What Should We Do About Taiwan?




May 16, 1999


OUTLINE

A.
Background
.....1.
The Role of Indoctrination in the Military Exercise Decision
.....2.
Why Worry about Growling?

B.
Claims and Counterclaims
.....1.
Is Taiwan Part of China?
.....2.
Is Taiwan Part of the ROC?
.....3.
Is Taiwan Part of the PRC?
.....4.
The Right of Self-Determination Through a Free and Fair Referendum

C.
U.S. Policy Alternatives
.....1.
If the U. S. Does Not Protect Taiwan
.....2.
If the U.S. Does Protect Taiwan
.....3.
The Hong Kong Wild Card




What Should We Do About Taiwan?


..... This essay discusses the likely effects of the U. S. adopting various policy alternatives toward the prevention of military intervention in Taiwan by the Peoples' Republic of China (PRC). This issue was most recently raised as a result of the PRC missile tests near the Taiwan coast during the runup to the first presidential elections in Taiwan. As most readers know, the U. S. responded with a warning to the PRC not to attempt to exercise control over Taiwan by force. Then it moved two aircraft carriers within striking distance of the Mainland batteries. After the election, the PRC stopped its missile tests and the U. S. carriers returned to their routine activities.


.....Both the communist PRC and the newly democratized Taiwan government, called the Republic of China (ROC), claim to have sovereignty over Taiwan. Indeed, both officially claim to have sovereignty over all of China, although the number of people on Taiwan who support that claim has probably always been a minority. In any case, the merit of these claims to Taiwan needs to be discussed before we turn to the policy issue. Thus, after some background in part one, this essay addresses the claims in part two. Part three deals with the policy issue.


1. Background


The Role of Indoctrination in the Military Exercise Decision


.....To describe the PRC's missile action, some of the media use the term "growling." They say that it reflects an instability at the top levels of power and that a more militarist group in the PRC is struggling with a less militarist group. This seems to be a reasonable interpretation. However, the news reports stop short of saying precisely how ordering military exercises can enhance the positions of the PRC leaders. The reason is that the exercises are popular among the Mainland Chinese people. So the more important question is would the Mainland Chinese People would care whether the Taiwanese are forced to submit to Mainland rule? The answer is that children in the PRC are indoctrinated to believe that they have a sacred duty to bring Taiwan back to the motherland.


.....A statement to this effect is included in the preamble to the PRC constitution. That document is not worth very much, since it also gives the Chinese people the right of election, free speech, assembly, press, religion, etc., except insofar as these rights conflict with the interest of the state. In practice, this means that the Communist Party central committee is a dictator. Thus, the important point is not what the constitution says. It is that ordinary literate Chinese in the PRC believe, almost to a person, that Taiwan belongs to China. They are taught this in the elementary schools, the high schools, the universities, the popular press and the Communist party. Evidence of this indoctrination is present in U.S. universities where PRC and Taiwan students attend classes together and are often members of the same association of Chinese or Asian students. I was amazed to hear that on more than one campus the PRC students had pressured the university administration to deny Taiwan students the right to fly the ROC flag during association meetings, although they permitted the PRC flag to be flown.


Why Worr y about Growling?


.....Now it doesn't matter very much whether the PRC growling is due to citizen indoctrination or some other factor. Growling does not usually cause pain and suffering. Indeed, in this case, it seems to have hurt the PRC. The Western news reporting has unexpectedly drawn world attention to a bullying PRC. No card carrying democrat could help but have sympathy for a democracy being threatened by a dictatorship 50 times its size. The PRC leaders cannot have been happy with this.


.....So long as the PRC merely growls and, as one news commentator has said, shoots itself in the foot; Taiwan has no worries. But the Mainland Chinese leaders are not dullards. By observing the response to their growling, they will learn. Keep in mind that the indoctrination makes it pretty easy for the communist dictatorship to rally huge numbers of soldiers and supporters willing to die for the motherland (or at least unwilling to question whether the risk of death is worth it). Mainland China indeed has an army of military captives. Recall that it was the PRC that sent waves of Chinese in the early 1950s to their death in an effort to help the communists conquer South Korea (or, giving them the benefit of the doubt, to prevent the U.S. from invading China.) (One might say that this was the first time that the PRC shot itself in the foot, since if it had not aided North Korea, MacArthur would probably have quickly ended the conflict by taking over North Korea.)


