goa si Sakai.

Engkok e chophai chengti hakchia Perry Anderson choekin ti 
London Review of Books laite hoatpiau hoan2 Tai-oan e 
gianlun.
Perry si Nationalism giankiuchia Benedict Anderson in sio-ti, 
Benedict masi chophai mkoh si tui Taioan toklip chin u tongcheng, 
chin iusian, tansi Perry tui Taioan hiah-ni bo ho, si chin kikoai.
(ma u thiaN kong, chitphiN bunchiuN si Perry in Tiongkoklang e 
lupengiu sia--e, na anne kohkhah okchit).

ChinchiaN e chophai engkai khia ti jioksechia e liptiuN, anne 
itteng ai chichhi Taioan--e, Hoatkok Siahoetong, Tekkok Lektong 
tengteng e Seau chophai e chuliu si theng Taioan--e.

Perry punsin si Ireland lang, mkoh tianto hoantui Ireland toklip, 
u 1 koa Marxist u chitchiong e moupeN, tiohsi toakok chugichia.
Lan itteng ai kiankiong phoepheng chitchiong ke2--e, chho-gou--e 
"chophai"

Hibang u lang iong Engbun lai phoepheng Perry e chhogou e gianlun.

================================================================

<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v26/n11/ande01_.html>

LRB | Vol. 26 No. 11 dated 3 June 2004 | Perry Anderson

return to screen layout   tell a friend

Stand-Off in Taiwan
Perry Anderson
Few elections have offered such last-minute drama as Taiwan's
presidential election in March, though whether the drama was a near
tragedy, as followers of the victor believe, or a comedy, as his
opponents maintain, was not immediately clear. The island is politically

divided into two colour-coded blocs, along Byzantine lines. On one side
is the 'pan-Green camp', comprising two pro-independence forces: the
Democratic People's Party (DPP), in control of the executive since 2000,

and its recently created ally, the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU). On the

other is the 'pan-Blue camp', composed of the Kuomintang (KMT), which
ruled the island for half a century after Chiang Kai-shek was driven
from the mainland in 1949, and a breakaway faction of it, the People
First Party, both identified with a tradition, now attenuated, claiming
Taiwan to be the seat of the legitimate government of the whole of
China, and still opposed to the idea of Taiwanese independence.

The day before the election, the DPP leader and presidential incumbent,
Chen Shui-bian, standard-bearer of the Green camp, was waving regally to

his supporters aboard a jeep in his home-town of Tainan. The street was
narrow and crowded, and his welcome noisy, firecrackers - de rigueur on
such occasions - exploding joyfully on all sides. Nothing untoward
appeared to occur. Some hours later, however, it was announced that the
candidate had been the victim of a pistol shot, which by a miracle had
grazed rather than penetrated his abdomen, and that he was now
recovering in hospital. Television showed images of a bullet-hole in the

windscreen of the jeep, and Chen, standing and waving beatifically
behind the driver, with a pinkish patch on the lower part of the front
of his shirt.

All parties cancelled their final rallies, and the next day the Blue
camp, which had started with a comfortable lead in the polls, lost by a
whisker - some 30,000 votes, or 0.2 per cent of the vote. There was no
question about the reason. Estimates differ of the scale of the sympathy

vote that the 'magic bullet', as supporters of the Green camp would
jubilantly come to call it, delivered to Chen, but it is quite clear
that he would have been defeated without it. The Blue camp spoke of a
put-up job and denounced it with increasing fury. Chen Shui-bian
explained that his miraculous triumph showed that God had called him to
lead the nation.

Subsequent evidence has left no doubt that Chen was indeed grazed by a
home-made bullet, and that another ricocheted harmlessly into padding
round the injured knee of his running mate, Annette Lu, sitting beside
him on the jeep. But no assailant was noticed at the time, and none has
been found since. The deeper mystery is not so much the identity of the
marksman, who fired a primitive weapon at very close range, as the
motive behind the shots. Who stood to benefit from such an attentat?
Certainly not the pan-Blue camp, which, had it not been for the bullet,
would have won the election. Could Chen have staged the whole affair
himself, to hijack a victory otherwise out of reach? There are
precedents for something like this: the fake ambush that Mitterrand is
generally believed to have arranged against himself in 1959, when he was

trying to refurbish his image as a doughty fighter against the Right,
comes to mind. But Chen was wounded, however slightly, in a vulnerable
part of his body: would any politician really take the risk of a
friendly bullet going astray? A Green conspiracy seems scarcely less
improbable than a Blue one.

