AIDES SAY TAIWAN MERITS RECOGNITION

'One China' seen serving only Beijing

By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan, Globe Staff, 07/18/99

TAIPEI - Why should a vibrant democracy of 22 million people - bigger than many European countries - enjoy less international recognition than Lichtenstein, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, and countless lesser-known territories?

Why should the world's 22d largest economy and a generous aid donor be excluded from the United Nations, the World Trade Organization, even the International Red Cross?

Those are the questions that keep Taiwan's leaders up at night. And it was years of frustration over archrival China's unrelenting campaign to marginalize Taiwan globally that finally drove Taipei last week to demand that it be treated as a separate but ''special state,'' rather than as a subordinate ''entity'' under mainland China's authority.

President Lee Teng-hui's controversial decision to scrap the longstanding ''one China'' policy - the idea that Taiwan and China, estranged since the end of a civil war in 1949, are a single state - followed the urging of a report submitted to the president last month.

A team of top advisers and legal experts spent a year studying the effect of the one China policy over the past 11 years and concluded it served only Beijing, said Lin Bih-jaw, the president's chief foreign policy adviser, in an interview.

In separate interviews Friday, Taiwan's foreign minister and its top policy maker on mainland China affairs expressed resentment toward Beijing for trying to isolate and absorb the island, rather than treating it as an equal and negotiating terms for unification that would suit both sides.

Beijing has forced every major power as well as the UN to withdraw recognition of Taiwan after establishing diplomatic relations with China.

Last year, President Clinton bowed to Beijing's demands that he publicly embrace the ''three no's'' during a state visit to China: no to the independence of Taiwan, no to the creation of ''two Chinas,'' and no to Taiwan's admission to the United Nations.

A delighted Beijing tried without success to get Japan, Britain, and Germany to support the three no's.

''We are the only people that have been punished by the international community because we say no to communism,'' said Foreign Minister Jason Hu.

''We have been treated really as a second-class citizen. ... There are 22 million people in Taiwan who have been ignored'' by the United Nations. ''It's just not right and not necessary to try to pretend we don't exist.''

Today, Taiwan has diplomatic ties with just 29 nations, while Beijing has ties to 165. Asked why Taiwan spends so much time desperately courting tiny nations such as Vanuatu, Tuvalu, or Tonga, Hu replied that if Taiwan did not fight for recognition, it would be surrendering to Beijing's dominance.

''Why Tonga? It's ... a teensy-weensy country. But why did'' Beijing ''have to take it away from us?'' Hu asked. ''Is it vital to their security or diplomacy? If it's not important, why do they have to do that?''

Su Chi, chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council, Taiwan's top government body on China affairs, said that Beijing's leaders are ''the same old men'' who fought the civil war in 1949 or have the same mentality.

''We look at the future, they still remember the past,'' Su said. ''They still remember Taiwan as an unfinished war. [They] want to win the war, get it back. By force if necessary, through tricks if possible.

''The one China policy is a trick'' that forces the rest of the world to accept Taiwan as subordinate to China, Su said. ''It's verbal annexation.''

The two men's comments were made the same day that Taipei stocks dropped 6.4 percent, the largest single-day drop in nine years, on fears that Beijing will take military action against Taiwan.

Yesterday, the government marshaled $11 billion in public funds to defend the stock market, helping the index to close just 0.6 percent down. Even so, shares were down nearly 13 percent since Tuesday, when they began to dip on fears of Chinese retaliation.

In 1995 and 1996, angry over Lee's visit to the United States and its first democratic elections for president, Beijing launched intimidating military tests off Taiwan that ended only when the United States sent battleships to Taipei's defense.

Two Hong Kong newspapers reported yesterday that China had mobilized forces for military exercises along its southern coast, 100 miles from Taiwan, as a warning to Taipei to back off from declaring nationhood.

This story ran on page A29 of the Boston Globe on 07/18/99.

@ Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.


TAIPEI'S MOVE ON 'ONE CHINA' REFLECTS CHANGED PARTY, PUBLIC

By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan, Globe Staff, 07/19/99

AIPEI - For 50 years, the leaders of mainland China and Taiwan have agreed on one thing, and one thing only: that the island of Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.

But as years have passed, the governments of Beijing and Taipei have followed radically divergent paths, making the notion of one nation little more than a fiction. Communist China has mushroomed in global power and influence and slowly liberalized its economy, but retained a repressive, one-party rule. Tiny Taiwan emerged as a capitalist success story and a spirited democracy, leaving behind its authoritarian past. Along the way, the ''one China'' line that both sides have toed came to mask an ever-expanding divide across the 100-mile wide Taiwan Strait.

Half a century after a civil war between Communists and Nationalists drove the losers to the island of Taiwan, many Taiwanese feel profoundly alienated from the place mainland China has become. Even those who long for reunification do not want to live under communism, and Taiwanese who visit the mainland often return disillusioned with China and disparaging of mainlanders as poor, unsophisticated, and uncouth.

