“The time has come,” the walrus said,
“to talk of many things:
of [Presidents, both true and fake] —
of cabbages and kings —
and why the sea is boiling hot —
and whether pigs have wings.”
— Apologies to Lewis Carroll.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo congratulated President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) on the occasion of her second inauguration and called her “courage and vision in leading Taiwan’s vibrant democracy an inspiration to the region and the world.”
It was the highest expression of support for a Taiwanese president ever made by a sitting US secretary of state.
US Deputy National Security Adviser Matt Pottinger, in fluent Mandarin, and other US officials also sent congratulatory messages. Pompeo and his colleagues all addressed her as President Tsai.
Predictably, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) expressed its “strong indignation” and said that Pompeo “seriously violated” the “one China” principle and the Three Joint Communiques. It condemned all of the officials’ references to Tsai as president of a separate political entity. However, unlike the occasion of Taiwan’s first direct presidential election in 1996, it did not fire missiles toward the island to protest.
Former US vice president Joe Biden, the Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee, also tweeted congratulations, but seemed to comply at least partially with China’s demands by referring to Taiwan’s newly re-elected leader as “doctor” rather than as president.
By happenstance, on the same day as Tsai’s swearing-in, the Washington Post ran a story on the annual meeting of the WHO’s World Health Assembly, which has excluded Taiwan from participation under Beijing’s pressure. The Post article referred to “President Trump” (no Donald) and to “Chinese leader Xi Jinping” (習近平, no president).
Even more interestingly, the caption on the montage of photographs accompanying the Post story listed the national heads of state as follows: “Swiss President Simonetta Sommaruga ... Chinese leader Xi Jinping, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, French President Emmanuel Macron, South Korean President Moon Jae-in, Barbadian Prime Minister Mia Mottley and South African President Cyril Ramaphosa.”
If avoiding the title of president for Xi was the Post’s intent, it could have used one of his other, more appropriate, positions such as CCP general secretary. While the Chinese embassy in Washington surely reads the local/national paper every day, it has not revealed whether it noted the asymmetry in titles in the Post’s reporting and registered a protest.
However, except for one later photo caption that referred to Xi only as “China’s top leader,” subsequent Post articles made sure to refer to him as “President Xi.”
Historians and academics generally ascribe the title of president to a national government’s democratically elected head chosen directly or indirectly by the people. The position and the term originated in the US in 1787 and the first head of state to bear the title of president was George Washington.
Several Latin American and Caribbean nations, after liberation from Spanish rule, set up republics and elected presidents as their national leaders. The first European ruler to adopt the title, but for distinctly nondemocratic purposes, was Napoleon Bonaparte, proclaiming himself president of the Italian Republic in 1802 before going on to become king of Italy and emperor of France.
The first Asian government to make its national leader a president was the Republic of China in 1912 and the man was Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙).
After the eras of Mao Zedong (毛澤東) and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) as paramount leaders, the CCP found it useful to seek the patina of international respect and democratic legitimacy that was accorded the title of president and enjoyed by leaders of the US and other democracies.
Jiang Zemin (江澤民) was the first Chinese leader to use the title of president on a regular basis with foreign audiences, but neither he nor his successors had any intention of adopting Western democratic methods to elect Chinese presidents. Instead, they followed the authoritarian, Napoleonic model and simply appropriated the honorific.
Xi clearly relishes Western officials and media calling him president and putting him on the same level of official respect and international legitimacy as the US president.
Trump, who prefers to call most world leaders by their first names to show his personal familiarity with them, seems only too happy to address and refer to the Chinese leader as President Xi, rather than as Jinping. Xi so enjoys the title and the power that goes with it that he has discarded the CCP’s tradition of two five-year terms and made himself president-and-everything-else for life.
Washington, America’s and the world’s first president who was called “the indispensable man” for his time, was offered such a lifetime position. He declined it, believing that no man is indispensable and confident in the knowledge that the young country of fewer than 500,000 people eligible to serve had plenty of perfectly capable leaders who could move it forward to freedom.
Xi and his CCP comrades do not believe that Chinese are capable of finding competent alternative leaders among China’s population of 1.3 billion. More likely, they fear that the real China dream is the same as the American dream and of people around the world: Freedom.
Perhaps some day “President” Xi will demonstrate the same political courage that President Tsai has shown twice by taking her case to Taiwanese and respecting their judgement. President Trump also relies on the democratic process to pursue his vision of America’s future, and, like Tsai, is willing to have the American people judge his record and decide whether they want to continue with his leadership. He might want to suggest that his Chinese friend give it a try.
After all, Xi is supremely convinced that only he is fit to govern China and that Chinese must surely agree, so Trump might ask him: “What do you have to lose?”
Joseph Bosco served as China country director for the US secretary of defense from 2005 to 2006 and as Asia-Pacific director of humanitarian assistance and disaster relief from 2009 to 2010. He is a nonresident fellow at the Institute for Corean-American Studies and a member of the advisory board of the Global Taiwan Institute.
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