Taiwan

Dancing with the enemy
Jan 13th 2005
From The Economist print edition

For all the hostility between Taiwan and mainland China, their respective economies are now deeply interdependent, says James Miles . That should help to keep the peace

“GIVE back our rivers and mountains,” says a slogan inside a military base on the tip of Kinmen (also known as Quemoy), a tiny island controlled by Taiwan but shrouded by the same polluted haze that envelops Xiamen, a port city on the communist-controlled Chinese mainland. A soldier on guard says giant loudspeakers inside the base still broadcast music across the 2km (1.2 mile) stretch of water to Xiamen.

The easy-listening fare, selected by Taiwan's “political warfare” troops, is a curious cold-war legacy on this fortress of an island. Taiwan's defence ministry will not say what it is for. But the original purpose of these broadcasts, which began after the inconclusive end of China's civil war in 1949, was to undermine the mainland's faith in communism and help to restore Taiwan's government as that of the whole of China. China had loudspeakers too, but they fell silent in 1991. It is decades since the two sides lobbed artillery shells at each other's broadcasting facilities.

Oddly, China would love it if Taiwan really wanted to regain control of the mainland. But the broadcasting station and the slogans are merely anachronisms. Taiwan's armed forces, led by officers who were either born on the mainland or had fathers who were, have found it hard to keep step with the rapid changes on the island. These days the goal of Taiwan's government is to assert the island's independence from China, ideally—though it dare not say so—a permanent one. But the barrack routine of shouting slogans calling for the reunification of Taiwan with the mainland was abolished only last September.

China knows that Taiwan is slipping ever further away. Since 2000, the island has been led by Chen Shui-bian, its first president from outside the Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT) since the civil war. The main aim of his Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) is to bring about the island's formal independence from China. Its charter calls for a Republic of Taiwan, not a Republic of China, as the island now confusingly calls itself. Mr Chen himself has vowed not to go this far, but China's leaders do not trust him. They have given warning that a declaration of de jure independence (such as by a change of name) would mean war.

Pessimists—and there are plenty of them in both Beijing and Washington—argue that in the remaining years of Mr Chen's presidency, which runs to 2008, tension between China and Taiwan could escalate, even to the point of armed conflict. Such a war could drag in the United States, Taiwan's main provider of moral and military support. If America decided to intervene, two nuclear powers would be pitted against each other. Japan, from where America would probably launch any bid to defend Taiwan, could find itself sucked in. The whole region could be plunged into turmoil.

Both China (economically) and Taiwan (politically) are evolving so rapidly that talk of preserving the status quo between them is no longer meaningful. Taiwan's smooth and rapid democratisation has allowed its people to redefine their identity. Increasingly, they no longer think of themselves as Chinese. They are Taiwanese, and mainlanders are foreigners. In China, too, nationalist sentiments are surging as the nation becomes more prosperous and the armed forces far more powerful.

Fear of China helps to keep Taiwan's nationalism in check. In parliamentary elections in December, the KMT and its allies caused a surprise by maintaining their slim majority in the legislature. These parties won support for their less confrontational stance towards China, despite their lack of appeal to many native Taiwanese. But around the region and in America, there are worries that Mr Chen will continue to rile the Chinese, who might one day lose patience and respond with force.

This survey will argue that the chances of conflict are slim. For all the nationalistic exuberance of China, there is no sign of a shift away from the fundamentally pragmatic external policy of the last quarter-century. And Taiwan's leaders, for all their braggadocio, are pragmatists too. Not just China, but America, Japan and other big powers are urging them not to go too far. A renamed or redefined republic recognised by the same handful of insignificant states that now recognise Taiwan would gain nothing and probably lose a lot. President Chen may resent America's restraining hand, but he cannot do without it.

There is another remarkable transformation under way that will put just as powerful a brake on any slide towards war: the rapidly growing economic integration and interdependence of Taiwan (the world's 20th biggest economy), China (number seven) and America (number one). Doomsayers in Taiwan, who a few years ago gave warning of a rapid “hollowing out” of their country's economy as manufacturing migrated to China, have been proved manifestly wrong. China, with Taiwan's abundant help but not to the island's detriment, has become the pre-eminent manufacturing base for many of the world's information-technology (IT) products. Even the initially sceptical Mr Chen is beginning to realise that Taiwan can only gain by working with China to remove the remaining barriers to cross-strait flows of people, goods and capital.