.....So long as the indoctrination continues, actions aimed at forcing Taiwan to submit to Mainland rule will continue. Of course, we must expect that Chinese leaders will change their strategy. We don't know what the Mainland Chinese will do next. But we can be pretty certain that they will avail themselves of every reasonable opportunity to dominate Taiwan.


2. Claims and Counterclaims


.....The metaphor of Mainland China shooting itself in the foot is misleading. It hints that Taiwan (the foot) is a part of China (the body). A subject to which I now turn


Is Taiwan Part of China?


.....Taiwan was a colony of Japan from 1895 to 1945. It had been ceded to Japan by China's Ch'ing dynasty in a war settlement. During the Japanese rule in Taiwan, revolutionaries in China overthrew the dynasty in 1911. Both the PRC and the ROC lay claim to having won the revolution and they have both condemned the political aspects of the preceding 3,000-year dynastic period. The evidence of this is the Chinese calendar that both use. It starts in 1911. Nevertheless, both claim that Taiwan is part of China. Since Japan ruled Taiwan at the time of the takeover, their claims are necessarily based on the assumption that because the dynasties controlled Taiwan before 1895, they have a right to control it now. So the question we are led to ask is this. In what sense is it correct that the dynasties controlled Taiwan and to what extent?


.....Around 1887, the Ch'ing dynasty declared that Taiwan was a province of China, equal in status to the other provinces. For about three hundred years before that, however, it was officially an attachment to another mainland province, Fujian. Does this mean that it was part of China? It depends on one's interpretation. Until 1875, emigration from the Mainland to Taiwan was banned, although it is doubtful that the ban was very well enforced. Taiwan's sizeable population in 1875 consisted mostly of refugees and their descendants, although there were surely some economic opportunists who had managed to elude the emigration ban. Most of the refugees had fled China during the previous 300 year period in fear, not in anticipation of colonizing Taiwan.


.....During this period, the Chinese government offered only token and occasional protection from the fierce aborigines warrior tribes on Taiwan. When the Chinese bureaucrats occasionally arrived with their soldiers, it was mainly to collect taxes and to impose trade restrictions. Mostly take and no give. As late as 1874, the dynastic government of China claimed to control (in a military and police sense) only the Western third of the island. The other two thirds, consisting of mountains into which the aborigines had been forced and the narrow Eastern side of the central mountain range, was, as the dynasty stated publicly, "beyond their jurisdiction."


.....My point is that although the dynasties of China, after the 16th century, had the power to collect taxes and to regulate, they did not pay much attention to Taiwan and they certainly did not provide any significant services for the "Taiwanese" (i.e., the immigrants from China). It is true that they occasionally tried unsuccessfully to kill off the "real" Taiwanese (i.e., the aborigines who had much earlier migrated from what is now Indonesia, or possibly from the Philippines), since these people disrupted the flow of taxes. Also, after 1875, they took some interest in the island. A new governor appointed around 1878 instituted an ambitious infrastructure program. It was so successful that, by 1890, the new Taiwan province may have been ahead of the rest of China in technological development. However, this development spanned a very short time. It seems to follow that the historical basis for the claim that Taiwan is a part of China is tenuous, at least insofar as that claim is based on the history of the pre-Japanese period. The largely "illegal" immigrants from China appear to have been more like the Europeans who fled to America or went there in search of work in the 16th and 17th centuries than like Chinese colonists.


Is Taiwan Part of the ROC


.....We now consider the claims of the ROC and the PRC to be the legitimate rulers of Taiwan. Before considering the ROC claim, it is important to realize that the ROC has changed radically in the last nine or so years. Indeed, there have been many changes through the years that are relevant to understanding the ROC claim. The ROC is the name given to China by the revolutionaries in 1911. Following the revolution, China was not a nation but a geographical region. It was ruled by local warlords, triads, foreigners, or whoever happened to have the power and/or support of the people in the various localities. Around 1928, Chiang Kai Shek and his recently formed Leninist-style political party, the Kuomingtang (KMT), set out with his Russian-trained troops on a unification mission. Their goal was to use whatever means possible to gain control over the people and then to "educate" them within the one-party system. He did not succeed. This was at first due mainly to the strength of local warlords and later due to the growing strength of the communists. Nevertheless, between 1926 and 1945, no other political force was nearly strong enough to lay claim to the government of China. Thus, from the viewpoint of international relations, Chiang and the KMT were virtually synonymous with the ROC and Mainland China, which of course did not include Taiwan.


