Recently, on 13 January, Lai Ching-te won the presidential elections in Taiwan, marked by a high voter turnout. Lai, previously Vice President, represents the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), which was founded in 1986 in opposition to the official Kuomintang (KMT), during Taiwan’s transition to democracy. The regime in Beijing was predictably miffed at the global leaders who complimented Lai on winning a free, fair, and participatory election.
Barely 12 countries in the world recognise democratic Taiwan as a state and have formal diplomatic ties with it. Most of these are small nations in Latin America, the western Pacific, Africa, etc. In 1971, Taiwan lost its seat in the UNO to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Until then, Taiwan, which fashioned itself as the Republic of China (RoC), was globally recognised as such.
Until 1990, Taiwan was sworn by the RoC Constitution adopted by the Nanking Constituent Assembly (1946), drafted in the tumult and confusion of the civil war, and claimed itself as the legitimate government of the whole of China, including Taiwan, Mongolia and Tibet. That fiction was finally shed on 1 May 1991 when it was admitted in the Constitution that RoC’s administrative jurisdiction was confined to Taiwan and nearby islands like Penghu (Pescaderos), Quemoy and Matsu.
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The leading democracies of the world, like the US, India, Britain, France, Australia, etc., do not recognise Taiwan. Only one country in Europe, viz., the Holy See (i.e., Vatican City), recognises Taiwan for the simple reason that it cannot recognise any godless Communist regime (like in Beijing). Whereas the US previously accorded recognition to the regime in Taipei as the official Republic of China, it later switched the recognition to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with effect from 1 January 1979. The loss, however, was made good by the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979, promulgated later that year. Over the ensuing decade, as many as 55 countries had broken off relationships with Taiwan for no fault of the island country.
Taiwan is hard proof that despite encomiums to democracy, the leading democracies themselves have displayed little courage of conviction. They are deferential to the clout of one-party ruled PRC, like the Buddhist nations who shy away from giving visas to the Dalai Lama.
However, the PRC knows it is not winning the game. It was on another 13 January, almost four decades ago, that Beijing had realised that Taiwan was irreversibly slipping out of its reach.
The reason was less political and more cultural. On 13 January 1988 Chiang Ching-kuo, son of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek, and President of Taiwan, passed away at Taipei Veterans General Hospital. Deng Xiaoping, Chiang’s former classmate at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow in 1926, and the then paramount leader of People’s Republic of China, pensively reflected that if PRC “could not reunify China right away, they would do in a century; if not a century, then in a millennium”. (Ezra F. Vogel, Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, P.487).
Though Chiang was antagonistic to the Communist Party of China (CPC), and he scoffed at both friendly and hostile bids by the PRC, Deng knew that he was still the best bet for the reunification dream. Chiang was the last leader born in mainland China, to rule over Taiwan. Chiang was one of those 1.5 million men, women, including members of armed forces, who fled the Communist takeover of mainland China, and took shelter amongst seven million Taiwan-born Chinese people in 1949. After his demise Kuomintang, (the Chinese Nationalist Party), which he succeeded from his diehard anti-Communist father Chiang Kai-Shek, would pass into hands of native born Taiwanese. There would be little cultural or emotional affinity left with mainland China, even if his successors were less than belligerent towards the CPC.
Chiang died with the conviction that he was the legitimate President of the whole of China, being the head of the Republic of China (RoC), originally founded by Sun Yat-Sen in 1912. His former classmate Deng, to him, was merely successor to Communist rebel and thug Mao Tse Tung, who had deprived his father Chiang Kai-shek of China’s undivided Presidency. Any possible rapprochement with the PRC could take place on terms of Taiwan, and not the other way round.
Chiang passed away towards the end of the Cold War. However, before his death, he had also released a genie from the bottle, which could justify Taiwan’s free existence in the approaching 21st century. He had taken baby-steps towards full democracy by rescinding the marital law (in force since 1949), and allowing formation of opposition parties like Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). He appointed a Taiwanese born Lee Teng Hui, a brilliant agricultural economist turned politician, as his Vice President and successor.
However, his masterstroke announced a few months prior to his demise was lifting the ban on civilians to visit their relatives in mainland China. Chiang had smiled with the other side of his face when Deng felt he was compromising. On expected lines, those who flocked to mainland China to see their long separated relatives, actually realised that Taiwan was a much better place and their true home. The squalor and underdevelopment in the mainland in the 1980s, and expectation of expensive gifts by the mainland relatives poured cold water on their enthusiasm.
