Friday, December 8

Reading:  Coursepack, pp. 156-162

Note:  Take a look at this N.Y. Times article, related to the political / human rights issues we discussed in class Wednesday.

Your reading for Friday is on PRC-Taiwan relations.  Rather than burden you on the last day with extensive reading on Taiwan's history since 1949, I've asked you to read these few pages from Hsu's book that will bring you up to date on the issues that face China and Taiwan currently (although some changes have occurred in the year since Hsu's book went to press -- these are current events).  In class, I'll spend some time on the historical issues behind the present situation.

   Prior to the removal of Chiang Kai-shek's Republic of China (ROC) forces to Taiwan in 1949, Chiang sought to prepare Taiwan to receive the presence of the government and army.  This was a complicated task.  Taiwan had been a part of the Japanese empire from 1895-1945, and during those 50 years, the Chinese population on Taiwan had come to view its ties to mainland China entirely in terms of ancestral links, rather than in terms of political ones.  After all, in 1895, when Taiwan was separated from China, the Manchus had been on the throne, and no true modern concept of China as a nation-state existed; the Japanese emperor had become the ruler of Taiwan, where the Manchu emperor had ruled before.  Sun Yat-sen's Republican Revolution, Chiang's Nationalist Revolution -- these were all distant news to the ethnically Chinese Taiwanese population.

The Taiwanese had from the start had rather tenuous links to China as a whole.  Taiwan had been settled by people from Fujian Province, on China's southeast coast, primarily peasant and fishing families.  The dialect of Chinese spoken by these people was (and still is) very distant from standard Mandarin Chinese, and their customs were shaped by their local origins, rather than any "national" characteristics.  Chinese presence on the island had been strengthened by a refugee force of mainlanders in the 17th century, led by a man known as Koxinga (Zheng Cheng-gong) (who ousted Dutch forces on Taiwan, which had previously established a European foothold).  Koxinga was a loyal follower of the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644), who resisted the conquest of the Manchus by retreating to Taiwan; his doomed battle with Qing government forces lent to Taiwan an anti-government tradition. 

This political and cultural history reflects the fact that Taiwan had never been tightly integrated in the Chinese imperial state.  Although Taiwanese welcomed release from the colonial conditions of Japanese occupation at the end of World War II in 1945, the island population was wary of their new KMT governors.  The KMT presence on the island after the war was a tense affair -- KMT officials spoke a different language, and tended to regard and treat the Taiwanese, who were (apart from a small aboriginal population) fully Chinese, as an inferior racial group.

Chiang Kai-shek realized as early as 1947 that Taiwan could be an important point of retreat in the event that the civil war against the communists was lost.  When  in February 1947 riots broke out in Taiwan in protest against unfair and corrupt KMT officials, Chiang sent troops to the island, and a large number of protesters were massacred in the streets.  From that point on, tensions between Mandarin-speaking "Mainlanders" and Taiwanese were high.  The early symbol of this tension was Chiang Kai-shek's son by his first, Russian, wife, Chiang Ching-kuo, who had led KMT troops during the February massacre.

This violent background was the unfortunate foundation upon which the removal of the KMT government to Taiwan was laid.  When Chiang Kai-shek and his troops arrived in 1949, the city of Taipei (Taibei) was recreated as the capital-in-exile of the Republic of China, and the executive, legislative, and other branches of government were installed there, all in the same form they had possessed when on the mainland.  In this government, each Chinese province continued to have representation according to its population, as before, so the smallest province -- Taiwan -- played virtually no role.  This meant that the popular majority in the actual ROC area (that is, Taiwan), the Taiwanese, possessed virtually no political power, and with the army in the hands of a mainlander government, much enriched by great wealth brought across the Taiwan Straits in the exodus of 1949, and also by massive American aid and military support, there existed no prospect for the Taiwanese to control their destiny on their own island.

These conditions persisted throughout the remainder of Chiang Kai-shek's lifetime, during which time, Taiwan remained under martial law and all political opposition of any kind was suppressed under one-party rule.  During this period, anti-mainlander sentiment generated an underground "Taiwan independence" movement, but when sympathizers were discovered, they were prosecuted and jailed.  Interestingly, this policy had the tacit support of the government across the strait in the PRC.  Both the ROC and KMT governments shared a single policy with regard to Taiwan:  China was geographically a single state, and Taiwan belonged to it (the so-called "One-China" policy, to which the U.S. has always also subscribed).  The ethnic and cultural distinctions of the Taiwanese people -- who were, after all, Chinese -- could not be the basis for any "secession" of Taiwan from the mainland.  The disagreement between the communists and the KMT was confined to the issue of which was the legitimate ruling government of China.