.....During the war and afterwards, Chiang was leader of the KMT and the ROC. Because of a continuing military emergency, he was a virtual dictator over the people who he controlled. Chiang's position was bolstered by the support of the allies, who gave him extensive military assistance. After the war, this range of control narrowed as the communists grew in strength. In the immediate post-war period, there was some hesitation on the part of the U.S. to continue assistance. However, the assistance kept coming. After Chiang retreated in defeat to Taiwan in 1949 and especially after the victorious communists sent troops into North Korea, Eisenhower threw a protective umbrella around the dictatorship-KMT-ROC on Taiwan.


.....On Taiwan, unification was a success. Unlike the vast mainland, Taiwan is an island about the size of New Jersey. Part of the reason was that its 6 million people had already been "tamed" by the Japanese. But part was a set of "taming" actions by Chiang himself.


.....Although the KMT and the ROC were synonymous before 1945, Taiwan complicated the picture. The Japanese were forced to hand over Taiwan to Chiang's ROC as a result of an agreement made between Chiang, Roosevelt, and Churchill in 1943. When the KMT-ROC-mainland government arrived on Taiwan in 1945 as administrators, the Taiwanese were not indoctrinated members of a one-party system, like the KMT members who ruled the ROC. Moreover, the majority of the ethnic Chinese (I would guess that about 5% were aborigines) spoke (1) a Chinese dialect and (2) Japanese. Very few spoke the national language of China (which children have been forced to learn since 1945 by both the PRC and the ROC governments). Although Chiang probably did not realize it in 1945, the Taiwanese still had to be "persuaded" to accept the ROC rulers. Taiwan was an ROC province by virtue of the 1943 decision but it was not a KMT province.


.....The KMT succeeded in dominating Taiwan by the brutal suppression of a Taiwanese uprising against inefficiency and corruption in 1947. Starting with the takeover in 1945, the ROC governor was inefficient and his uncontrolled subordinates were corrupt and exploitative. The Taiwanese objected but they had no way of coordinating their objections, since they had been almost totally dominated by the Japanese for fifty years. When there was a spontaneous revolt in 1947, the ROC-KMT on the Mainland reacted by sending troops. The result was a massacre of between 5,000 and 30,000 Taiwanese, mostly rising intellectuals and property owners. After that, the Taiwanese in general submitted to ROC. Their only hope of gaining political power was to become members of the KMT.


.....In 1949 the ROC fled the mainland with a population of soldiers and exiles large enough to comprise 1/6th of the population and 100% of the military and police power. Chiang Kai Shek carried out a subsequent "anti-communist" purge of mainlanders and additional Taiwanese in the early 1950s. It is not clear how many people were killed but the numbers seem to be between 1,000 and 10,000. In any case, the combination of the purge and the 1947 suppression of Taiwanese made Taiwan a stable and secure military dictatorship, so long as the government could rely on U.S. protection against the Mainland. Chiang claimed to be preparing for an assault on the mainland, but the passage of time made this prospect increasingly remote. Instead, Taiwan became synonymous with the ROC and the KMT, all under the rule of Chiang.


.....During this period of stability, the government instituted a system of private property rights, maintained a stable price level, controlled corruption, and granted a high level of freedom to small businesses. It also promoted exports which were helped by the absence of import restrictions by the U.S. As a result, the Taiwan economy maintained a growth rate of about 8% for twenty-five years or so. It became one of the four so-called Asia tigers, the others being Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea.


