Source: WSJ (11/15/15)
The End of ‘One China’
By ANDREW BROWNE
After a historic surprise meeting with the leader of Taiwan, Xi Jinping could go down in history for recognizing the island democracy—or choose conflict instead
Communist Chinese leader Mao Zedong, left, and Chinese Gen. Chiang Kai-shek toast one another at a celebration of Japan’s surrender and the end of World War II, Sept. 1945. PHOTO: JACK WILKES/THE LIFE PICTURE COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES
Chiang was driven into exile on Taiwan, taking with him his Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang. The enmity of Mao and Chiang endured across a Cold War frontier—for a time, their troops hurled shells and propaganda messages at each other across the narrow strait separating Taiwan from the mainland—but they always shared a dream, born of their long struggle: “One China.”
The unification of China and Taiwan has been the sacred mission of every Communist leader since Mao, including the current president, Xi Jinping. And though the idea of “One China” today commands virtually no popular support on Taiwan, which prizes its fledgling democracy, it nevertheless clings to life as a legacy within the Kuomintang, the party of the country’s current president, Ma Ying-jeou.
Not for much longer, though. As the political heirs of China’s wartime foes reached out for a historic handshake in a five-star Singapore tourist hotel, both men surely understood that “One China” as a common goal is now as good as dead.
Mr. Ma is a lame duck, nearing the end of two terms in office. His signature policy of economic opening to China has been spurned by angry young Taiwanese who stormed the legislature last year to block a trade bill. The Kuomintang is in disarray, and the likely victor in presidential elections in January, Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party, can’t bring herself to utter the “One China” mantra. Her party espouses independence, although she herself doesn’t go that far.
A Taiwanese boy at a demonstration in Taipei holds a sign whose Chinese characters read, ‘Ma Ying-jeou Doesn’t Represent Me’ on Nov. 7, the day Mr. Ma held a historic summit in Singapore with Chinese President Xi Jinping. PHOTO: SAM YEH/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
Unless, that is, Mr. Xi decides to go down in history as the Chinese statesman who crafted a new approach to Taiwan, one imaginative enough to accommodate Beijing’s cherished “One China” aspirations and Taiwan’s commitment to its hard-won democracy.
Chinese President Xi Jinping, right, shakes hands with Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou before their meeting at Shangrila hotel in Singapore on Nov. 7. PHOTO: ROSLAN RAHMANROSLAN RAHMAN/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
The U.S., Taiwan’s main military backer, is watching anxiously; China’s coastline bristles with rockets pointed at the island. Taiwan is the one festering problem that could realistically bring the U.S. and Chinese superpowers to war. Such a clash would be, as a recent Rand Corp. study noted, a “short, sharp and probably desperate affair.” Nuclear escalation couldn’t be ruled out, which is why, in part, the U.S. doesn’t explicitly guarantee Taiwan’s security. Would an American president ever risk Los Angeles for Taipei? Washington maintains a policy of “strategic ambiguity.”
The Harvard-educated Mr. Ma clearly hankered after his handshake with Mr. Xi to save some part of his tarnished legacy. He has built his presidency on the promise of better ties with China, only to be rejected by a Taiwanese public that believes he has pushed ahead too quickly and recklessly. His popularity rating has sunk to around 20%. At least now he will be remembered for this breakthrough encounter.
The real conundrum is why Mr. Xi bothered with him. Perhaps, some say, Mr. Xi hoped to boost the Kuomintang’s chances ahead of January’s vote, when Taiwan’s legislature is also up for grabs. But that is unlikely: Polls show that the Kuomintang is hopelessly behind.
Mr. Xi has emerged as a mercurial leader, bold yet unpredictable. China’s strongman keeps the region off-guard by abruptly ratcheting up military and diplomatic pressures against neighbors, then just as suddenly easing off. Right now, tensions with the U.S. are bubbling over artificial islands, fit for military use, that China has created in the South China Sea; a few weeks ago, the U.S. Navy sent a guided-missile destroyer churning through seas close to one of them, just to remind Beijing that Washington still rules the waves and that Mr. Xi can’t claim no-go zones amid the world’s busiest maritime thoroughfares. So perhaps this meeting was Mr. Xi’s olive branch—not just to Taiwan but to the entire region, and to America as well.
Others speculate that Mr. Xi was polishing his credentials as a global statesman with a final flourish after being feted by President Barack Obama in the White House, dining with Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace and patching up ties with old foe Vietnam.
But there is another possible explanation. Maybe—just maybe—Mr. Xi designed his meeting with Mr. Ma as an icebreaker, a way to start regularizing top-level contacts that will continue under Ms. Tsai, who Mr. Xi knows is unlikely ever to accept “One China.”
That would be a game-changer. It would alter perceptions of Mr. Xi, who thus far has shown almost no flexibility in his dealings with China’s troubled periphery—including Hong Kong, where Beijing has rejected popular demands for full democracy, and China’s restive Xinjiang region, where authorities continue to clamp down harshly on the mostly Muslim Uighurs.
Such a shift might also reverberate among the Chinese population. Taiwan, after all, provides a democratic alternative for the Chinese-speaking world.
Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party, who polls suggest is likely to win Taiwan’s January presidential elections, speaks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank, on June 3. PHOTO:BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI/AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE/GETTY IMAGES
By agreeing to engage with Taiwanese leaders without the principle of “One China,” Mr. Xi would be acknowledging the values that Taiwan holds dear: its political pluralism, cultural diversity and everyday civility. These are qualities that millions of Chinese tourists who flock to Taiwan each year often remark upon—the qualities of a prosperous postindustrial society that is largely at peace with itself, if not with its giant neighbor.
