26 December 2007
Taiwan’s Sleeper Crisis
By Gwynne Dyer
US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice didn’t go into much detail in her year-end message, but on one topic she was very clear: “We think that Taiwan’s referendum to apply to the United Nations under the name Taiwan is a provocative policy. It unnecessarily raises tension in the Taiwan Strait, and it promises no real benefits for the people of Taiwan on the international stage.”
But then, the referendum is not meant to benefit the people of Taiwan so much as the Democratic Progressive Party, which is not precisely the same thing. The DPP, which draw its support mainly from those who would like the island of Taiwan to be an entirely separate country from China, has held the presidency for the last eight years. However, it won the 2004 election by a majority of only 0.22 percent, and things look even grimmer for next March’s election, so it desperately needs a gimmick.
The referendum is the gimmick. The DPP has never dared to declare Taiwan’s independence from China, because the Communist regime in Beijing vows to use “non-peaceful measures” to thwart any attempt to divide the motherland permanently. So the DPP always looks for substitute gestures that will signal to its supporters that it still means business. A referendum on changing the country’s official name from the Republic of China to “Taiwan”, held at the same time as the election, might just work.
Well, not change the official name, exactly, because the Chinese People’s Republic has already said that’s a red line that Taipei must not cross. The referendum just proposes that the government applies for UN membership as “Taiwan”. The UN said no the last twelve times, when the government in Taipei applied under the name of “Republic of China”, but maybe it will say yes if they call the country “Taiwan” this time. They’re not very bright at the UN.
Changing the name is not going to change Taiwan’s reception at the UN, and Chen Shui-Bian, the outgoing DPP president, knows it very well. Taiwan lost its UN seat to the People’s Republic of China in 1971, twenty-two years after the Nationalists lost the civil war to the Communists and fled from the mainland. It lost its seat, basically, because the regime in Beijing ruled more than 98 percent of the Chinese population.
It still does, and few UN members are going to risk losing the trade of such a huge country just to make 22 million Taiwanese happy. True, Taiwan is now a democratic country where even the old Nationalist Party, though still devoted to the concept of One China ruled by non-Communists, has accepted the democratic rules. But having a nicer political system doesn’t win you a lot of points in international politics.
The whole notion of applying for a UN seat under a different name is a pure charade. It is the DPP’s way of justifying a referendum that sort of involves changing the country’s name to Taiwan (though not officially, because that might start a war), so that disheartened DPP voters will show up at the polls one more time. Once there, they might vote for the DPP’s presidential candidate, too, and the party might squeak back into power once more.
It is a gambit that is almost bound to fail domestically. Taiwan’s economic growth has slowed since the DPP took power, and the word in Taipei is that half the corporate headquarters that still remain in the island will decamp to the mainland if the DPP wins the 2008 election. So no problem: the DPP will lose the election, and even if the referendum passes the new government won’t act on it, and the UN would never accept Taiwan’s application anyway. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
The Taiwan government calculates that it can get away with this stunt because Beijing is hosting the Olympics next summer, and wouldn’t dream of spoiling the party by confronting Taiwan over a referendum on the (fake) name change on 22 March. The Taiwan government is probably wrong.
Its assumption is that the Beijing regime, being a tyranny, can turn public opinion on and off like a tap. If it wants the Chinese public to be outraged about Taiwan’s “splittism”, the protestors will come out on the streets. If it doesn’t want a crisis, they will obediently stay home. Chinese nationalism, which has always been obsessed with preserving the unity of the motherland, is reduced in this paradigm to a mere propaganda tool of the current regime.
Nonsense. The Communist regime knows that its ideology is dead. It knows that its claim to power depends on producing rapid economic growth and defending the national interest, so it regularly plays the nationalist card, especially over Taiwan. But popular hostility to Taiwan’s independence is real on the mainland, and the regime in Beijing cannot just ignore it.
This is a marginal case, for Taiwan will not be declaring independence in March, or even formally changing its name. But this is an event that falls on the borderline of the tolerable for Beijing, and its response, even in the Olympic year, will depend on whether it thinks it can manage the news of the referendum. If it thinks that it will be blamed by the public for failing to defend Chinese unity, then stand by for the mother of all crises to erupt in the Taiwan Strait in early March.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 7 and 8. (“The whole…simple”)