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COMMENTARY
March 27, 2004
Taiwan's mess
The result of Taiwan's election last Saturday which was Florida close (the two presidential candidates separated by fewer ballots than were disallowed) is still being disputed in the streets. Supporters of the losing candidate Lien Chan the Kuomintang leader of a "pan-blue" alliance which promised better relations with mainland China will get the recount they demand but want more. They claim that President Chen Shui-bian stole the election by faking an assassination attempt on himself and his vice president just prior to the vote to win sympathy. The assassination attempt was weird but not therefore faked. I am in no position to get to the bottom of it and will not even try. President Chen's party has quite openly invited opposition representatives to take part in the investigation. A pan-blue egg and rock-throwing mob stormed Taipei's Central Election Commission trying to prevent the formal posting of the election result yesterday. The pan-blue opposition may use its majority in the legislature to annul the election and call another. This will create a fine constitutional mess in one of the world's youngest and most promising democracies. What is worse we now have in Taiwan something of the volatility before the recent terror-stormed Spanish election in which it doesn't matter what the facts are -- the opposition assumes wrongdoing ahead of the facts. No reason thus for cooler heads to prevail. This would be a domestic matter were it not that mainland China has seized the opportunity to destabilize Taiwan further. Beijing's Taiwan Affairs Office yesterday issued a threat that China might intervene "to restore order". It should be taken deadly seriously. China's opposition is not so much to Taiwan's election as to President Chen. He embodies the aspirations of a majority of the island's inhabitants towards independence and a Taiwanese rather than Chinese national identity -- aspirations which can never in fact be realized so long as the mainland casts its shadow. Though populated mostly by Chinese Taiwan has never been formally part of any Chinese Empire let alone the Communist one. China's sovereign claims are thus about as legitimate as they would be over Singapore or over Vancouver's Chinatown. Unfortunately sheer ignorance of Taiwan's actual history prevents many from seeing through the bluster. This ignorance is compounded by the post-modern Western cowardice. In an obscene gesture against Taiwan which he sees as an American client and as a pariah state like little democratic Israel President Jacques Chirac ordered the French Navy to conduct joint manoeuvres with the Red Chinese Navy. It was part of this year's intimidation of Taiwan's electorate; and a reminder that France and its allies in "Old Europe" can no more be counted upon to take the side of democracy against dictatorship than to take the side of America against international terrorism. China's threats are very real. In the last decade the Chinese politburo has built a huge missile force on the adjoining mainland aimed squarely at Taiwan's cities. The Chinese military frequently rehearses the conquest of the island which is the chief item of doctrine in Beijing's officer academies -- being central to their longer-term superpower ambition to seize a chokehold on the sea lanes that supply Korea and Japan. There is also a huge continuing effort to buy off Taiwan's business elite through the bribery of access to China's vast domestic consumer market. Indeed one of the factors helping the old Kuomintang recover ground in Taiwan's elections is public jitters about the economic consequences of "teasing the tiger"; and several million Taiwanese now stand to lose access not only to remunerative trade but to family and friends who are settled on the mainland. The Chinese Communist leadership speak of this "recovery of Taiwan" as if it were as inevitable as their earlier "recovery" of Hong Kong. It should be borne in mind that the limited civil freedoms still granted to the "Special Autonomous Region" of Hong Kong are window-dressing that would be quickly removed once the prize of Taiwan had fallen. Reciprocally while so much smaller Taiwan represents a real threat to the government of China as a constant example to their subjects that there is nothing to prevent a free Chinese people from governing themselves and prospering. The notion that Chinese people are by race or culture unable to be ruled except as serfs or slaves is what the Communists require to make their "guidance" plausible. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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