For over 40 years, the United States has been Taiwan's number one trade partner and the major influence on Taiwanese society, and in countless ways, Taipei feels closer to Los Angeles than it does to Beijing. The 10th anniversary of the massacre of democracy protesters in Beijing's Tiananmen Square riled only a few dozen sympathizers enough to march in Taipei. When supporters of a fringe socialist party drive around town blasting the national anthem of the People's Republic of China, the common reaction of Taipei residents is not allegiance, but confusion: What is that song?

So in many ways, Taipei's move last week to scrap the ''one China'' idea and call for ''special state-to-state relations'' with Beijing was a long time coming. It reflects not only a shift in public opinion, but a dramatic evolution in the mentality of the ruling Kuomintang party.

''Somebody had to say it sooner or later. I'm not a fan of President Lee Teng-hui or of the DPP,'' the pro-independence, opposition Democratic Progressive Party, said Huang Jui-ming, a lawyer. ''But he's only saying what the reality has been for 50 years.''

Lee, a native-born Taiwanese, has led Taiwan for nearly 12 years, and in that time the first-generation Nationalist leaders from China have died and been marginalized, and the pro-independence opposition has flourished.

The 1970s saw Taiwan lose its UN membership and other diplomatic recognitions to China, an experience that spurred a rise in ''native'' consciousness and a flowering of indigenous art and literature. In the 1980s, the end of martial law accompanied a rise in native-born politicians. The 1990s brought democracy and the abolition of the provincial government, a vestige of the premise that Taiwan is a province of China. So it was perhaps inevitable that the ruling party's new generation would urge Lee to change his China policy to fit the times, as they did in a confidential report submitted to the president last month.

''He's ridden the tide of public opinion, and now he's trying to lead the tide further. Society is ready for this,'' said Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, a sociologist at Academica Sinica, Taiwan's national academy, and a member of the National Reunification Council, an elite advisory board to the President.

His public may have been ready, but Lee's abandonment of the ''one China'' principle enraged Beijing, upset Washington, and spooked Taipei's stock market with the possibility of military conflict. China's military newspaper called Lee ''a criminal of the nation who will leave a stink for a thousand years,'' and Beijing yesterday repeated a vow to use force to stop Taiwan independence.

Taiwanese people are famously pragmatic, and quarterly government surveys consistently show the majority favor the status quo in cross-straits relations. The last thing people here want is war, or even hostilities that would rock their economy, one of the few to escape the ravages of the two-year-old Asian crisis. Taiwan's government Saturday used $11 billion in state funds to shore up the stock market, and the Defense Ministry denied rumors yesterday that China stepped up drills and sent fighter jets into the Taiwan Strait.

Numerous polls in recent days show more people approve of Lee's ''two state'' policy than oppose it. The most dramatic support was reported in a survey released by Central News Agency yesterday that found 73 percent behind the new policy.

Reaction seems to divide largely along ethnic lines, between those who came from the mainland or whose parents did, 15 percent of the population, and those who have lived here for generations and call themselves ''Taiwanese.''

''He said `one nation, two states,' but I don't think it should even be `one nation,''' declared Go Diang-ling, 46, an eighth-generation Taiwanese who works at an ethnographic institute that promotes native culture. ''I was in China two months ago, and I won't accept life under that government. Now they say they have the neutron bomb, but I'm not scared. I think we should stand up for dignity and if necessary, die for this land.''

That view differs markedly from people with strong emotional ties to the mainland, such as Yi Ya-chieh, 55, a worker for the maritime union. ''The policy of state-to-state relations gives up the idea that Chinese people are one and the same nation. It's like giving up the chance to be Chinese.''

There is also a striking generational split. Most younger people, who have no memory of civil war or of China, seem to support the notion of Taiwan and China as separate. Many older voters, nostalgic for a united China and frightened of invasion or economic collapse, are angry that Lee would risk stablity and prosperity by rocking the boat.

''It's terrible and it's dangerous. President Lee had no right to say it. This island was originally part of China,'' raged an old man who, like many elderly people interviewed, refused to give his name because of his memory of military rule and his fear of Taiwan's secret police.

In contrast, Kao Hui-jung, a high school student, said she would support the independence opposition party if she could vote. ''If Taiwan doesn't declare independence and becomes part of China, we'll have to pay for their economic problems,'' she reasoned.

In an interview Friday, Foreign Minister Jason Hu insisted the government's goal of reunification once China has ''freedom, democracy, and prosperity'' has not changed. The new policy, he asserted, is intended to promote that goal by getting Beijing to negotiate on more realistic and equal terms.

''We have to answer to 22 million people. You really think they want to be just another province of the PRC'' he asked. ''What can'' China ''offer us? What are'' they ''going to give me that I don't already have today? I only hope the PRC will try to understand us, our sentiment, our mentality, our frustration.''

Antonio Chiang, publisher of the Taipei Times and an independence advocate, said times have so changed that ''even civil war veterans, old soldiers who dream to go back realize their home is here. ... China's military exercises against Taiwan dissipated any feelings of loyalty. No government would use force against its own people.''