Democracy has handcuffed the ability of any Taiwan leader to bargain with Beijing, although the Taiwanese certainly want friendly relations. If Ms. Tsai refuses to embrace “One China,” it is hard to see any future Kuomintang leader doing so either. That is because the overwhelming majority of voters in Taiwan are content with the status quo—neither de jure independence (the island is a self-governing country in all but name) nor unification with China. Ms. Tsai has adopted this cautious position.
No less important, while most of the island’s residents are Han Chinese descendants of immigrants from the mainland, they have come to identify with Taiwan as their home. They have grown immune to ethnic appeals for national unity of the sort used by Mr. Xi in Singapore, where he said: “We are brothers still connected by our flesh even if our bones are broken.”
Moreover, many Taiwanese resent a version of history that sees Taiwan exclusively in the context of an unresolved Communist-Kuomintang civil war, as though 1949 is the only year that counts in the narrative of their past.
In fact, the date that matters most to many Taiwanese isn’t 1949, when the Kuomintang began its exile, but 1945. That is the year that the Kuomintang, then the governing power in China, took over the island of Taiwan from Japan at the end of World War II.
The Japanese had ruled Taiwan as a colony for 50 years—and, by and large, had ruled it well. By contrast, the Kuomintang was brutal, corrupt and incompetent. It pacified what was to become its island fortress by massacring some 20,000 Taiwanese. And the repression continued. Led by Chiang, a million or so demobilized soldiers and other refugees descended upon a Taiwan population of roughly six million and set up a one-party dictatorship under martial law.
To this day, some Taiwanese equate the notion of “One China” with a time when the Kuomintang’s secret police conducted a reign of terror and the authorities carted pro-independence activists off to jail on Green Island, persecuted human-rights lawyers who sought to defend them and muzzled the press. After a long, painful struggle for democracy—Taiwan’s first presidential elections were held in 1996—these Taiwanese have no intention of throwing in their lot with another party of mainlanders.
Mr. Xi’s ruling style—including strict Internet censorship, curbs on NGOs and ideological controls on college campuses—especially alarms the Taiwanese.
The people of Taiwan, writes the China scholarDonald Rodgers, a professor at Austin College, “have no desire to unify with China—ever.” For them, relations with the mainland have reached a turning point. Increasingly, they reject the assumption that the “Taiwan question” is a family squabble among the Chinese. Instead, they see it as a political tug of war between two sovereign equals.
Charles Huang, a prominent Taiwan businessman and one of Ms. Tsai’s closest advisers, says that Taiwan’s likely next leader wasn’t opposed to the Singapore meeting but objected to its secretive planning—Mr. Ma sprung it as a last-minute surprise—and took issue with the Taiwanese president’s apparently unqualified acceptance of Beijing’s “One China” formula.
Mr. Huang’s ancestors arrived in Taiwan from mainland China 10 generations ago. He says that makes him ethnically Chinese, but he’s bound to Taiwan culturally, socially, politically and in every other way. “I call myself Chinese,” he says, “but only reluctantly.” The cross-strait relationship, Mr. Huang adds, “has to take on a different mind-set.”
In other words, forget “One China.” And forget Beijing’s long-standing offer of a route to get there—the “One Country, Two Systems” formula that it used to recover Hong Kong, under which the British colony kept its independent judiciary, feisty media and other freedoms while China took over matters of defense and foreign policy.
For the Taiwanese, it is unthinkable that they would allow soldiers of China’s People’s Liberation Army to be stationed on the island, as they now are in downtown Hong Kong. The alternative way that Chinese troops could get to Taiwan—an amphibious military landing, backed by air and missile strikes—is almost equally unimaginable, at least for now.
More likely, say analysts, if Ms. Tsai stood firmly against the idea of “One China” and Mr. Xi chose a hard line in return, the island would face slow strangulation. Mr. Xi might start by choking off tourist flows and then try to steal away some of Taiwan’s diplomatic partners, of which the most important by far is the Vatican, whose relations with Beijing have long been tense.
Or he could surprise the world by moving in the opposite direction—for instance, by acknowledging Taiwan’s democracy and proposing a loose federation between two sovereign states. The Singapore meeting offered no encouragement that he has anything of the sort in mind. Without an agreement on “One China,” China’s official Xinhua News Agency quoted Mr. Xi as saying, “The boat of peaceful development will encounter terrifying waves or even capsize.”
Indeed, to avoid any suggestion that the Singapore meeting was a state-to-state encounter, the two men addressed each other as plain “mister” rather than as “president.” And when Chinese state TV broadcast Mr. Ma’s news conference before he left for Singapore, it blacked out the tiny Taiwan flag he was wearing as a lapel pin.
The turbulent history of relations between the Communists and the Kuomintang suggests that we should expect wrenching twists and turns as China and Taiwan try to figure out a way to resolve the impasse. Consider the moment back in 1936 when one of Chiang’s own generals kidnapped him in the city of Xi’an and held him captive until he agreed to end civil-war hostilities against the Communists and collaborate with Mao’s forces against the Japanese invaders.
The so-called Xi’an incident altered Asia’s destiny: The Kuomintang’s armies fought most of the big battles against the Japanese, pinning down more than a million enemy troops who might otherwise have been deployed elsewhere, and hastening the end of the Pacific War. Meanwhile, the Communists husbanded their forces to be ready to renew the civil war.
The decisions facing Mr. Xi are equally fateful. While he puzzles through his options, regional tranquility is the hostage.