20041115

KEEPING TABS: China's intelligence officials have files on most individuals, and the situation needs to be addressed, a DPP legislator said yesterday
CNA

Chinese intelligence authorities have files on almost all the personal data of Taiwan's residents, Legislator Trong Chai of the ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) said yesterday.

Chai, together with fellow DPP lawmakers Lin Chin-hsing and Chiang Chao-yi of the Alliance Against Selling Out Taiwan , submitted an emergency inquiry to the Executive Yuan yesterday, telling the administration about the seriousness of the problem and calling for a quick resolution to the "crisis."

The alliance was formed to monitor interactions between the opposition pan-blue camp and China.

Chai quoted unidentified China-based Taiwanese businesspeople and intelligence sources as saying recently that Chinese intelligence officials have files on the personal data of almost every resident in Taiwan.

Chinese intelligence authorities' computers contain data on Taiwan residents' household registration, military service records, vehicle registration and even national health insurance records, Chai said.

Chinese authorities also keep files on Taiwan's political parties, military hierarchy line-ups, and high technology research and development sector personnel, Chai said.

The data could be smuggled from Taiwan and sold to Chinese authorities by Taiwan officials or stolen by criminal rings who trade the information for certain purposes, Chai said.

Chai said that China's intelligence authorities have established a task force to focus on Taiwan's legislative elections next month, including gathering personal data on the candidates. The task force is even dedicated to trying to influence the elections by having Taiwanese businesspeople in China return to Taiwan and vote or drum up support for candidates that are more to Beijing's liking, he said.

He said this is a pressing issue that the Taiwanese people should be concerned with and that should be tackled.

Meanwhile, Lin and Chiang said they want the government to "clean up" all possible channels through which important personal data could be smuggled to China and to establish a special task force to find out whether certain government officials have been bribed by Beijing for intelligence information.

After the US presidential election results were announced, the Democrats were shocked by the Republicans' ability to mobilize votes. They also realized that what they were fighting was not just an election, but a "cultural war," which was changing society at a fundamental level.

The defeats of Democratic candidates in the last two presidential elections reveals that they are victims of this fundamental change in society. It was this wave of change that swept US President George W. Bush back into office.

That The New York Times ran a pro-Senator John Kerry editorial is no surprise, but when the Washington Post followed suit, some people detected a shift in the political environment. That Kerry outperformed Bush in the debates was predictable, but polls that put Kerry ahead just before the election seemed to indicate a shift in public opinion. The actual vote was another matter, and the accuracy of exit polls that predicted a Kerry victory were one of the first casualties of his defeat.

Some people have invoked the idea of populism to explain this change in the political environment. But it does not explain Kerry's naivety in ignoring the southern states in his bid to win the presidency.

The same can be said of Taiwan's last presidential election, in which the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and People First Party were content to accept losses in the south, hoping to counter that loss with votes from the north. But why should they view the south as their Achilles' heel, unless they feel that southerners are a "nation of idiots"? It is probably simply that the divide between the elite and the grassroots is too wide.

To say that to win the election you must have the populist vote is an oversimplification. Politicians must connect with the people, not simply in terms of benefits, but also in terms of sentiment and ideas. Bush insisted on tax cuts that benefit the rich, even though most votes come from the middle and the lower classes; and it is the sons and daughters of these families who are now fighting in Iraq.

But Bush, the scion of Connecticut aristocracy, was the candidate that many of these middle and lower class families looked up to. The fact that he is not very articulate, has many character faults, gets agitated during debates, and is unwavering in his determination to pursue war all became major campaign themes.

Naturally, some people will say this democracy is rational in spirit and should put aside passion and faith. This was the mindset of former vice president Al Gore and Kerry, who both performed well. But they both were unable to garner enough support from the people in the end.

Is it because the people are not rational enough, or is it that the elite are not clever enough to get to grips with public opinion? Or is it simply that there are two Americas: the sophisticated, urban America with an international perspective and the rural, God-fearing, patriotic America?

Perhaps it's the case that to be president of the US you can't use one of these Americas to defeat the other, but instead you must build dialogue between them. Bush, just like Gore and Kerry, comes from a blueblood background. But he is often perceived as a Texas cowboy, and is therefore seen as a leader of the other America. Former president Bill Clinton, the son of a single parent family, became the darling of the cultural elite on both coasts. He who can bridge the gulf between the two Americas has a better chance in presidential elections.

This is the fundamental aspect of the "cultural war." It is not a matter of quality, but a matter of who can speak the language of the two Americas at the same time.

Hsu Yung-ming is an assistant research fellow of Sun Yat-sen Institute for Social Sciences and Philosophy at Academia Sinica.

