Taiwan's latest bid to re-enter the UN
Earlier this week, Taiwanese president Chen Shui-bian wrote a letter to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, initiating the latest chapter in the on-going saga of Taiwan and the UN. Taiwan was a member of the UN, under the name "Republic of China," until it was ousted in 1971 and replaced by the People's Republic of China (mainland China).
This is not the first time Taiwan has tried for re-acceptance to the United Nations. In August of 2001, President Chen Shui-bian announced that his government was re-initiating (for the ninth time in the history of the ROC) the campaign for Taiwan to enter the UN. (More information about that here. That last effort, like this one, did not seek for acceptance of the "ROC," but simply for "Taiwan" as a sovereign political entity with no official relationship either to the PRC or the ROC.
Chinese officials were outraged by the re-initiation of this issue, and vehement proclamations and denunciations of the "rebellious move" are showing up in newpapers all over China. A good account of what is being said was published recently in the People's Daily (人民日报), the full text of which is available here. (Some information about the nature of the People's Daily, which is printed and edited by the Chinese Communist Party, can be found here). Clearly, it's hardly an unbiased source, but I have no doubt that what it reports about what was said by various officials on this topic is accurate).
Anyway, here's what I read: A senior Chinese representative to the UN, Wang Yinfang, said earlier this week that "There is only one China in the world, any attempt to raise in whatever form the so-called issue of Taiwan's "participation" in the United Nations is doomed to failure as before.... Such an erroneous act is not only a flagrant violation of the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and aserious distortion of the nature of this Organization, but also a brazen challenge to the 'one China' principle widely recognized bythe international community," he said.
"It has severely encroached upon China's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and grossly interfered in China's internal affairs," Wang insisted. "The Chinese government strongly condemns and firmly opposes it and requests these countries immediately to desist from engaging in any such illegal act that undermines China's sovereignty and integrity. There is but one China in the world and Taiwan has been part of China's territory since antiquity."
I don't want to get too involved in political argument here -- not, as last summer, because I'm afraid of being hunted down by government agents and dragged away (hooray for freedom of speech!), but simply because I don't feel fully informed about the details of the situation. However, I do feel pretty safe pointing out that Wang's statement that "Taiwan has been part of China's territory since antiquity" is a brazen lie. I researched Taiwanese political history for a class I took at Harvard called "The Two Chinas," for which I wrote a final paper on the Japanese occupation of Taiwan. Some information from this paper appears below.
Although two Chinese expeditions were said to have visited the island of Taiwan in the seventh century, there is scant Chinese documentation of contact before 1430, when a Ming official reported his “discovery” of the island to the emperor. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries the island often served as a refuge for pirates, as well as a variety of more legitimate Chinese and Japanese traders, before being “discovered” and named “Ilha Formosa” by Portuguese explorers in 1590. The island was seized by the Dutch in 1622 and officially settled in 1624, in order to establish trade between the Dutch and the Ming dynasty Chinese.
Forty years later, in 1662, revolutionary Koxinga, the son of a pirate, laid siege to the Dutch fortress of Zeelandia and won control of the island for more than twenty years. In 1683, however, the Qing dynasty annexed Taiwan as the empire’s 22nd province and ruled it as a prefecture. Sinicization slowly replaced the Westernization that had characterized the cultural development of Taiwan’s hodge-podge population, and the island was settled by many Chinese during this period.
Thus by the time the Sino-Japanese War began in 1894, Taiwan had been a part of the Chinese empire for little more than two hundred years -- not exactly a short amount of time, but certainly not all of "antiquity" given that the Chinese empire dates back thousands of years into the past. Although the Sino-Japanese War was fought in the Korean, Liaotung and Shantung peninsulas, most historians agree that the Japanese kept a constant eye on Taiwan as a key strategic Chinese territory, and patrolled the waters outside the island almost continuously.
