During the 1996 presidential election the People’s Liberation Army fired missiles into the Taiwan Strait and backed off only when Washington sent two carrier battle groups into the area. Last week China demanded that Taiwan start talks over reunification or face invasion. A White Paper published by the State Council, China’s cabinet, warned that China would be forced to take “drastic measures, including military force” if Taiwan continued to delay talks over eventual reunification. Taiwan’s position, which I heard expounded at length from senior officials on a recent visit, is that reunification can indeed be discussed–when China is democratic.
The transformation of Taiwan is quite astonishing. When I first visited in the early 1970s, it was a dingy military dictatorship, still under the complete control of the aging Kuomintang generals who had fled the mainland after their defeat by the communists in 1949. The press was under strict government control; dissidents were rounded up. In those days the principal exports were rice and pineapples. American GIs on R&R from Vietnam frolicked with local girls in such famous haunts as the Literary Inn in Peitou; bookshops were filled with cheap pirated copies of best sellers published in the West. I bought a sackful to read on the long trans-Siberian train journey back home to London.
In 1970, I called on the Foreign Ministry’s spokesman, who informed me that communist China, still in the throes of the Cultural Revolution, would undoubtedly fail and that the Taiwanese model would be triumphant. I am ashamed to say that I thought he was talking nonsense, and that the march of Maoism was ineluctable. It gives me great pleasure that I was so wrong. Now, almost everything that I saw on my earlier visits has gone from Taiwan. No more GIs on R&R, of course. Fruit and rice exports have been replaced by high-technology goods. Above all, the Kuomintang turned the country toward pluralism and itself into a genuinely democratic party. Taiwan has problems, of course, but its successes are stunning and, in a rather obvious way, moving. It has a system people can trust.
In China, by contrast, such trust is largely absent. According to Linda Jakobson, a Finnish expert on China now working in Taiwan, the real danger to the island is the spiritual void in China itself. Communism is dead; sects multiply. The only emotional lever that the party still controls is nationalism. And therein lies the risk to Taiwan.
The strength of Chinese chauvinism was seen in the furious public reaction to NATO’s bombing of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade during the Kosovo war. Young Chinese have been trained to believe that China will inevitably include Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Of the three territories, only Taiwan now remains free. But Taiwan is not a colony; rather it is a state with its own Constitution and its own defense forces. Taiwan is willing to pay lip service to the idea of reunification, but, as Foreign Minister J. R. Chen says, “For us it’s a precondition that the people of China enjoy the rule of law, freedom, democracy and a free market before [unification] can take place.”
Taiwan’s position on China continues to evolve. Last year President Lee Teng-hui caused something of a ruckus when he stated that relations between China and Taiwan should be conducted on a “special state-to-state basis.” China was infuriated and stepped up its threats against “the rebel province.” Bill Clinton wobbled. Washington at first encouraged Taiwan to back away from its new stance and insisted it still believed that there was only “one China.” But in the face of Taiwan’s refusal to back down, U.S. officials reiterated that they were committed to the defense of the island state so long as it did not declare independence.
The bizarre nature of the international system is rarely seen so clearly as in the case of Taiwan. States that are utterly insignificant or brutal are in the United Nations. Taiwan, which is neither, is not only excluded but has full diplomatic relations with few others because of Chinese threats. Taipei now has diplomatic relations with only 29 countries. Some are minute Pacific Islands like Palau (population: about 10,000), Nauru and the Marshall Islands; some were obtained by bribes; others are battlegrounds like Liberia, whose bloodstained President Charles Taylor was the latest state visitor to be feted in Taipei. The struggle for diplomatic recognition is not encouraging, but the reality is that almost all countries (including China itself) have growing commercial and financial links with “the renegade province.”
Even so, whoever wins the Taiwanese presidential election next month, the threat from China will remain paramount. Beijing’s belligerence makes the reunification it demands ever more unlikely. A sense of a New Taiwan with its own civic consciousness is emerging. The shibboleth of “one China” seems ever more archaic. In short, the external threat to Taiwan is growing as its internal system becomes more mature. That is why the Taiwan Strait remains one of the most dangerous places in Asia.
Shawcross is on the board of the International Crisis Group, which recently held a meeting in Taipei. His book “Deliver Us From Evil: Warlords and Peacekeepers in a World of Endless Conflict” will be published in March.