Whereas the PRC could deal with CPC- Kuomintang binary, as both were mirror images, it was clueless how to deal with Communism-democracy dichotomy in the post-Cold War era. Will Communism eclipse democracy, or there would be ‘one country two systems’ under its projected ‘One China’ principle? Thus when Taiwan held its first ever popular Presidential elections on 23 March, 1996 the PRC responded by flexing its muscles with testing missiles on Taiwan straits. The Clinton administration redirected the USS Nimitz carrier battle group, on duty in the Mediterranean, through Southeast Asia towards Taiwan Straits as a warning to the PRC. The tension was ultimately defused.
It was reminiscent of the August, 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis when the PRC had launched heavy artillery fire upon the Quemoy island, off Taiwan. However, at that time US President Dwight David Eisenhower and Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, were looking to defend Taiwan as a bastion of anti-Communism in the Asia Pacific in a Cold War context.
Even the possible use of nuclear weapons for defence of Quemoy island was agreed upon in Dulles meeting with members of Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other top officials on 2 September, 1958, as M.H. Halperin says (The 1958 Taiwan Crisis- A Documented History, P.xi). This had almost brought the US on the verge of confrontation to the USSR, the then stalwart ally of the PRC. However, in 1996, the Clinton Administration was trying to defend an emergent democracy, situated in the shadow of the world’s largest authoritarian regime. The narrative was different.
South Korea and Taiwan are often cited as two Asian examples, where growth of the middle class under authoritarian regimes led to the decisive triumph of democracy. The transition happened more smoothly in Taiwan than in South Korea, though interestingly they almost coincide in time. There was a great hope that under Deng Xiaoping, even the PRC would not only dump Mao’s economic legacy, but political legacy as well.
Deng could have anticipated Mikhail Gorbachev, in taking PRC towards democracy. The hope was unfortunately belied. In September, 1981, Ye Jianying, one of the 10 marshals of PRC, had issued a nine point policy for “return” of Taiwan on the basis of “one country, two systems”.
At that time there was democracy neither in PRC nor in Taiwan. On a formal level, June Teufel Dreyer informs, Chiang rejected Ye’s demarche, noting that it was for the PRC to relinquish sovereignty. His policy was ‘no contact, no negotiation and no compromise to CCP’. He said that any reunification could come on the three principles of Sun Yat-Sen viz. nationalism, democracy and people’s livelihood (Dreyer, A History of Cross-Strait Interchange, from Crisis in the Taiwan Strait, P.20). It was anybody’s guess how Beijing would react to any suggestion of democracy!
Whereas the authoritarian rule of Kuomintang culminated in a multi-party democracy in Taiwan, the Communist rule in the PRC has taken a more authoritarian turn under Xi Jinping. However, what compounds the incompatibility of PRC and Taiwan, is the generational shift, which Deng knew would be the death-knell for reunification.
Taiwan’s Struggle: Voices from Taiwan (2014), edited by Shyu-tu Lee and Jack F. Williams illustrates how Taiwanese nurture not only different political destiny but also different sense of history. The book is a collection of 22 essays by as many reputed Taiwanese contributors spanning different aspects of national life. They all agree that Taiwan differs from mainland China, and is better off with those differences.
Taiwan, it might be remembered, was a Japanese colony between 1895 and 1945. It had thus escaped the horrors of the Agrarian Revolutionary War (1927-37) and the Chinese Civil War (1946-49) between Kuomintang and Communists that scarred the terrain of mainland China. Mainland China, informs Lee Shiao-feng, witnessed at least 140 wars among 1300 warlords between 1912 and 1928 (Taiwan’s Struggle, P.36).
The Japanese colonial rule, albeit repressive, nonetheless contributed to peace, prosperity, wider educational opportunities and better living standard that placed this mountainous and forested island far ahead of mainland China on development indices. Lee-Shiao Feng contrasts the “oceanic or maritime personality” of Taiwan with “self-reliant inward looking agriculture society” of China going back to further in time.
Lee Teng-hui, the first democratically elected President of Taiwan, sees mainlander-dominated Kuomintang as one of the alien rulers like the Dutch, Koxinga, Manchu and Japanese before them (P.20). Lee feels that over half a century, the troubles that Taiwan encountered all came from China. Once the relationship between Taiwan and China is clarified, Taiwan could have true peace and stability. The cross-claiming of territory by PRC and RoC (Taiwan) was a dangerous proposition that Lee ended from the Taiwanese side in 1991. One hopes, the PRC belatedly takes a leaf from it, and acknowledges Taiwan’s sovereignty. Culturally and emotionally, Taiwan has already passed out of the Chinese ambit. Both countries could still cooperate at the economic level, as over the last three decades, Taiwan has emerged as the leading source of investment in mainland China.
The writer is author of the book “The Microphone Men: How Orators Created a Modern India” (2019) and an independent researcher based in New Delhi. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.
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