For those in search of a more plausible explanation, the most popular
scenario - widely bruited in Taiwan - points at the island's powerful
gambling syndicates, which stood to lose huge sums of money if the Blue
camp, on which all bets had been placed, won. They could well have
calculated that winging Chen was the best way of unleashing a sympathy
vote for the Green cause that would yield them an avalanche of cash in
lost wagers. But how could they be sure that a bullet would not -
counter-productively - actually kill him? A clue may lie in the
embarrassed admission of Chen's security detail that, supposedly because

it was a hot day, he was not wearing a bullet-proof vest, standard issue

for a presidential incumbent on the campaign trail. An odd feature of
the shooting was that aim was taken through the windscreen of an open
vehicle, where a bullet was most likely to be deflected, and not at the
candidate's head or upper body, which were clear of obstruction,
unprotected above it. If a gang had assumed that Chen would be wearing
an armoured vest, then a bullet slung low through the windscreen should
have struck where it could cause a sensation without inflicting any real

injury. That would make one, more or less coherent story. But perhaps
the shots were just fired by a random misfit with a grudge, melting into

the crowd. There have been plenty of incidents - George Wallace or
Robert Kennedy - like that.

Taiwan is in its way a highly politicised society, in which partisan
passions run deeper than in older and more jaded democracies, and the
immediate effect of the magical missile has been to polarise public
opinion more than ever before. Despite its lacklustre candidates, and
belying its establishment reputation, the Blue camp mobilised vast
popular demonstrations against the upshot of the poll, with student
sit-downs in front of the presidential palace and indignant demands for
a recount, for which there has never been any provision in island-wide
elections. But even with a recount, the result is unlikely to be
changed. Chen can look forward to another four years in office, with
ardent supporters elated by his unexpected victory, and an embittered
opposition convinced it has been cheated of power. The short-term
prospect looks choppy.

The Green camp, committed to outright independence, started with 21 per
cent of the vote in 1996. In 2000 it took 39 per cent. This year it
reached 50 per cent. Even discounting the sympathy factor, and a variety

of motives for not voting Blue, the trend of support is plain. A
distinct Taiwanese national identity is in the process of
crystallisation. The change has been relatively swift. As late as 1996,
well over 50 per cent of the population, when asked, described itself as

'Chinese and Taiwanese', over 20 per cent just as 'Taiwanese', and under

20 per cent as 'Chinese'. Today fewer than 50 per cent define themselves

as Chinese and Taiwanese, and not much more than 10 per cent as Chinese,

while those who see themselves as simply Taiwanese number more than 40
per cent.

How should this development be understood historically? In an address
given in Taipei a couple of years ago, Benedict Anderson suggested that
it is best seen as a contemporary version of the originating form of
modern nationalism: namely, the separation of overseas settler
communities from an imperial homeland, such as gave birth to the United
States in the 18th century, and to the Latin American republics of the
early 19th century. This form, he showed in Imagined Communities,
predated the romantic nationalisms of Central and Eastern Europe that
are often thought to have set the pattern for 20th-century nationalism.
Unlike these, the overseas settler - or 'creole' - type required no
major linguistic or ethnic difference from the metropolis. Rather, the
markers of nascent national identity were territorial and historical:
geographical distance and colonial institutions engendered a distinct
culture and self-consciousness, and, with it, a collective identity that

laid the foundation for independent states. The late 19th century saw a
repetition of this process in the white dominions of Canada and
Australasia.