Translated by Lin Ya-ti and Ian Bartholomew

This week has seen a flurry of debate and controversy over the nation's history and its symbols. Much of this debate is simply obfuscatory. Of course the Cairo Declaration does not formally give the Republic of China (ROC) sovereignty over Taiwan. Only an international treaty can do that and no treaty since 1951 has -- which is the real reason why the status of Taiwan, as far as the US is concerned, (US Secretary of State Colin Powell take note) -- is "still to be determined."

On the other hand, of course the Allies meant to return Taiwan to China. They said so in Cairo and in Potsdam. And the Japanese agreed that this should be so. Only it was never formalized.

The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government in 1945 was therefore not the legitimate sovereign government of Taiwan, it was the legitimate occupying power until sovereignty could be determined. The illegality of the KMT government was not in its occupation of Taiwan but in its assumption that it was sovereign and in its execrable behavior when it arrived. The current controversy is intimately bound up with the kind of society that was established by this government, especially after its transfer to Taiwan in 1949.

What was established was a settler colonialism in which the incoming Mainlanders were the privileged colonial overlords and the Hoklo, Hakka and Aborigines routinely discriminated against. For non-Taiwanese to put this in perspective, think of Taiwan as Ireland, and the Mainlanders as the Protestant ascendency. For the argument over Sun Yat-sen (孫中山) this week you can substitute the argument over the "correct" name of the city of Derry.

The colonial ascendency imposed its symbols, its history, even its language upon the people it colonized and this is the heritage that some among the pan-greens now seek to dismantle. Sun, for instance is no more than the father of Taiwan than Oliver Cromwell was of Ireland. He is a totemic figure of the colonial power. The 1911 revolution has as much relevance to Taiwan as does prime minister Winston Churchill's wartime leadership of Britain to the happy denizens of today's Dublin.

So let us put the recent debates into perspective. In the 1990s Taiwan effectively decolonized. Former president Lee Teng-hui's extraordinarily crafty tactics resulted in Taiwan becoming a democracy under majority rule -- although majoritarianism has yet to sufficiently penetrate a number of key areas in society, including the media, the civil service and the education system.

While Lee was in power he was able, through his power in the KMT -- and his ability to co-opt the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and social groups when the KMT was recalcitrant -- to make this a rather quiet revolution. But since the advent of the DPP government in 2000, the old Mainlander ascendency, along with the considerable number of Taiwanese clients they recruited over the years, has panicked. Some intellectuals have thrown in their lot with the Taiwanese, who up to now have been remarkably inclusive for formerly oppressed peoples. But many Mainlanders simply do not want to accept their diminished status. They do not want to compete on an even playing field with the native Taiwanese.

Their leaders, People First Party Chairman James Soong and the Taiwanese collaborationist KMT Chairman Lien Chan , even flirted, back in March, with overthrowing democracy through a military coup or inviting a Chinese invasion, in order to retain their privileged position; that is, in order to keep Taiwan a colonial society.

One of the sad things about all this is that 50 years of KMT indoctrination has persuaded a significant number of Taiwanese to buy into the ROC myth -- an example of false consciousness or what Franz Fanon called the "captive mind."

We can only hope that the recent controversy has led to some of those captives loosening their chains. After all, what they are being told is that what matters to Taiwan is first and foremost Taiwan. Everything else comes afterwards. What could be simpler than that?

The APEC economic leaders' meeting in Chile, which begins Saturday, will be the first international meeting where the two sides of the Taiwan Strait will meet after Chinese President Hu Jintao took over as chairman of China's Central Military Commission. It will also be the first such summit after the US presidential election.

The numerous suggestions for free trade agreements in the Asia-Pacific region in recent years seem to be a reflection of a dissatisfaction with APEC's inability to coordinate regional economic policy during the East Asian financial crisis. Because APEC's 1994 Bogor Declaration declares that the integration of the region's advanced economies shall be completed by 2010, next year will be an important halfway point. The question of success or failure will have a major impact on the future of APEC. These factors make this year's APEC meeting extraordinarily important.

APEC is the only multilateral international organization in the Asian region in which Taiwan is a member. The question of how to best use APEC is therefore of practical importance in the current stage of Taiwan's multilateral diplomacy. At the same time, after the Asian economic order dissolved in the mid-1990s, no new "healthy" economic order has appeared. The wave of suggested FTAs appearing now to mostly exclude Taiwan due to Chinese pressure, even though this exclusion runs counter to the APEC spirit of "open regionalism."

`Taiwan must avoid giving Beijing an opportunity to build an Asian strategic order centered on China, which would increase the pressure on and isolation of Taiwan.'