.....Politically, the country remained a military dictatorship until 1987. At that time Chiang Ching Kuo, son and successor to Chiang Kai Shek, declared an end to martial law shortly before he died. He apparently instructed his successor, Lee Deng Hwei, to implement a democratic constitution. (The ROC Constitution had been produced back in 1946 when the older Chiang was trying to get more financial aid from the U.S. to fight the communists.) Lee could have done many things. But, perhaps because he was Taiwanese (i.e., his parents were from Taiwan and not from the Mainland, where practically all of the ruling party prior to 1950 were born), he permitted the wishes of the younger Chiang to be fulfilled. Since 1987, Taiwan has been gradually democratizing. The last government office to be fully democratized was the presidency. The first presidential elections were held in March, 1996. As years of democratization pass, the political situation is changing radically. This is evidenced by an identity crisis. While the ROC and the Kuomingtang party were synonymous on Taiwan until 1987, today the Kuomingtang is just one of three parties that compete for the right to govern the ROC. The ROC, on the other hand, is now synonymous with Taiwan. Today, Taiwan is not a part of the ROC it is the ROC.


.....Nevertheless, the link between the ROC and the Kuomingtang party is still strong. The vast majority of government bureaucrats are KMT members. Accordingly, the laws and their enforcement are biased in favor of KMT members and KMT-owned businesses, which help to finance political campaigns. The legislature is slightly more than half KMT, the president is KMT, and most of the major politicians are KMT. However, KMT strength is weakening with each day of democracy.


.....Whereas the claim of sovereignty over Taiwan used to be made by the ROC=KMT, it is probably more correct now to say that it is made by the ROC=democratic Taiwan. In the meantime, while the KMT claims to be the legitimate ruler of all China, the main opposition party's goal is just the opposite -- independence from China. The party does not advocate actuallydeclaring independence for fear of provoking a PRC attack (and less favorable U.S. treatment) or the confiscation of Taiwan assets in the mainland).


.....In light of these facts, we can consider the claim of the ROC to be the legitimate rulers of Taiwan. As we have seen, given the democratic nature of Taiwan today, the ROC is Taiwan. Thus the real claim is that the elected government has the legitimate right to rule Taiwan. We shall look more deeply into this issue below.


Is Taiwan Part of the PRC?


.....The PRC was formed after the communist victory in 1949. The civil war between the communists and the ROC had raged on and off for about 20 years. The PRC's claim to Taiwan has two parts: (1) it is the rightful heir to the dynastic lands and (2) Taiwan is historically part of China. We have already explored the second of these claims. The first seems reasonable by force of sheer might. No stronger power emerged to unite China after the 1911 revolution. However, by this logic -- that is, by the logic that the might of the past determines what is right today -- the ROC-KMT has a legitimate claim over Taiwan. It is probably true that Chiang Kai Shek could not have prevented a communist takeover if he had not had help. Thus, the PRC leaders might argue that the only reason Taiwan is not under PRC rule today is "foreign interference." In reply, in can be argued that a nation's might is not only a function of its military power, it is also a function of its strategic alliances.


.....On the other hand, if we allow for diplomatically-achieved might, then we cannot stop our analysis in 1949. We must add the Nixon communique in 1971, the Carter reaffirmation of the communique in 1978, the Taiwan Relations Act passed in 1979, and the relationship with the U.N. Prior to 1970, the PRC could base no claim to Taiwan on the basis of might. But this has changed as the major countries of the world took a more realistic approach toward the world situation.


.....An anomaly of the post-war era was that one of the largest countries in the world was not represented in the U.N., which was presumably the world organization created to give all people an opportunity to participate in diplomatic discussion. China's U.N. seat was held by the ROC, since most countries in the world refused to recognize the PRC as the Mainland's legitimate government. Gradually, this anomaly became evident. U.S. President Nixon faced the reality around 1970 that Mainland China was one of the top military powers in the world and began a process of normalizing relations. With the U.S. as leader, the rest of the world followed. In the early 70s, the Soviet Union and the Western countries transferred the Chinese U.N. seat from the ROC to the PRC. The Mainland was given "China's seat."


.....Chiang Kai Shek responded (defiantly, angrily?, you guess) by rejecting a separate U.N. seat for Taiwan. Later, as country after country shifted diplomatic recognition to the PRC, Taiwan became increasingly isolated politically. Today there is a different anomaly -- the 30 million people on Taiwan are not represented in the U.N. And apparently the reason for this is the same as before -- diplomatic fantasy.


