China outlines its opposition to Taiwan's UN bid

AFP , BEIJING

China has fired off a letter to UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warning that Taiwan's bid to join the UN amounts to a "gross encroachment on China's internal affairs," state press said yesterday.

Chinese ambassador to the UN Wang Guangya sent the letter on Monday outlining Beijing's firm opposition to Taiwan's 13th bid to join the world body.

Wang criticized the move as a "brazen violation" of the purposes and principles of the UN Charter.

"Taiwan is a part of China's territory and it has never been a country. There is only one China in the world, and China's sovereignty and territorial integrity brook no division," the letter said, according to the China Daily.

This year, Taipei issued a statement warning that Beijing's opposition "definitely will not help improve cross-strait ties but hurt peace in the Taiwan Strait."

Wang told Annan that significant changes had taken place in Taiwan, "where the `Taiwan independence' secessionists have intensified their activities, threatening the peaceful and stable development of cross-Straits [sic] relations."

"This has increasingly become the biggest obstacle to the growth of cross-Straits relations as well as the biggest immediate threat to peace and stability in the Taiwan Straits [sic]," he was quoted as saying.

The UN General Assembly is expected to debate whether to table Taiwan's membership bid after it opens on Sept. 13.

Lien trying to set state policy

Following Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan's visit to China in April, his party has been pushing ahead to cooperate with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

A number of organizations dominated by the KMT held talks with Beijing on Taiwanese agricultural exports that led Chinese authorities to unilaterally grant tariff-free entry for 18 kinds of fruit from Taiwan. Another delegation, made up of KMT members, visited Beijing to discuss direct charter flights with Chinese officials.

On Tuesday, Lien said that KMT chapters across the country could engage in exchanges with the CCP members between the end of this month and next month. The KMT is also planning to invite officials from China's Taiwan Affairs Office (TAO) to co-host an "economic development forum" in October to establish a platform for KMT-CCP cooperation.

As outgoing chairman, Lien has seen fit to made significant decisions about KMT-CCP exchanges. Has his successor, Taipei Mayor Ma Ying-jeou, who takes over the party's helm tomorrow, played any role in Lien's decision-making process? Lien's new cross-strait policies will force the party's new leadership to accept his own China policy preferences. This is disrespectful and unfair to the new leadership. It also raised the question of just who is going to call the shots on the KMT's China policy in the future.

Each time Lien calls a press conference to make a big announcement about the KMT's new direction, he creates problems for the future chairman. He also invites criticism from the public by repeatedly saying the wrong things. In a press conference on Tuesday, he criticized President Chen Shui-bian for speaking poor English -- triggering a public backlash from Taiwanese who don't care about the president's foreign-language skills.

More important, however, is the question of the nature of the relationship between Taiwan and the People's Republic of China (PRC). If both sides of the Taiwan Strait were part of the same country, it would be natural for the KMT to build a relationship with the CCP. But Taiwan and the PRC are two different countries, neither of which holds any jurisdiction over the other.

Negotiations about the export of agricultural products to China or direct cross-strait charter flights -- which the KMT has busied itself with -- are perogatives of the government, not one political party. The KMT should not make up excuses to send delegations to negotiate with Chinese officials, nor should it use its private agreements with Beijing to trespass on the government's authority.

No one has any doubts that the KMT's effort to promote a cross-strait policy different from that of the government is simply a tool aimed at winning the 2008 presidential election.

The people of Taiwan must give serious thought to whether the policies pursued by Lien as KMT chairman, including the building of closer relations with China, direct links and agricultural exports, are designed to destroy Taiwan, or whether they can bring about peace and prosperity for both sides of the Strait. This is also a question to which the new leadership of the KMT should give serious consideration.

Whether the KMT's China policy is supported by the people will become evident in the year-end mayoral and county commissioner elections. Can Ma afford not to listen to the voice of voters?

Deciding what Taiwan stands for

By Ku Er-teh

In a conference to mark the establishment of the Democratic Pacific Union (DPU), President Chen Shui-bian said that China's rise must go hand-in-hand with a peaceful awakening and democratic development, and it was the DPU's mission to ensure that this happened.

He spoke of the traditional concerns of regional security from a global perspective, saying that nobody wanted to see the collapse of China, as the international community would have to pay a heavy price if this happened.

Amid the flood of loud contention over the issue of independence versus unification, the writer of Chen's speech managed to take a global and integrated perspective of regional security that encompassed the issues of China's rapid economic growth, the stability of its society and beneficial development in considering the future of the Asia-Pacific region.

With economic and strategic conflicts in the Western Pacific between China, the US and Japan increasing, if Chen actually means what he said in this speech, then he may actually be suggesting a viable way out of the cross-strait impasse.

Chen's speech combined both realism and idealism. We heard no more cliches about the need for the collapse of China. He broached the idea of political and social stabilizing mechanisms, as well military expansionism, as major variables that will influence China's peaceful rise.

If we follow the logic of the speech, we can see how the need to cope with China's military expansionism can be addressed simultaneously with the need for more flexibility on the question of direct links. After all, the military threat from China and the lure of its economy are objective realities in Taiwan today.

In terms of idealism, the speech regarded China's attitude toward a peaceful awakening and democratic development as being the key to solving the problem. These are not merely universal ideals, but must also be actualized through action.

