TAIWAN: CHINA'S LAST FRONTIER

Transcription

1 TAIWAN: CHINA'S LAST FRONTIER

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3 Taiwan: China's Last Frontier Simon Long M MACMILLAN

4 Simon Long 1991 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 33-4 Alfred Place, London WCIE 7DP. Any person who does any unauthorised a('t in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1991 Published by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RC2 l 2XS and London Cornpanies and reprcsc11tatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Long, Simon, Taiwan: China's last frontier. I. Taiwan. Foreign relations with China, history 2. China. Foreign relations with Taiwan, history I. Title '249'051 ISBN DOI / ISBN (ebook)

5 To my Mother and Father

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7 Contents Acknowledgements Note on Romanisation Map: China and Taiwan Map: Taiwan Introduction Xl Xll XllI XIV XVll Geography and Early History Topography: The beautiful island 1 Pre-history: Before the Chinese 2 Early contacts with the mainland 4- Early foreign contacts 6 Taiwan under the Dutch: The Koxinga interregnum: The 'Wild East': Taiwan Taiwan joins international politics: The nineteenth century 16 Early modernisation: Self-strengthening on Taiwan 20 The Japanese annexation and the Republic of Taiwan: Taiwan under the Japanese: The Kuomintang The Kuomintang in Sun Vat-sen and the origins of the KMT The Kuomintang reorganises: Vll

8 Vlll Contents The Kuomintang in power: The second united front: Taiwan's Political Development: The KMT takeover of Taiwan 53 Defeat on the mainland and the 1946 Constitution 56 The KMT cleans up its act on Taiwan 59 Political development in the 1950s and 1960s: Mainlander dictatorship 61 The birth of the opposition: Chiang Kai-shek and the succession problem: The son also rises 72 4 Taiwan's Economic Development 75 Introduction 75 The first stage: Agricultural development 75 The driving forces of early economic growth 80 The second stage: Exports for growth 82 The restructuring of Taiwan's economy in the 1960s 86 The third phase: The 1970s and 1980s 89 Present economic structure: Assets 95 Present economic structure: Liabilities Relations with China The lines are drawn: Hostili ty in the 1950s 116 Stalemate in the 1960s and 1970s 123

9 Contents IX 6 Taiwan's Foreign Relations 129 Introduction 129 Relations with the United States 130 Taiwan and the United Nations 140 Taiwan and Japan 142 Taiwan and the Soviet bloc 147 Relations with the overseas Chinese 150 Taiwan's current foreign policy China Changes Tack: Peking's 1980s Taiwan Policy 158 Introduction 158 China's new approach - the Nine Principles 159 The Hong Kong example 165 China's pragmatic foreign policy in the late 1980s 169 China's Taiwan policy in the late 1980s Political Reform in Taiwan The pressures on Chiang Ching-kuo 180 The lifting of martial law 182 Reform of the legislature 185 Reform of the KMT 189 The Democratic Progressive Party 194 The growth of protest Taiwan's Opening to Mainland China 203 The 1980s debate in Taiwan on mainland policy 203 The change finally comes 206

10 x Contents The trade and investment debate 210 The Thirteenth Congress and after: Mainland fever 216 Taiwan and the Peking massacre 221 lo What Next? Scenarios for the Future 227 Introduction and outline: The options for Taiwan's future 227 The preservation of the status quo 228 Reunification on China's terms: peacefully, under 'one country - two systems' formula 232 Reunification on the KMT's terms: Under the 'three principles of the people' (or 'one country-two governments?) 235 Independence for Taiwan as a separate nation 237 The military option 239 A compromise? 243 Notes and References 246 Select Bibliography 252 Index 258

11 Acknowledgements My debts to those who helped me form the knowledge and opinions expressed in this book are too numerous to catalogue. However, I would like to express thanks to Georgina Wilde, my friend and editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit, who, unawares, set this book in motion. Basil Clarke and Michael Williams at the BBC Far East Service gave me the time to write it. My editor at Macmillan, Belinda Dutton, and copy-editor Anne Rafique were models of professionalism and forbearance in dealing with a remote and unreliable author. But above all, I am indebted to Imogen Sharp, who made many invaluable comments on the manuscript, and helped me write it in many other ways besides. The errors are, of course, all my own. Xl

12 Note on Romanisation The question of how to transliterate Chinese names into English is a vexed one. The 'pinyin' system now standard on the mainland has made no inroads on Taiwan, which still refers to mainland leaders under the older 'Wade-Giles' system (Deng Xiaoping, for example, is known as Teng Hsiaop'ing). To complicate matters further, many in Taiwan use yet other methods of spelling their own names in English. The author has opted in this book to follow no consistent system, but rather to Romanise in what seems to him now the most familiar form to the reader of English, e.g. Mao Zedong, not Mao Tse-tung, but Chiang Ching-kuo, not Jiang Jingguo, and Kuomintang not Guomindang. XlI

13 CHINA GG EAST CHINA HONG KONG SEA ~()ipei.) ~..~ _ 0 y Quemoy.-" Strait ITAIWANI,I:) ~ ri' Ryukyu Is. PACIFIC OCEAN \...l>t O ".' PHILIPPINE N SEA SOUTH CHINA SEA ~ Mindoro'\) () 'I: Nan J ~panayd ~ S\ Samar «fd Yi~ " Su/u Sea ~Mindanao pala;? ~ 0 o. o p= :/ '" Of-I _----,r-2--'?_o""t,..-j,4~0 Miles o Km Xlll