In the next few years there will be plenty of pro-independence rhetoric as the debate gets under way on Taiwan's proposed constitutional revisions that Mr Chen has said will be endorsed in 2006 and enacted two years later. But if he is sensible, the main achievement of his eight years in office will be not that he made Taiwan truly independent (which, in almost every respect, it has been for 55 years), but that he helped his country to gain unprecedented prosperity, shoulder to shoulder with China. To get there, he will need to ride the tide of Taiwanese identity with skill—and some caution.

Turning Taiwanese
Jan 13th 2005
From The Economist print edition

The islanders are developing a distinct identity

Chen says it with budaixi

TAIWAN'S deep fascination with a televised form of puppet theatre illustrates the complexity of what it means to be Taiwanese. Budaixi, as the art form is known, is an omnipresent feature of Taiwan's cultural and political life. The island's biggest budaixi production company, PiLi International Multimedia, says it has an annual turnover of $35m. A million people a week rent the latest PiLi shows on DVD. Budaixi puppets feature the wooden expressions and jerky movements of early TV animations, but the characters, costumes and plots draw on ancient Chinese sources, with a heavy dose of martial arts and special effects. The target audience is grown-ups as well as children. Politicians like to portray themselves as budaixi heroes.

Taiwan's 23m residents regard budaixi as Taiwanese, yet the genre has its roots on the Chinese mainland. The hand-held puppets were imported more than 200 years ago from Fujian province on the mainland coast facing Taiwan. Budaixi is the name for it in standard spoken Chinese, which the KMT forced the Taiwanese to use, but the natives still mostly speak a Fujian dialect. They are the descendants of Fujianese who fled to the island to escape upheavals on the mainland. Some trace their ancestry to the island's original inhabitants, Malayo-Polynesian-speaking peoples akin to those of Indonesia and the Philippines. China incorporated the island into its empire after putting down an insurrection there in the late 17th century.

In 1895, China ceded Taiwan to Japan after being defeated in a war over control of the Korean peninsula. Taiwan still has strong cultural ties with Japan, and many Taiwanese take a fairly positive view of the colonial era. But the Japanese discouraged Taiwaneseness. During the second world war, they forced budaixi troupes to perform in Japanese and adjust their plots to extol the Japanese martial spirit.

The end of Japanese rule in 1945 brought little relief to the puppeteers. Budaixi now had to be performed in standard Chinese. In the 1960s, televised budaixi was banned for allegedly distracting islanders from their work. By the time Taiwan began moving towards a multi-party democracy in the 1990s, budaixi was in danger of dying out, but it became “intertwined” with a movement to revive Taiwanese culture, wrote Wu Sue-mei, a scholar at Carnegie Mellon University.

For all its moorings in the culture of the mainland, Taiwan's version is now being touted as something very distinct. For President Chen and his generation, the struggle for democracy on the island and the struggle for a Taiwanese identity amounted to much the same thing. It pitted native Taiwanese against the “mainlanders”, the label attached to those who arrived with the KMT in 1949 (and their offspring). Mainlanders make up about 15% of the population and still provide much of the support for the KMT and its allied splinter parties. But there are not enough of them to return the KMT to power. Democracy is forcing it to turn Taiwanese too.

Surveys conducted by Taiwan's National Chengchi University show a remarkable shift in Taiwanese self-perception over the past 12 years. The number of those identifying themselves as Taiwanese has risen from 17% to 41%, whereas those who see themselves purely as Chinese have dropped from 26% to 6% (see chart 2). This alarms the government in Beijing, which not unreasonably suspects Taiwan's leaders of pursuing a deliberate policy to “de-sinify” the island.

Chinese? Us?

This view is shared by some opposition politicians in Taiwan, and it is true that President Chen is fostering Taiwaneseness, but he is doing it because it is popular. Admittedly the policy does not encourage support for reunification with China, but nor does it seem to detract from the public's strong support for the preservation of the current ambiguous relationship with China. Polls suggest that less than 10% of Taiwanese want independence “as soon as possible”, a figure that has hardly changed in recent years. No doubt China's sabre-rattling plays its part in that.

Yet the new emphasis on Taiwanese identity is making it harder for the DPP to cloak its dealings with the mainland in ambiguity. In 1992, when Taiwan and China began discussions between nominally non-governmental bodies set up by both sides to disguise their official contacts, they agreed on the notion of “one China” but deliberately left open exactly what that meant. China broke off the talks in 1999 after Mr Chen's predecessor, Lee Teng-hui (of the KMT, but born in Taiwan and very pro-Japanese) proclaimed that Taiwan and China were separate states.

