Taiwanese Conflicted Over China
Full text of the white paper, "The One-China Principle and the Taiwan Issue." Read it
Response of Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council. Read it
The Post's Steven Mufson was online Thursday, Feb. 24 answering questions about Sino-U.S. relations, Taiwan and the World Trade Organization. Go there
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By John Pomfret
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, March 6, 2000; Page A01
TAIPEI, Taiwan ?? A popular Taiwanese travel writer and the author of several feverish love stories, Shi Chung-yu had one of her books published in Beijing last year. But when she called her publisher recently to ask for her share of the profits, she was told the editor had fled with her cash.
"They said, 'Go chase him,' " said Shi, with an exasperated laugh, as she nursed a cup of tea in her apartment outside Taipei, the Taiwanese capital. "This is the problem. Even though we have the same language, history, culture, it's like they've been living as aliens for the past 50 years. They're a foreign country."
Shi's experience in, and perspective on, China are typical of many Taiwanese. Just as they are fascinated by the opportunity to do business and communicate with their overpopulated neighbor, Taiwanese are also repelled by China's corruption, political repression and fly-by-night business practices.
Thirteen years after relations between the two sides began to thaw, many Taiwanese feel deeply conflicted about China. More than anywhere else in the world, except perhaps South and North Korea, China and Taiwan are two places divided by the same language. In recent weeks Beijing has threatened to attack Taiwan if it delays reunification negotiations. But at the same time, they are inexorably drawn together by geography and a love of healthy profit margins.
As Taiwan nears its second direct presidential election, the two countries are further apart socially, politically and culturally than ever. Taiwan's democracy is blooming, while China's Communist Party appears stuck in time, knowing it cannot turn back on economic reforms but unwilling to follow Taiwan down the road of political change.
Economically, however, Taiwan is among the top foreign investors in China. More than 40,000 Taiwanese enterprises operate in China, with total investments in excess of $30 billion. Taiwanese make nearly 2 million visits to China annually, and 200,000 Taiwanese live there.
How Taiwan and China manage their paradoxical relationship is critical to the stability of Asia and to U.S. influence in the region. The 100-mile-wide Taiwan Strait, which separates the two nations, is the main conduit for most of Japan's oil and for billions of dollars in trade. Increased tension there would mean economic trouble around the world, and the United States has a commitment, albeit unspecified, to protect Taiwan.
China's latest threat to attack Taiwan underscored the widening cultural and political gap. In a white paper issued Feb. 21, Beijing said it would attack if Taipei indefinitely delays negotiations on reunification. Those threats were reiterated by President Jiang Zemin and Premier Zhu Rongji this weekend as the Chinese legislature opened its annual session. Previously, China had said it would attack only if Taiwan declared independence or was occupied by a foreign power.
In China, the threat was seen as a natural extension of Beijing's view that Taiwan has been a renegade province since 1949, when Nationalist forces led by Chiang Kai-shek fled there after their defeat to Mao Zedong's Communists.
Chinese officials acknowledge that the white paper also illustrated a sense of crisis in Beijing that the Taiwanese are slipping away from China, generating fear that such threats may be the only way to halt the trend. In addition, the white paper played to a domestic constituency increasingly raised on a diet of nationalism. As Communist ideology has faded, nationalism--and with it the quest to recover Taiwan--has become the most solemn goal of the Communist Party.
"Would I let my brother fight [against] Taiwan? Of course!" said Wu Gege, 28, a college graduate who works at an American computer company in Beijing. "I have never liked Taiwan anyway."
But to most people in Taiwan, who consider their island an independent country, China's white paper was perceived as a bullying tactic. It alienated more people than it frightened. Polls showed that it had no effect on support for any of the three leading presidential candidates: Vice President Lien Chan, Chen Shui-bian of the opposition Democratic Progressive Party and independent James Soong.
"We don't really care about unification or independence," said Shi. "We just don't want war. I ask my boyfriends, would they fight? And they say no."
Writer Shi's views mark an important generational shift in Taiwan. Her father was one of the last holdouts against Communist rule in China. He fled to Burma in 1949, and led guerrilla raids from mountain jungle bases for the next two years. He longs to return to live in his home town of Kunming in southwestern China.
Shi thinks that is quaint, and she has no plans to follow him.
"For me, I go there and it's really another country. I have more of a sense of being at home in Seoul or Singapore or Japan," she said. "We all grew up on the same stuff. Madonna in the '80s, singing 'Like a Virgin.' On the mainland, they know nothing of this. And what little they know they distort into some kind of weird, perverted thing."
Shi said she does not understand why the Communist leadership in China does not adopt a softer attitude. "If you want to marry someone, you don't come over to their house with a shotgun and threaten to shoot them, do you?"
(cont)
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