The gap today with China is so wide that the fringe socialist labor party that blasts the PRC's national anthem from the windows of its beaten-up sedan won only 1,020 votes nationwide in the last election, Chiang said. ''Even though Lee Teng-hui talks about eventual reunification when China becomes a democracy, I say, when China becomes a democracy, why bother joining them? Xinjiang, Tibet, Mongolia - all will run away.''

This story ran on page A01 of the Boston Globe on 07/19/99.

@ Copyright 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.


THE END OF 'ONE CHINA'

By Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe, July 19, 1999

There has been no end of heavy weather these last few days over the "One China" formula that Lee Teng-hui, Taiwan's president, is supposed to have betrayed.

In its usual thuggish style, the Communist government in Beijing erupted in threats and abuse. It warned that "any plot to challenge the `One-China' principle ... will fail," described Lee as "a criminal of the nation who will leave a stink for a thousand years," and bluntly warned that China now has the technology to build a neutron bomb. At the State Department, James Rubin was more diplomatic, though equally disapproving. "It is not helpful," he lectured, "for the Taiwanese authorities to make statements that make it harder to have dialogue." His colleague James Foley stressed that US policy "is unchanged: Our 'One China' policy is longstanding and certainly well known."

In truth, "One China" is not a policy at all. It is a falsehood, one to which the United States has genuflected for 50 years to accommodate dictators and strongmen.

From 1949 -- the year of Mao's Communist victory in China -- until 1979 -- when Jimmy Carter extended diplomatic recognition to Beijing -- American foreign policy pretended that the rightful government of China was in Taipei. This fiction appealed to Taiwan's former authoritarian rulers, who periodically blustered about reconquering the mainland. Since 1979, the United States has pretended the opposite: that the government in Beijing is somehow the government of Taiwan. This fiction appeals to the totalitarians who run the People's Republic of China, who insist that Taiwan is merely a "renegade" province.

As long as Beijing and Taipei both claimed to be the sole legitimate government of China, there was a case to be made for winking and going along with "One China." But going along with the pretense that Taiwan was part of China did not mean the United States agreed with it. "The government of the United States of America," declared the Recognition Communique signed by Jimmy Carter in 1978, "acknowledges the Chinese position that there is but one China and Taiwan is part of China." Note: the *Chinese* position, not the American position.

It is true that during his trip to China last year, President Clinton endorsed Beijing's hard line. "Our Taiwan policy," he said, "is that we don't support independence for Taiwan or `two Chinas' or `one Taiwan, one China.' " But his words were promptly rejected by Congress, which repudiated them by nearly unanimous votes in both houses.

In any case, presidential assertions and summit communiques do not have the force of law. The Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, Public Law 96-8, does. That statute makes it a matter of US policy "to preserve and promote extensive, close, and friendly commercial, cultural, and other relations" between the United States and Taiwan. And it specifies that the United States will consider "any effort to determine the future of Taiwan by other than peaceful means, including by boycotts or embargoes, a threat to the peace and security of the Western Pacific area and of grave concern to the United States."

In short, close US-Taiwan relations are mandated by law, and Taiwan's welfare is an explicit focus of American concern. When the statute was passed, Taiwan was still a police state. Today it is a free and robust democracy. More than ever, Taiwan deserves our friendship, protection, and admiration.

Lee Teng-hui's words last week were a simple statement of reality. Inasmuch as China and Taiwan are separate, sovereign countries, he said in a radio interview, they should be dealing with each other on a "state-to-state" basis. This was neither a declaration of independence nor a rejection of reunification as an ultimate goal. It was a statesmanlike call for mutual acceptance -- and an announcement that the tired fable of "One China" has lost its diplomatic usefulness.

Foreign policy works best when it is grounded in reality. Fifty years after Mao's victory on the mainland and Chiang Kai-shek's flight to Taiwan, there is one China and one Taiwan. The former is a Communist dungeon, ruled by a junta that enslaves prisoners, persecutes Christians, arms vicious terror-states, forcibly sterilizes women, and sends people to prison for talking about freedom. The latter is a democracy, a prosperous island of free markets, free speech, and free elections.

Taiwan is something new in the 4,000-year history of the Chinese people: a land of liberty, where human rights are respected and governments rule at the pleasure of the governed. Its population is but a fraction of China's -- though at 22 million, Taiwan has more people than Australia and New Zealand combined -- but in that fraction is the hope of what China might one day become.

The United States behaves toward the Taiwanese with a shameful injustice. We blackball them at the United Nations and deny them normal diplomatic courtesies. We tiptoe around Taiwanese autonomy as if it were a dangerous explosive, but treat the brutal regime in Beijing with deference and respect.

On one side of the Taiwan Strait lies one of our most reliable democratic allies. On the other lies a violent, untrustworthy foe. It's time we started treating our friend as a friend. Junking "One China" would make an excellent start.

(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe. His e-mail address is jacoby@globe.com)

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