If these agreements keep proliferating, they will weaken APEC, because such agreements block Taiwan's road towards regional integration. At the same time, APEC's ability to act behind the scenes will be reduced due to the confusion over its functions, and this will have a very negative effect on Taiwan's economy. Taiwan therefore needs to apply advanced strategies when looking at APEC development. Aggressive measures will be required during the APEC leaders' meeting.

Simply speaking, the nation's strategic interests in regional economic matters includes the hope that APEC will continue to be useful, and that its importance will override that of other regional organizations and trade agreements. After making APEC irreplaceable, ways must be found to expand APEC's role and the issues it should cover.

Some people believe that APEC has outlived its usefulness and suggest that a new multilateral organization be established. However, at a time when most Asian countries are unwilling to face Chinese political pressure head-on, it is very possible that Taiwan would be unable to join a new organization.

At the same time, Beijing is certain to use the establishment of a new organization to weaken the regional influence of the US and Japan and to set up China-centered political rules. Examples are the Boao Forum for Asia and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, both set up by China. China is also using the six-nation talks on the North Korean nuclear issue to redefine the strategic position of the US, Japan and South Korea on the Korean Peninsula.

Taiwan must avoid giving Beijing an opportunity to build an Asian strategic order centered on China, which would increase the pressure on and isolation of Taiwan. A regional political and economic arrangement biased towards China runs counter to the establishment of an Asia-Pacific order beneficial to Taiwan's democracy. Based on these reasons, there's an inescapable conclusion for Taiwan: APEC must be strengthened.

To this end, there are a few issues that Taiwan should give particular attention at the APEC meeting in Chile. It is true that the development of a free trade agreement for the Asia-Pacific Region might integrate all economic entities in the region and cancel out the exclusion effects of recent bilateral agreements. But many member countries doubt whether such an agreement would comply with the spirit of the World Trade Organization (WTO).

They also see the regional free trade agreement proposal as making it impossible for APEC to meet the goals of the Bogor Declaration -- the success of which are seen as crucial to the organization's existence.

If APEC members see an Asia-Pacific free trade agreement as the death knell for the Bogor Declaration, they could react simply by lowering their expectations of APEC. But they could also go so far as to suggest setting up a new mechanism for regional economic integration. If the regional free trade agreement is seen as conflicting with the spirit of the WTO and doubts grow concerning APEC's function, then Taiwan's decision whether or not to support such an agreement will no longer be a straightforward issue. It will have to involve an explanation of what kind of regional free trade agreement Taiwan feels is reasonable.

Next year will see a review of the first stage goals set out in the Bogor Declaration. South Korea, Australia, Canada, Japan, China and Thailand have put forward their respective reform plans for APEC. Due to APEC's crucial importance to Taiwan's participation in regional Asian activities, Taiwan must pay close attention to the proposed reform agendas and resulting alliances. It must also prepare its own reform agenda.

The differing agendas for APEC reform will cause the group to splinter into various international alliances. We all remember how last year the G22 grouping, led by India and Brazil, benefited from the WTO's failure in the Cancun talks, and how Australia won US approval by opposing the G22 countries. As a result, free-trade talks between the US and Australia, which had ground to a halt over agricultural issues, were resolved with the signing of a US-Australian FTA late last year. Such strategic opportunities are the result of active maneuvering, and Taiwan must actively develop a strategy in its APEC reform agenda to maximize its political and economic gains.

APEC also plays a role in the development of cross-strait relations. In the past, APEC has dealt with the cross-strait relationship from the perspective of the unfair treatment of Taiwan, in particular Chinese pressure on Taiwan. After the Sept. 11 attacks, APEC stopped discussing purely economic issues and began putting counter-terrorism efforts on its agenda. As a result, we must determine how to use APEC, a forum with representatives from both Taiwan and China, as a platform for promoting cross-strait dialogue.

Past interaction between Taiwan and China in APEC has never been discussed in detail. "Red" Americans who lobbied the US government to grant China permanent normal trading relations claimed that the measure would help China enter the WTO, and that it would help deal with cross-strait interactions. Such arguments often neglected to mention cross-strait interaction in APEC. Now is the time to review the role to be played by APEC in cross-strait interaction.

To sum up, in participating in this year's APEC meeting, Taiwan should adopt a comprehensive strategy based on its view of the Asia-Pacific economic order and its hopes for a regional integration mechanism. Taiwan should act strategically to prevent the rise of a regional arrangement detrimental to its interests, while actively building an environment beneficial to regional integration and the strategic order.

Although the question of who leads Taiwan's delegation and what issues are proposed are indeed important, the nation cannot afford to do without a broad strategic vision that can incorporate and unite the issues mentioned above.

Lai I-chung is the director of foreign policy studies at the Taiwan Thinktank.