Eventually, the Penghu Islands fell under Japanese attack, and by spring of 1985 the Chinese forces had had enough. Yet the Qing rulers’ willingness to give these islands to Japan was by no means matched by the islanders themselves. Taiwanese historian Chang Chi-yun recounts the vehemence of the islanders upon learning of their fate: “When, on April 17, 1895, the Treaty of Shimonoseki ceded Taiwan and the Penghu Islands to the Japanese, so great was the uproar among the Taiwan population that the transfer ceremony had to take place on board a warship outside the Keelung harbor.”
Yet this ceremony was even more vigorously contested at a later date. In May of 1895, the people of Taiwan, “clamoring for autonomous government,” established what they called “The Republic of Taiwan,” with a parliament and an elected President, Inspector General Tang Ching-sung, forming the first democratic republic in all of Asia. Despite the many attempts of the Taiwanese islanders to maintain their autonomy in the face of foreign domination, the republic was a short-lived, surviving little more than a week.
Still, as historian Lai Tse-han points out, although the Republic lasted only ten days, the Taiwanese fought the Japanese troops for four months. By June, the Japanese had occupied Taipei, in the face of massive Taiwanese resistance. With the arrival of the Japanese Governor General, Sukenori Kabayama, a military and civil administration was set up as, by October of 1895, Tainan was also subdued and occupied by the Japanese Army.
When Taiwan was "returned" to China at the end of the Second World War in 1945, it had spent fifty years as a Japanese colony and still retains the deep impression this period left upon it. Since Taiwan was Japan’s first overseas colony, Japanese intentions were to turn the island into a showpiece “model colony.” Therefore, once the rebellions had slowed and the Japanese political infrastructure had been solidified, much effort was put into to improving the island’s economy, industry, public works, and culture.
Yet few ever truly lost sight of the fact that the islanders of Taiwan were a conquered and colonized people who were governed by foreigners on their own soil. There was little integration between Japanese officials and their subjects, except at the very highest social strata. According to statistics compiled in 1941, more than fifty years after Taiwan ostensibly became a Japanese colony, the island’s Japanese population amounted only to 370,000, mostly merchants and government servants. One-third of these lived in Taipei, and the ratio of Taiwanese to Japanese on the whole island was 18 to 1. Although armed resistance in this period was almost nonexistent, there were many more peaceful forms of protest, both overseas and on the island itself.
Most historians agree that at the time of the Japanese invasion there was a strong sense of Chinese identity among most of the residents of the island. Yet it is also true that this sense of self shifted and mutated under the fifty years of Japanese occupation, from a strong cultural nostalgia for China in the early days as a Japanese colony, to an increasing “Japanization” which was buoyed and fostered by the good effects of Japanese infrastructure and economic organization, to mingled resistance and compliance with the Kōminka movement of the late colonial era.
There was also an increasing sense of isolation and abandonment, perhaps best captured and sloganized by Wu Zhuoliu’s 1945 novel Asia’s Orphan (Ya-xi-ya de Gu’er). The symbolism of Taiwan as a neglected and isolated orphan, forced to find its own identity as events on the mainland of China marched on without them, has been an important part of cultural discussion of Taiwanese identity ever since.
The Guomindang's efforts to portray Taiwan as a bastion of traditional Chinese culture, which began immediately after retaking the island in the 1940s and persis to this day, represent just one small piece of the island's complicated culutural and political identity. As it becomes more and more difficult to cling to the idea that the ROC is the true government of all of China, it seems to many just as difficult for the PRC to maintain that Taiwan is truly part of China after more than sixty years of de facto self-government. Is the current political situation simply a long and awkward cease-fire in an ongoing civil war, as nationalists on either side of the Strait seem to insist? Or is it rather the case that Taiwan has found a new political identity to match a cultural identity that was never fully Chinese, and now seeks international recognition of this fact?
Obviously, no one has the answers to these questions. I'll be keeping an eye on the news, though.... Not just because the topic is interesting and I've studied a bit about it, but because, as my classmate Matt put it the other day while reading the news online, "it's good to find out whether we're going to be invaded soon or not."
Note to anyone worrying back home (*cough*Mom*cough*): China would be crazy to do anything stupid right before the 2008 Olympics, so I'm sure we're all fine.
posted by Kelly @ 3:00 PM
<< Home