.....In 1979 Congress, upset with Carter' failure to state explicitly that the U.S. would not stand by while the Mainland absorbed Taiwan, passed a rather ambiguous Taiwan Relations Act. That act explicitly states a U.S. recognition that Taiwan is part of China. On the other hand, it does not state that the PRC has the right to force its will onto Taiwan. On the contrary, it says that if the Mainland uses force to try to take Taiwan, the U.S. has a responsibility to... It is not easy to finish the sentence on the basis of what the act says. Thus, aside from the tenuous historical argument, the PRC's claim to Taiwan is based on a kind of ambiguous commitment by the U.S. to recognize that "there is only one China." How the U.S. could make (and keep) this commitment amid the obvious fact that Taiwan is a sovereign independent political entity is a question for the experts in doublespeak to answer.


.....At best, therefore, the PRC claim to be the sovereign of Taiwan is based on an ambiguous statement that appears to suggest the possibility that the U.S. would, at some point in time, stand aside while the PRC uses its might to take control. One should add, of course, that the opinion of the rest of the world powers is not insignificant. Nor is the opinion of the U.S. voters, who ultimately determine who the President will be.


.....Note that the PRC's claim is not based on past might, since mainland China in the past has not had the unilateral power, or will, to invade Taiwan. Instead it appears to be based on what China wishes the U.S. had said. It wishes that Nixon, Carter, and the Taiwan Relations Act authorized China to establish its sovereignty over Taiwan by force. If they had authorized this -- and if the other world powers agreed -- then the PRC would have a legitimate claim on the basis of currentmight. As it stands, however, this part of the claim is built on wishes.


The Right of Self-Determination Through a Free and Fair Referendum


.....I believe that the true (moral) right to govern Taiwan comes not from historical precedent, might, or from having provided an environment for what most people would call economic development. Instead, it comes from the "will of the people." Who owns Taiwan today? Well, my answer is that the only way to find out is to have a free and fair referendum on the issue. When I say "free," I mean, of course, a referendum that is not influenced in any way by some threat of force from the PRC or reaction from the U.S. if the referendum goes one way or the other.


.....Let's imagine that such a referendum could take place. What would the majority want? Unification with communist China? Continuing the status quo of relative international diplomatic isolation? Independence? To become the 51st state of the U.S.? To join with Japan? It is not easy to know. Like the Chinese on the Mainland, the Taiwanese and descendants of the 1949 KMT refugees have also been indoctrinated. Taiwan's youth have no real sense of history. The descendants of Taiwanese have parents and grandparents who are still afraid to speak out against the KMT. The descendants of the Mainlanders tend to have a nostalgic feeling about the Mainland. Visits there, however, have convinced most that they don't want to be ruled by the communists. Most important, missing from the Mainlander's descendants is an appreciation of the horror inflicted by their recent ancestors. Descendants of mainlanders still do not want to acknowledge that their parents and grandparents sanctioned the killing of thousands of Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese. The killing in Taiwan, of course, is relatively insignificant compared with the starvation on the mainland due to Mao's industrialization attempts and the uncountable murders during the cultural revolution. But both suggest that the Chinese are little different from other races in their capacity to inflict heavy damage on others of their own race. Thus, even if the people on Taiwan could have a fair and free election, it would not be one that is informed in the more complete sense of the more mature democracies.


.....Every country has a history of terror against natives, against those who resisted colonization or "development," against those who refused to adopt the state religion, or something else. The explanation for such horror is the combination of racism, ethnocentrism, and religious radicalism. More generally, the cause is the belief that one race, one ethnic group, one language group, one nation, or one religion should be, or is destined to be, the only, or the dominant, one. But the citizens of countries that have been free and democratic for the longest period have learned about that horror and have at least in part tried to avoid it in the future. Citizens of the mature democracies have, generally speaking, worked themselves free of such views, partly because the citizenry consists of multi-racial, multi-ethic, multi-language, and multi-religious individuals. But also partly because researchers are free to explore all aspects of the past and to make them public. Such is not yet the case in Taiwan (and, of course, not in South Korea or Japan at the moment). One hopes that the Kuomingtang and the Taiwanese will learn about and appreciate their predecessors' horrible deeds. But this can only occur, in my view, if the people of Taiwan are allowed to decide their future political and economic system for themselves.


