Beijing’s identity approach has shifted from soft outreach to legislative pressure, Taiwanese academics said yesterday as they compared Friday’s meeting between Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) with a meeting 20 years ago between then-Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and then-KMT chairman Lien Chan (連戰).
Xi’s use of legal coercion to impose Chinese identity contrasted sharply with the sentimentality of the 2005 Lien-Hu meeting, said Dong Li-wen (董立文), executive officer of the Foundation on Asia-Pacific Peace Studies, at a seminar in Taipei hosted by the Asia-Pacific Elite Interchange Association.
“China’s passage last year of the Law on Promoting Ethnic Unity and Progress, which allowed the prosecution of those who defy its diktats, showed that accepting Xi’s framework would be tantamount to shackling the people of Taiwan,” Dong said.
Photo: Liao Chen-huei, Taipei Times
While Hu spoke of Taiwanese independence in the language of politics, Xi spoke of it in terms of judicial criminalization embodied in Beijing’s “Opinions on Punishing ‘Taiwan Independence’ Diehard Elements for Splitting the State and Inciting to Split the State According to Law,” Dong said.
Cheng acknowledged to reporters at a post-meeting news conference that she supports the incremental enactment of “peaceful unification,” but Xi’s vision is for Taiwan to be unified against its will, Dong said, urging Cheng to stop before she “falls into the abyss of complicity in Xi’s schemes.”
Fan Shih-ping (范世平), a professor of East Asia studies at National Taiwan Normal University, told the seminar that many businesspeople were among those in Lien’s delegation to Beijing 20 years ago.
However, only one entrepreneur is in Cheng’s 14-member delegation to China, showing the seismic change that has occurred in Taiwan’s economic structure and the decline of China’s economic fortunes, Fan said.
The lure of profits promised by China’s economy for Taiwanese businesspeople is gone, as is the promise of a better life for young Taiwanese workers, he said.
“The absence of those two attractions means that Beijing’s talk of the great Chinese national renaissance, the greater Chinese family across the Taiwan Strait and expanding cross-strait exchanges remain pale and feeble slogans,” he said.
Taiwan Thinktank researcher Wu Se-chih (吳瑟致) said that the unilateral narrative of the CCP has become a “KMT-CCP” or “Xi-Cheng” shared narrative.
Cheng at the news conference did not reference the “Republic of China,” but instead used Beijing-approved terminology such as “China” and “zhonghua minzu” (中華民族, “Chinese nation”) and parroting the words of Xi, who she addressed as “General Secretary Xi,” Wu said.
Xi’s and Cheng’s failure to address Beijing’s continued use of military threats against Taiwan underscored the “exchange of empty platitudes” that characterized their meeting, he said.
Chang Kuo-cheng (張國城), a professor of international relations at Taipei Medical University, said that democracies do not air their internal political strife to a foreign audience, because that would send a dangerous signal to their friends and foes alike.
For example, the political opponents of US President Donald Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not make a show of going over their governments’ heads to talk with Tehran at a time of war, Chang said.
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