The day before this speech, Chen gave another address for the World Taiwanese Congress (WTC), in which he quoted the final two lines of the Chinese poet Li Bai's  Through the Yangtze Gorges ("Yet monkeys are still calling on both banks behind me, to my boat these 10,000 mountains away") to describe Taiwan's road to democracy and self-autonomy.

Not everyone would agree that the "boat" had really passed through the 10,000 mountains, but the Taiwanese people have indeed all experienced the dangerous journey "through the Yangtze gorges." The question is how to make the Chinese also understand that this "road to democracy and autonomy," with all the dangers it entails, is necessary?

If making them believe this is the immutable mission of the DPU, how is Taiwan, one of the union's founders, going to fulfill this responsibility?

Around the time of the 1989 Tiananmen Massacre, Taiwan's government and people were keeping a watchful eye on the development of democracy in China, but its support has waned in the intervening time. Supporting democracy in China brings repercussions in the form of pressure from Beijing, but Taiwan has never shirked paying the price for advancing democracy. The presence in Taiwan of Yan Peng and Chen Rongli, members of China's democracy movement, is a testament to this.

Two common democratic movement activists last year escaped from China to Taiwan to seek political asylum. At the beginning, they were treated the same as other illegal immigrants and taken to the Chinglu Detention Center in Ilan. An appeal by the Taiwan Association for Human Rights' (TAHR) was rejected after the court ruled that determining whether the two qualified for refugee status, and whether they could be granted political asylum, was a decision for the Cabinet.

As Taiwan does not have an asylum law, there is no legal basis for determining refugee status, so the administration was unable to rule on this matter either. It seems that Taiwan still exists in the world of 20 or 30 years ago. The government apparently believes that the country is still in need of protection, and so has never actively engaged the issues of international human rights outside its own borders. It is no wonder that we have never thought to draft a asylum law for the protection of refugees.

As a result of pressure from the international community and Taiwan-based human-rights groups, the government finally managed to "clandestinely" release the two Chinese asylum seekers on the condition that a non-government agency acted as guarantor. Now the government is trying to find a country that is willing to accept the two men.

Chen has criticized China on numerous occasion in the past, and we hope that his recent speech to the DPU meeting was neither an attempt to please a specific audience or another pretext to weasel out of facing up to China.

If China is to move toward the establishment of democracy and peace, Taiwan must also act. It must not simply take pride in its economic and democratic achievements, while failing to have the confidence to promote peace and democracy at an international level.

The plight of the two refugees should make Taiwanese reflect on one question: If we want to play an active role in realizing international democracy and peace, what are our responsibilities and what price must we be prepared to pay?

Are all Taiwanese prepared to take on such a mission?

Ku Er-teh is a freelance writer.

PRC, ROC both rode on history's coattails

By Chin Heng-wei

On Aug. 15 exactly 60 years ago, Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced an imperial prescript to end the war, and proclaimed the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, as the Potsdam Declaration demanded. Germany had already surrendered on May 2, 1945. Japan's move officially marked the end of World War II.

Historically, should this day be marked as the end of the war or victory in the War of Resistance Against Japan? The two represent different historical views on World War II. To be blunt, both the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wanted bragging rights for the so-called "victory." In fact, late president Chiang Kai-shek was not challenged on the issue when singing his own praises about it. Without the 2000 transfer of power, his claim would be the only version of history.

Nevertheless, from a historian's perspective, focusing on the victory against Japan rather than the end of World War II is like talking about the Sino-Japanese War without reference to World War II. This narrow perspective reduces the importance of World War II. Although the Sino-Japanese War was a part of World War II, the latter was in fact the focus. China was victorious not because it defeated Japan, but because the US dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, forcing it to surrender. Japan had met with virtually no defeats in China, and it surrendered only because of the attacks on its homeland. Therefore, China did not really win the war. It was able to be listed as a victorious nation thanks to the US and its allies.

From this perspective, Chiang's regime simply rode to success on others' coattails by listing itself as one of the world's leading powers. But it was not actually listed as one of the alliance's four leaders until the US declared war against Japan after Pearl Harbor in December 1941.

Whether a country is a "power" or not depends on its actual strength. The UK was hardly considered a great power after World War II, let alone China. As British prime minister Winston Churchill commented at the Tehran Conference in November 1943, the poor little English donkey was squeezed between the great Russian bear and the mighty American buffalo. As least the UK was able to attend the Yalta Conference; China did not even have a seat.

Calling it China's eight-year war of resistance sounds good, but actually China was set to perish at Japan's hands. In his book The Second World War, the British war historian John Keegan described China's war of resistance as a battle to "keep their distance" from the enemy, and that they rarely threatened their opponent. He added that there was little difference in the performance of Chiang's troops and those of the communists.

During the war, Japan had a high level of control over China. It had established four successive puppet governments, and the government of the Republic of China (ROC) had all but ceased to exist. As Yale history professor Jonathan Spence has said, without World War II, China might have split in 1938. Chiang was undertaking a last-ditch fight, and was lucky to be able to hold on until Japan's defeat. Otherwise, he might not have had to wait until he fled to Taiwan to proclaim the death of the ROC.

This special day should be marked as the end of World War II, rather than the day of victory in the war of resistance. This is the historical fact. The KMT and the CCP, however, have come up with their own versions. No matter how they commemorate this day, they are merely writing a fake history. If they really want to discuss the Sino-Japanese War, they should first clarify the historical facts.

Chin Heng-wei is the editor-in-chief of Contemporary Monthly magazine.