Now talk of “one China”, with Taiwan as one of its components, has become dangerous for Taiwanese politicians. Ma Ying-jeou, the charismatic KMT mayor of Taipei, who is widely regarded as a potential future leader of his party, says that using the term would be political suicide in Taiwan. China, for its part, would clearly not be happy with Mr Ma's suggestion that Taiwan and China model their relations on that between the two Germanies before their unification. For China, the Taiwan problem is the result of an unfinished civil war. It would find simultaneous recognition of two separate Chinas almost as abhorrent as Taiwan renouncing Chineseness altogether.

Galling though it is for China, Mr Chen's emphasis on Taiwan's identity has helped win him votes. But he can go only so far. In the build-up to December's parliamentary elections, Mr Chen angered China's leaders with his calls for a new constitution for the island, to be approved by a referendum, and for provocative name changes for government offices and state-owned enterprises. Taiwan's nervous voters responded by denying the DPP and its allies the majority in parliament on which they had set their sights.

But China knows that threats of war do not reinforce Taiwan's identification with the mainland. Some officials in Beijing still hope that economic interaction with Taiwan will make people in the island feel more Chinese again, but many now have their doubts. “My Taiwanese friends ask me, what do we get out of reunifying with the mainland? It's a difficult question,” concedes Wang Jisi of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. “I cannot think of many attractions.”

Although China feels a little more relaxed after December's election results, it still fears that Mr Chen will now look for ways of backing down from his promise not to make any constitutional changes that would affect the island's official name or the definition of its sovereign territory. America is also worried. In December 2003, President Bush, with China's prime minister, Wen Jiabao, by his side, dressed down “the leader of Taiwan” for challenging the “status quo”. Mr Chen got the message and watered down provocative plans for a referendum on cross-strait issues.

China crowed. “America doesn't want to see Taiwan becoming independent, war breaking out across the strait and America being dragged into the water,” says Zhang Mingqing, a Chinese spokesman on Taiwan affairs. “America has the problem of fighting terrorism, the Iraq problem and the North Korean nuclear problem. It does not want a problem with Taiwan.”

Since his censure by Mr Bush, Mr Chen has tried to repair relations with America, sending drafts of important public documents on cross-strait issues to Washington in advance. Michael Kao, Taiwan's deputy foreign minister responsible for ties with America, says he has been explaining to the Americans that President Chen is “a pragmatic lawyer, not a political ideologue”. Mr Chen, he says, is trying very hard to “hold the line so that political movements in Taiwan would not push him to [declaration of] de jure Taiwan independence”.

But Bush administration officials are not entirely convinced. They held extensive discussions with their Taiwanese counterparts on a speech that Mr Chen was to deliver on the occasion of Taiwan's national day on October 10th. The speech was billed by Taiwan as an important overture to China. But to the Americans' surprise, it contained last-minute additions, not cleared in Washington, that challenged the decades-old principle of overlapping sovereignty between the Republic of China and the People's Republic of China. “The sovereignty of the Republic of China is vested with the 23m people of Taiwan. The Republic of China is Taiwan, and Taiwan is the Republic of China,” Mr Chen said. And just to make sure everybody got the point, he said that Taiwan was “a country of 36,000 square kilometres”, in other words, just the island and a few islets.

Radicals in Mr Chen's party and in its main ally, the Taiwan Solidarity Union, want Taiwan to revise its constitution to clarify its de jure independence, arguing that the island has only a narrow window of opportunity while China is preoccupied with its preparations for the 2008 Olympics. China, the theory goes, would avoid a war in order to ensure the success of the games, which it wants to mark the country's emergence as a great power.

Without a legislative majority or evidence of strong public support for a referendum, Mr Chen could not achieve this even if he wanted to. Personally he seems to prefer a gradualist approach, stopping short of the final, formal change. In his first term of office he enraged China by adding the word “Taiwan” to Republic of China passports. He has recently suggested a change of tactic in the island's dogged but futile attempt to join the United Nations: it is now asking for admittance as Taiwan, not the Republic of China. This has caused anxiety in Washington, where officials resent his goading of China and feel he does not understand the risks he is taking.