomy on the other. In other words, two independent governments, one in Beijing and the other in Taipei.
The second step entails waiting until the supporting legislation for the Taiwan law is in place, at which point Beijing can openly recognize the political reality of the ROC on Taiwan. It will then be able to initiate official political dialogue with Taiwan, negotiate a peace agreement and a military mutual trust mechanism, and even enter into political agreements. By recognizing the reality of the ROC on Taiwan, Beijing can claim to have confirmed that Taiwan is a part of China.
Some may doubt that China will ever recognize the ROC on Taiwan, but it has actually been quite flexible with its Taiwan policy. At the Shanghai World Expo, for example, Shanghai allowes currency exchanges between the New Taiwan dollar and the Chinese yuan. Now, NT dollar notes have the name Republic of China printed on them. By accepting this as legal tender, aren’t Chinese officials at least tacitly recognizing the fact that the ROC still exists, in the form it did before? And if they tacitly recognize this fact without actually going as far as to articulate it, this is only because they are waiting for the legal support to be in place to legislate the Taiwan law.
The third stage, is to use diplomatic channels to get major nations and international organizations to re-confirm their support of the “one China” principle and to have our diplomatic allies defect to China. Beijing has for many years insisted on the interpretation in the international community that “there is only one China, Taiwan is a part of China and that the People’s Republic of China is the only legitimate government of China,” but it remains the expression of the “one China” syllogism that best represents the core approach on the Taiwan question taken by China.
The question is, if China does actually put this three-phase strategy into effect, what are the two main political parties in Taiwan going to do about it? And what counter-strategy are they going to introduce?
Lu Chun-wei is a researcher at the Taiwan Thinktank.
TRANSLATED BY PAUL COOPER
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