Today, Taiwanese voters go to the ballot box to elect the nation’s next president and legislature. Last month, the People’s Daily, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) official newspaper, published two articles about China’s Taiwan Affairs Office Minister Liu Jieyi (劉結一): the first an op-ed by Liu, which was followed a week later by an interview with him.
In the interview, published on Dec. 19, Liu said: “Today, we are closer, more confident and more capable of achieving the goal of unification with Taiwan than we have been at any other time in history.”
Liu’s comment was refuted by US Representative Ted Yoho, who also serves as chairman of the Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Asia, the Pacific and Nonproliferation, in an op-ed published in the Taipei Times (“Facing up to Beijing’s arrogance, ignorance,” Jan. 5, page 6).
Yoho pointed out that China’s idea of “reunification” is based on the “misguided belief that Taiwan is part of the PRC [People’s Republic of China],” which he says is “a false premise” that is the result of the “misdirected foreign policy under then-US president Richard Nixon and then-US secretary of state Henry Kissinger.”
More specifically, Nixon and Kissinger gave in to China’s interpretation of the Cairo Declaration and acknowledged that it meant that Taiwan should be handed to China.
Yoho wrote: “Is Taiwan an independent country or a province of the PRC? The people of Taiwan already know the answer and will give it during the elections.”
We are waiting in anticipation.
Lin Ching-yi (林靜儀), who recently resigned as spokeswoman for President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) campaign office after her statement that, “in terms of national sovereignty, advocating unification is tantamount to treason” caused great public controversy. If we accept the notion that Taiwan is not a part of China, then the word “unification” should really be replaced by “annexation.”
Moreover, Taiwan’s past foreign regime — the then-Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) administration — renounced unification a long time ago. This historic fact is, of course, also known to Yoho, and that was the reason he wrote that “Taiwan has risen from a backwater controlled by an authoritarian, exiled military regime” in another op-ed article published in the Taipei Times (“Recognize Taiwan as the country it truly is,” Dec. 11, 2018, page 8).
That “authoritarian, exiled military regime” is none other than the government of the two Chiangs — Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and his son Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國).
Following the reign of the two Chiangs, former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), Chiang Ching-kuo’s successor, established the National Unification Council in July 1990 to deal with the KMT’s conservative Mainlander faction. In December that year, then-Tsinghua University president Shen Chun-shan (沈君山) visited Beijing as a member of the National Unification Council’s research committee to meet with then-CCP general secretary Jiang Zemin (江澤民, China’s president from 1993 to 2003) for a three-hour talk.
Shen later visited Jiang on July 15, 1991, and on Jan. 29, 1992. During the latter meeting, Shen said: “The Taiwanese independence faction could perhaps be called ‘Taiwan nationalists.’”
“What exactly does Taiwanese nationalism mean? The highland Aboriginal tribes? Apart from them, aren’t all Taiwanese Chinese who went there from China?” Jiang asked.
“The highland Aboriginal tribes account for 350,000 people at most, and they are not pursuing independence,” Shen said. “Around 98 percent of the residents in Taiwan emigrated there from China, but some people think Taiwan was originally a savage land that was developed by their ancestors.”
“We will not adopt any forceful measures to achieve the unification of the motherland, but if the Taiwanese attempt to secede from China, then I’m afraid that the Chinese Communist Party will not go soft on it,” Jiang said. “We’re reasonable, but we play hardball when we have to.”
It is clear that Shen and Jiang were deceived by misinformation, because the ancestors of the Taiwanese are not Chinese, and Taiwan is not a part of China.
At the end of the meeting, Shen ventured a guess that the Chinese view was that it had so many other tasks to work on that it was not capable of achieving unification by force. He added that once China’s economy improved, it would no longer be deterred from pursuing unification, and that all that it had to do for the time being was to just hold on to the “one China” principle. Jiang readily admitted that he agreed with Shen.
To avoid forceful unification, the National Unification Council had stopped pursuing “national unification” as its ultimate goal before Lee left office.
Later, when then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) planned to abolish the Guidelines for National Unification (國家統一綱領), the US strongly opposed it, and in the end, Chen decided that the guidelines would simply “cease to apply” and the council would “cease to function.”
This raises a question: Why would the government cease to apply the guidelines if unification was not against Taiwan’s interests? In other words, what makes “unification” different from “treason”?
Sim Kiantek is a former associate professor of business administration at National Chung Hsing University.
Translated by Chang Ho-ming
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