.....The reality, of course, is that the people of Taiwan can have neither a free election nor a referendum on what their future will be. Their votes in the Presidential and National Assembly elections in 1996 were determined in large part by what they expected the PRC, the U.S., Japan, and other relevant countries to do.


3. U.S. Policy Alternatives


.....What should the U.S. policy be on this issue? Let us take it for granted that the U.S. has chosen to be the world's police force, as its laws and past policies seem to reflect. Then, it should contain the PRC and protect democracy in Taiwan with a clear and open policy to that effect. Given Taiwan material wealth and the U.S. capacity to produce weapons, the direct cost to the U. S. citizens should be minimal. (It might be argued that American business would lose out in China due to assumed trade restrictions by the PRC; but given the loopholes in international trade and worldwide competition, this loss would be minimal when considered against the compensating gains.)


If the U. S. Does Not Protect T aiwan


.....I think that if the U.S. does nothing, at some point in the future, the democracy on Taiwan will be provoked into using military force against the PRC. The PRC will encroach on fishing territories, violate Taiwan air space, support subversive activity, arrest and detain visiting Taiwan businesspeople or journalists, or something of the sort. The Mainland oath to take back Taiwan is serious. It is ingrained in the minds of the young. If the U.S. does nothing to protect Taiwan, it will most likely be the end of the Taiwan democracy.


.....A policy of not protecting Taiwan may have some good long run effects. Assuming that China slowly expands its strength and territory, countries like Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, Russia, and India would be forced to take sides. There is no reason to suppose that the PRC's aspirations stop at what it claims is its current borders. The Mainland Constitution and, more importantly, its indoctrination tells the people they must "fight against those forces and elements, both at home and abroad, that are hostile to China's socialist system and try to undermine it." Thus, the best argument for abandoning Taiwan, in my view, is to teach the leading Asian countries the value of having a super-strong democratically controlled military force to counter a totalitarian threat. They may learn, but they would have to learn the hard way. And while they were learning, the world would be greatly disrupted, the arms race would shift to Asia, and the people of the U.S. would probably eventually be threatened by the next wave of advances in arms technology


If the U.S. Does Protect Taiwan


.....The leaders of Mainland China are attempting an impossible job. They have in mind a China under the rule of the central committee of the Communist Party. If China were closed to trade and communications, like North Korea and the Soviet Union under Stalin, this might be possible. However, the members of the committee want the people of China to have the benefits of trade. To do that they must open their communications. As this openness continues, the power to control the military and police will shift more and more away from the communist party and toward business. Eventually, if other things don't change, the children of these wealthy businesspeople will probably usher in democracy. How long will this take? Twenty or thirty years? It is difficult to tell.


The Hong Kong Wild Card


.....There is one obvious wild card, however. It is Hong Kong. Chinese leaders have made a very unusual promise to allow Hong Kong a "high degree of autonomy." If they choose not to honor this promise, world opinion will shift quickly against China. Taiwan would probably then be made more secure under a U.S.-world military umbrella. On the other hand, if the PRC leaders choose to honor their promise, communism will find it much harder to survive. The residents of Hong Kong already enjoy enormous freedom and many are very wealthy. They are ready to spread democracy, or at least the philosophy of the rule of law and freedom of opportunity under the enterprise system, to all of China. Given that the communists do not viciously suppress them, democratization could come to China much sooner. With democratization, communist indoctrination about Taiwan will decline. Also, the Taiwan people would feel more secure in expressing their true desires.


.....It seems to me that the Hong Kong wild card adds support to the argument that U.S. policy should be to protect Taiwan against military takeover. The U.S. should allow the world to experience the PRC's handling of the Hong Kong issue in order to be more certain about the ultimate effects of supporting or withdrawing its support for Taiwan's right to self-determination.



More on the History of Taiwan




Taiwan Before 1945




Gunning’s Address




J. Patrick Gunning
Visiting Lecturer
Department of Economics
Bryant University
1150 Douglas Pike
Smithfield, RI 02917


Please send feedback:


Email: gunning@nomadpress.com
Go to Pat Gunning's Pages