When Chiang Kai-shek died in 1975, he was succeeded, in good dynastic fashion, by his son, Chiang Ching-kuo (to the right of his aging father in the photo).  At first glance, this seemed a grim outcome for the Taiwanese -- after all, Chiang Ching-kuo had led the 1947 massacre, and was, as Chiang Kai-shek's son, thoroughly associated with existing policy.  However, Chiang Ching-kuo was, in fact, very different from his father.  He was unrelated to the family of his father's second wife, Soong May-ling (Mme. Chiang), and so less entangled in the power network that had been the basis of the KMT since the Nanjing Decade of 1927-37.  Moreover, Chiang Ching-kuo recognized that in the long term, the mainlander contingent on Taiwan could not continue its total domination of the Taiwanese.  Simply on an economic basis, this dominance was already being undercut.  As Taiwan had modernized and matured economically, through American aid and the rise of major export market structures in East Asia, land values on the island -- and particularly in Taipei -- had skyrocketed, and with most land in the hands of the native Taiwanese population, the unusual situation had emerged where wealth was increasingly flowing into the hands of the politically disadvantaged Taiwanese sector of society.

Chiang Ching-kuo elected to fashion a new blueprint for Taiwan's future that would being Taiwanese society into the ruling structure of government.  He loosened the Chiang family hold on government, adopted economic policies favorable to Taiwanese, brought Taiwanese into the KMT, relaxed laws against political opposition, and ultimately allowed for the formation of opposition parties and free elections.  By the time of his death in 1988, Chiang Ching-kuo had substantially democratized Taiwan's politics and ensured that the Taiwan independence movement would base itself on political rather than terrorist tactics.  Perhaps most important, Chiang ensured that he would succeeded as president by a KMT leader who was himself ethnically Taiwanese, an economist trained at Cornell University named Lee Teng-hui.

Lee Teng-hui (photo at right) continued Chiang Ching-kuo's policy of political liberalization, and, as an economically oriented leader, also focused on coopting political opposition through delivery of strong economic goods.  Despite his success, and his own Taiwanese roots, the deep force of anti-KMT sentiment among Taiwanese led to important successes by opposition party candidates, particularly leaders of the DPP: the Democratic Progressive Party, which became the Taiwanese counterbalance to the ruling KMT.

From 1979 on, Taiwan's international position was dramatically altered by the decision of the U.S. Carter administration to shift political recognition from the Taiwan government to the PRC government in Beijing.  While Lee's domestic policies in Taiwan were generally successful, he was often controversial in his handling of Taiwan's precarious international situation, particularly in terms of a tendency to risk alarming Beijing, both by stressing his personal ties to the U.S., and by insisting on equal status for the KMT in any diplomatic contacts with CCP negotiators in tentative discussions concerning ROC-PRC relations, and the difficult question of to what degree Chinese "reunification" might be contemplated.

Throughout Lee's presidency, as the KMT's hold on political monopoly slipped, opposition politics and the issue of Taiwanese independence continued to gain momentum.  In 1999, Lee announced his retirement, and in the elections of 2000 to determine his successor, a young and charismatic member of the opposition DPP, Chen Shui-bian, succeeded in ousting the KMT from the power it had held since arriving on the island in 1949.  For the first time since 1927, the KMT leads no form of government in any part of China. 

Chen's rise to political power was based on a political commitment to Taiwanese independence -- that is, the end of the "One-China Policy" and the stand that the PRC-ROC dispute is about which government is the legitimate leader of a single geographical entity.  The goal of Chen's DPP has generally been to declare Taiwan an independent nation state, whose ties to China are historical and cultural, but in no sense political.  However, now that the DPP holds power, this is not easy to do.  Although the KMT is powerless to stop any such declaration coming from Taiwan, the PRC government has made it clear that it will not recognize or tolerate such an action, and will swiftly act to negate it, even if this requires military force. 

In light of this reality, upon being elected president, Chen Shui-bian immediately modified his position, and indicated he would take no immediate actions to proclaim Taiwan an independent state.  He has, instead, embarked on the same path of negotiation with the PRC concerning Taiwan's political status that was followed by Lee Teng-hui.   It is, of course, far too early to predict how successful Chen's presidency will be, in this regard, or in terms of its goal of continuing Taiwan's economic and political development.