The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) “united front” tactics continue to distort history to form a narrative conducive to CCP control over territories it lays claim to.
On Friday, the Council of Indigenous Peoples criticized former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislator Yosi Takun (孔文吉) for remarks he made during an event hosted by China’s Yunnan Minzu University. The remarks suggested that Taiwan’s indigenous people — who are of Austronesian descent, speak Austronesian languages, and have an independent identity and culture — are part of China’s minority cultures.
The council is right to push back against the obvious distortion targeting Austronesian people in Taiwan who have lived here for approximately 15,000 years.
The idea is so easily refutable that perhaps it is better to look behind the distortions and understand why the CCP is resorting to such unfounded claims.
The root of the problem is that the CCP is attempting to forge a nation state out of territory the Republic of China (ROC) inherited from the Manchu Qing Dynasty, which was subsequently transferred to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) when the CCP defeated the KMT in 1949, Chinese-Australian historian and Sinologist Wang Gungwu (王賡武) said.
The concept of the nation state developed in the late 18th century was formulated within the context of the majority of the countries in Europe already encompassing people who spoke the same language, had the same historical narrative and probably shared the same religion, and turning the people within the borders of each country into a nation state was relatively straightforward, Wang said.
Many Asian countries did not have this luxury, as their borders did not evolve along national lines, but were drawn according to the requirements of colonial masters, he said. Japan was one exception. China had a different quandary: The ROC in 1912 inherited the borders of the Manchu Qing empire, which was not a Han empire, but a Manchu-Mongol one, and covered territory beyond countries with majority Han Chinese populations.
Taiwan was not part of this territory: The Manchu-Qing empire had ceded it to Japan in 1895, and Japan did not relinquish control over Taiwan until 1945.
ROC founder Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) looked for a way to organize his inherited borders as a republic modeled on the two successful republics of the day, the US and France, to govern diverse groups of people who had been controlled by an imperial state. Wang called this a “mammoth task.”
The CCP is still struggling to work out how to control diverse groups who have never belonged to a nation in an ethnic — as opposed to political — sense, and to claim legitimacy for that project, Wang said.
If it fails to do so, it runs the risk of losing control over the territories it now controls through fragmentation along defined national, historical and ethnic lines, as happened in the late 20th century with the collapse of the Soviet Union, he said.
Putting all of these groups under the umbrella of the “Chinese nation” (中華民族), a term invented by Sun and co-opted by the CCP, is a solution, but ethnic groups and nations such as the Tibetans, Uighurs, Taiwanese and Austronesian indigenous groups in Taiwan are not buying it.
That is, the roots of the “united front” attempts to absorb Taiwan’s indigenous people into its orbit extend beyond the CCP’s fabricated claims over Taiwan; they strike at the heart of the CCP’s legitimacy and the party’s definition of the PRC as a nation state.
The White House’s decision to take a 9.9 percent stake in Intel Corp is looking like very shrewd business indeed. Since the government bought in at US$20.47 a share last August, the US chipmaker’s surging stock price has delivered the US a US$43 billion return. One of the reasons the investment has so far proved so sound is that the White House has made sure of it. According to The Wall Street Journal, Howard personally pushed deals on Intel’s behalf with some of the most lucrative clients imaginable. They include Nvidia Corp, the company at the heart of the AI
KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun’s (鄭麗文) recent visit to Beijing and her upcoming visit to Washington will serve as a high-level test of her diplomatic mettle. In Beijing, Cheng was received with symbolic gestures, a warm reception, and high-level access. In Washington, she will receive far less pomp and far sharper questions about the KMT’s vision for the future of Taiwan. Her challenge will be to persuade Washington that the KMT’s engagement with China can coexist with strong deterrence. Cheng’s April 7-12 visit to mainland China coincided with an intense period of conflict in Iran. Despite the strategic significance of Cheng’s trip,
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent the vast Asian chemicals industry into a tailspin. Deprived of the likes of Qatari natural gas and Saudi Arabian oil, the region’s fertilizer and plastics plants are slowing production or even shutting down. Everywhere except China, that is. In petrochemicals, China is unique. As well as a traditional industry that uses oil and gas as feedstock, it has parallel output that relies on its abundant domestic coal. Unsurprisingly, India and other regional powers want to copy and paste the Chinese method. This would not be easy — or climate friendly. The
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto says he knows how to fix the problems facing Indonesia. Yet his economic mismanagement and authoritarian tendencies are steering the nation toward a familiar mix of currency instability and political chaos. The world’s fourth-most populous nation risks reversing the hard-won democratic and business reforms that came after the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997. At that time, the rupiah collapsed and the political upheaval that followed forced former president Haji Mohamed Suharto from power. Prabowo’s administration is ignoring similar warning signs. That disconnect was apparent in a national address on Wednesday, when Prabowo projected the swagger that has
RSS