I recently read a doctoral thesis written by a student who was about to take his oral exam. The thesis examined the Taiwanese independence movement in Japan, focusing on the bimonthly Japanese-language political magazine Taiwan Youth (台灣青年), which was published by Taiwanese students studying in Japan between 1960 and 1979. Published material included discussions of Taiwanese nationalism, the evolution of a Taiwanese identity and the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government’s strategies for attacking it.
These issues have been addressed by others, but the thesis takes its point of departure in the debate in 1971 at the UN over the right to represent China. In doing so, it discovers that the young Taiwanese independence advocates in an op-ed piece in the October 1971 issue of Taiwan Youth welcomed the accession of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) to the UN and opposed the expulsion of the Republic of China (ROC).
In the 1960s, this group centered its argument around the view that Taiwan’s status was undecided following the end of World War II and rejected the legal case for the KMT’s right to rule Taiwan.
Based on this logic, when then-US secretary of state Henry Kissinger visited China, and the UN was preparing to accept China into the fold, this group could have taken the opportunity to strike a blow against the KMT government and advocate Taiwanese independence, but it did not, because it believed that the KMT government’s difficulties also posed a threat to Taiwan.
“Expelling the ROC would be to neglect the rights of 14 million Taiwanese,” the group said.
In other words, it hoped that Taiwan — the ROC — could remain an ordinary member of the UN.
The author of the thesis discovered that after the ROC lost its right to represent China at the UN, Taiwan Youth, for reasons of pragmatism, revised its nationalist argument to recognize the ROC government. This means that 28 years before the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) unveiled its Resolution on Taiwan’s Future in 1999, the Taiwanese independence movement had already made the argument for independence based on existing realities.
I have written in a previous article (“Self-determination key to survival,” Oct. 14, 2011, page 8) that then-US Department of State spokesman Charles Bray in April 1971 tossed a hand grenade into the China representation problem.
Bray on the one hand said that Taiwanese and Penghu sovereignty was still an “unsettled question,” and, on the other hand, that the issue should be resolved through “peaceful negotiations” between the ROC and the PRC.
The reason Washington decided to introduce the issue of Taiwan’s unsettled status at that critical juncture was, first, intended as a reminder that the Taiwan problem was not a Chinese problem, and second, aimed to create room for the possibility of dual recognition. Unfortunately, the ROC government at the time hesitated and in doing so let slip the opportunity to remain in the UN.
As for Bray’s statement that the two sides should negotiate a solution between themselves, what was Washington’s actual position on the matter, and was there a risk that Taiwan would be thrown to the wolves?
Today’s arguments for independence broadly fall into two groups: Those who argue that Taiwan is already independent and those who argue that Taiwan has not yet achieved independence.
The DPP has accepted the argument advanced by Taiwan New Century Foundation chairman Chen Lung-chu (陳隆志) for “effective self-determination and an evolution to independence.” This argument falls into the first category.
During the 1990s, democratization was accompanied by a transformation of the political parties, and both the DPP and the KMT moved toward the political center, as can be seen in the DPP’s resolution and then-president Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) “special state-to-state” theory of cross-strait relations.
Although further progress toward the normalization of Taiwan as an independent nation requires the nation’s name to be amended and the Constitution be rewritten, one must not overlook that a DPP majority in the Legislative Yuan is a necessary precondition to independence.
Today, some independence advocates judge everything based solely on the view that Taiwan has not yet achieved independence, casually differentiate between “ROC independence” and “Taiwanese independence,” insist that their view is right and everyone else’s is wrong, and even insult President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文), a popularly elected president.
They might be arguing themselves into a corner of “false independence” without even realizing it.
Chen Yi-shen is an associate research fellow at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Modern History.
Translated by Edward Jones
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