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A Taiwanese sailor keeps guard on a ship in Keelung Harbor. AP Photo/Wally Santana
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Playing With Fire
With a few choice words on Taiwan's political status, Lee Teng-hui earns Beijing's wrath but, as elections approach, pleases his home audience
By ANTHONY SPAETH
The relationship between Taiwan and China is often compared with that of David and Goliath. Sizewise the metaphor works, plus there's the seemingly eternal antagonism between a giant, totalitarian mainland that insists upon sovereignty over a prosperous, democratic island that functions, in nearly every way, as an independent state.
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But David and Goliath are remembered because they battled--and that's the one thing that China and Taiwan have avoided for nearly 50 years. It's taken diplomatic gymnastics, a watchful world (particularly in Washington) and, on Taiwan's part, delicate rhetoric to keep the peace. But last week, Taiwan unilaterally appeared to abandon the rules of the game. President Lee Teng-hui told a German radio interviewer that Taiwan and China enjoyed "a state-to-state relationship, or at least a special state-to-state relationship." What seemed at first like an inadvertent presidential slip quickly became official policy. Last week, Su Chi, chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council, Taiwan's government body responsible for cross-Strait relations said: "It is an indisputable political and historical fact that the roc [Republic of China] and the PRC [People's Republic of China] are separate governments ruling respectively the Taiwan area and the mainland area." The pro-Lee Taipei Times editorialized: "Now it is Taiwan that is being rational about its position in the world and almost everybody else who is living in fantasy."
It was astute analysis--if you look only at one half of the picture. Beijing wasted no time bringing the other half into clear focus. First came the standard dudgeon accusing Lee of being a "splittist" of the Motherland. Then came reports that President Jiang Zemin was meeting with the military to formulate his reply. (The last time Lee peeved Beijing, by going to the United States in 1995 to deliver a speech at his alma mater of Cornell University, China shot missiles into the waters around Taiwan.) On Thursday, in a supposedly separate context, the Chinese government announced that it had developed the neutron bomb--precisely the weapon one might choose to attack a crowded, industrialized place like Taiwan. (Neutron bombs kill humans while sparing buildings and other infrastructure.) "We sternly warn Lee Teng-hui and the Taiwan authorities not to underestimate the Chinese government's firm determination to uphold the nation's sovereignty, dignity and territorial integrity," a Foreign Ministry spokesman intoned in Beijing.
The U.S., taken by surprise by Lee's gambit, quickly reiterated its often-stated position. "We do not support Taiwan independence," said State Department spokesman James Rubin. "We do not support a two-China policy or a one-China/one-Taiwan policy." (Washington also warned China that it wouldn't accept force against the island.) Then it sent its de facto ambassador in Taiwan, Darryl Johnson, to meet with Lee, after which the Taiwan President said that Taipei's policy toward China "has not changed"--a significant gesture in Washington's view, but a comment that went largely unnoticed anywhere else.
A commonsense view might be that Lee was simply stating the current reality, and also taking his country one final step away from the delusions of the past. For most of Taiwan's postwar history, the island's rulers claimed to be the government in exile for all of China, in effect refusing to concede that in 1949 the Nationalists lost the Chinese civil war to Mao Zedong's Communists. Time wore that pretense thin, and the position was formally abandoned in 1991. And yet, when Taiwan had claimed sovereignty over the mainland, the two warring sides were actually in agreement on the essential point: that China and Taiwan should be indivisible.
Since 1991, and especially after the deaths of many mainland-born leaders, Taiwan citizens increasingly have edged closer to accepting the idea of a formally declared separation from China. The economy is robust, nimble, high-tech. Native-born Taiwanese are at last running the island--Lee is the first such President. Decades of authoritarianism evolved virtually overnight into an open democracy. Several opposition parties have incorporated independence into their platforms, but Lee's ruling Kuomintang party has been more circumspect. Officially, it says that
Taiwan is a separate political "entity," which like all states has its own name and flag, but that reunification with the mainland is the ultimate goal. A more recent caveat says that reunification can come when the two parts are equal in terms of political freedoms--in other words, at some impossibly remote time. That finesse has worked well for everyone, and China only gets exercised when someone in Taiwan intentionally steps over that invisible line. (Lee's trip to Cornell was viewed by Beijing as a quasi-presidential visit, thus the ire.) As for the U.S., its official view since 1979, when Jimmy Carter established formal relations with the mainland, is that reunification will come someday--but it won't spell out under which flag, that of the People's Republic or the Republic of China. "That ambiguity has served us well," says a White House aide.
So why, amid such a delicate diplomatic minuet, did Lee decide to deliver a heavy foot-stomp, which precipitated the largest single-day drop in Taiwan's stock index in nearly a decade? At first it seemed like a gaffe, not unknown to a President who is garrulous, occasionally injudicious, though hardly the loose cannon that Beijing likes to portray. In fact, Lee apparently knew exactly what he was doing. His government recently concluded a lengthy multiagency study of relations with China. Taiwan's populace is generally cautious about the mainland question: public opinion polls tend to show that about 70% want the status quo maintained; less than 20% advocate independence, and even fewer want rapid reunification. But polls also show a growing sense of Taiwanese identity, as distinct from Chinese, and the common sentiment on the island is resentment toward Beijing for trying to whittle away Taiwan's already tiny international space. (Beijing reacted with standard fury when Taiwan recently secured diplomatic recognition from Papua New Guinea.)
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