14 N Taiwan Strait TAIWAN Penghu Lieh Tao IPescadores /5.).' II 'V.,:aisha rao MakUng~ ;:,. e.r;;nghu Tao o Pachao Tao 1I'ChimeiHsu PACIFIC OCEAN '1 Lu Tao Liuchiu Hsu C> Key Hsian (County) Boundary c:1 Lan Hsu Main Road ~ Main Railway International Airport Miles r-----2r~--~1--4tb-----6~~'km XIV

15 In the present and in the future we seek the peaceful unification of the motherland. We will not easily abandon this wish. But if this wish cannot be realised for a protracted period, and if it is clear that some elements in Taiwan are opposing unification with foreign encouragement, then we should re-examine the situation. If we're sure of our capabilities, then why not consider other means of unification? But we should be sure of the result. Unification is the last frontier for China. We must recover our full sovereignty. Hu Yaobang, 1986 (at the time General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party) I xv

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17 Introduction On the very night of the massacre, there was a mass rally in Chiang Kai-shek's memorial in the centre of Taipei. The crowd there sang songs, which, through a connection of telephone lines were listened to by students in Tian An Men Square, so they were overjoyed about the connection of telephone lines. But suddenly, the other side, namely in Peking, said, 'They opened fire', and the line was cut off. The crowd in Chiang Kai-shek memorial suddenly became silent, and they all wept. 2 Thus Ma Ying-cheou, Chairman of Taiwan's ruling Nationalist Party's Mainland Affairs Committee described the events of the early hours of 4- June 1989, in Taipei. That was how the first news reached Taiwan of the Chinese People's Liberation Army's brutal suppression of nearly two months of peaceful pro-democracy agitation on the streets of Peking. The scene he described would have been unthinkable just months before. Who would have believed that the people of Peking would so long have defied their government to pursue their protests? Who would have believed that the old men of the Chinese leadership would have sent tens of thousands of armed soldiers in tanks and armoured personnel carriers bearing automatic rifles to fire on unarmed civilians in the heart of China's traditional capital? And who would have believed that, in the middle of Taipei, in the memorial to the fiercely anti-communist founder of Nationalist China on Taiwan, Chiang Kai-shek, the general public would be singing songs in unison with communist students in Peking? The Peking massacre marked the end of a chapter not just in China's ten-year pursuit of 'reform and the open door'. It also marked a turning point in relations with Taiwan, and the end of another chapter in China's international image, during which it had been possible to argue that the reintegration of China's 'separated territories' - Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao - could be achieved smoothly. That telephone lines could be established with Peking was a feature of a remarkable opening up of Taiwan to the mainland XVll

18 XVlll Introduction in the late 1980s. Sinc;e 1979, China had been trying to woo Taiwan into acknowledging Chinese sovereignty with offers of autonomy and friendship. But the rival Nationalist government on Taiwan had refused any contact with the mainland; it saw the communists as rebels, bandits and usurpers of its proper position as the legitimate government of all of China. However, by the late 1980s, the Nationalists decided they had little to fear from allowing some tourist and commercial dealings with China, so by the time of the Peking massacre, the sense of kinship with mainland China went beyond the sense of ethnic and national identity that the Nationalists had tried to instil. Many had been to the mainland, had met longlost family there, had made friends there, and felt involved in the struggle for democracy. In Taiwan itself, some would argue that this is 'false consciousness'. Almost nine-tenths of the population have no parental or grandparental links on the mainland. They are ethnically Chinese, but in the way that many Australians are ethnically British. Taiwan's people had the dubious distinction from 1895 to 1945 of living in Japan's first colony of modern times. They have been ruled since 1945 by an elite of mainland-born administrators and soldiers who took refuge there when Chiang Kai-shek's armies were routed in the civil war of by Mao Zedong's communists. They had moved their government, still purporting to be the 'Republic of China', to Taiwan, and had built it up as a 'bastion for national recovery'. Since then Taiwan's history has been one of remarkable economic achievement, accompanied by political repression, and growing diplomatic isolation. It has prospered financially but has seen its political status in the world dwindle, so that now all the world's major powers and diplomatic organisations, and all but a couple of dozen mostly tiny countries, recognise the claim of the Peking government to rule China, and that 'Taiwan is part of China'. This volume will consider the relationship between Taiwan and China. It will examine Taiwan's history, and show that the ideal of national unity to which governments in both Peking and Taipei pledge loyalty is a dream with only tenuous roots in past reality. It will then consider the background of the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, which has ruled Tai-

19 Introduction XIX wan since 1945, and claims to have had the right to rule all of China since As a background to the present relationship with China, economic and political developments in Taiwan since 1945 will be considered, as well as the way tensions across the 100-mile straits which divide them have ebbed and flowed since the founding of the People's Republic of China in The last decade has been a period when tensions have been at a low ebb, when there has seemed no immediate reason why the peculiar status quo should not last. Peculiar, because two governments, each claiming legitimacy over a fifth of the world's population, have survived for so long without annihilating each other. I will argue, however, that this state of affairs cannot endure indefinitely, and that the present impasse holds the seeds of a transformation that will result either in confrontation, in the reintegration of Taiwan into China in some way, or in Taiwan's achievement of some form of separate nationhood. This last eventuality, independence in name as well as in fact, seems to me the least likely outcome. And I think that is a shame. There are 20 million people on Taiwan, who have made a good job of turning their island into a prosperous, booming, lively home. They have done this under the watchful eye of an overbearing communist neighbour, and increasingly abandoned by their ally, the United States, for whom they at one time promised to be an 'unsinkable aircraft carrier'. The author's bias is to feel they have a right to determine their own political future. That they are unlikely to be given that chance, seems to me one of the tragedies of the post-war era.