Seen in this light, contemporary Taiwanese nationalism belongs to a
political family with a well-established ancestry. The great majority -
perhaps 85 per cent - of its modern population of 22,500,000 descends
from migrants who arrived in the island from Fujian and Guangdong
between the 17th and late 19th centuries, pushing its Malayo-Polynesian
natives back into the mountainous interior. Genetically and
linguistically, they are as Chinese as white New Zealanders are British.

But geographical separation and historical experience have produced over

time a settler community with a national identity that is today as
natural and legitimate as American or Costa Rican, Australian or
Uruguayan. There seems little doubt that within the morphology of
nationalisms, such an analysis offers the right classification of the
Taiwanese case. But determining its place within a general taxonomy
invites a further step. Where does the specificity of Taiwan within the
family of overseas settler nationalisms lie? Schematically, it might be
said that four particularities set it apart within this group,
corresponding to each of its decisive modern experiences.

First, separation of the overseas settlement from the imperial homeland
came neither by revolt, as in North and South America, nor by
negotiation, as in the white dominions, but by foreign annexation, when
Japan took the island in 1895 as a prize of its victory in the war with
China. Thereafter Tokyo ruled it as a colony within the Japanese Empire
for half a century. This was a deeply formative experience, dividing the

fate of the island from the mainland. For whereas Japanese imperialism
was a ruthlessly destructive force once launched against China itself,
responsible for millions of deaths and massive devastation, in Taiwan it

established a relatively orderly, peaceful and productive system of
rule: authoritarian as all European colonial regimes were, but in a more

'backward' rural society with, eventually, less repression than in Korea

or Manchuria, and a record of economic and educational development
superior to any area of Republican China. Acute hardships were suffered
by the mass of the population only towards the end of the Pacific War,
during which many Taiwanese volunteered and died loyally in the imperial

armies. Few viewers of Hou Hsiao-hsien's film The Puppet-Master, a
landmark of world cinema, are likely to forget the beauty and dignity of

one of its greatest scenes, the funerary theatre of a Taiwanese soldier
killed in Guadalcanal, with Japanese officers at attention. The
ambiguity of this experience, utterly unlike that of the mainland at the

hands of Japan, remains a basic element in island life to this day.

The end of the Pacific War returned Taiwan by Allied agreement to China.

The KMT occupied the mainland after the Japanese surrender, and was very

soon responsible for far worse exploitation and oppression than the
Japanese had inflicted, leading to a spontaneous rising against it in
early 1947 - the subject of Hou's other masterpiece, City of Sadness.
Separation from the mainland was rapidly reproduced by the Civil War in
China. Such wars often divide countries into hostile zones. But the
second peculiarity of Taiwan's fate was to take no part in the battle
itself, instead simply to become a passive victim and external
depository of it, when Chiang Kai-shek's regime fled to the island in
1949 after its defeat by the PLA, along with two million mainlanders. As

a fleet of Communist junks prepared to cross the straits, the KMT was
saved from ejection by the Korean War and the interposition of the
American Seventh Fleet.

>From 1950 onwards, Taiwan thus found itself an outpost of the American
empire, one of Washington's Asian trenches in the Cold War: a vital
staging area for the US forces fighting in Vietnam, CIA activities in
South-East Asia and Tibet, and a strategic base for nuclear weapons
targeting China. Sheltering behind US fire-power, and benefiting from
lavish US aid, the KMT reconstructed itself as an efficient development
state. With no roots in island society, and under American pressure not
to repeat its record on the mainland, it put through sweeping agrarian
reform of the kind it had always resisted when it was tied to Chinese
landlordism. Inheriting a huge cache of confiscated Japanese properties,

it then drove industrialisation through a vast state sector, funded
largely by Washington - up to 1965, some 40 per cent of all capital
formation on the island was provided free by the US. Very rapid economic

growth, with increasing export dynamism based on small local business,
and educational progress ensued. Taiwan became one of the great material

success stories of the region. It currently enjoys a per capita income
of over $13,000 a year and boasts $200 billion foreign reserves.

The Blue tradition is understandably proud of these achievements. Part
of its following's hostility to the DPP is based on a sense that Green
politicians - whose economic management has not been their strong suit -

are free riders on a prosperity they have done little to create, and
something to damage. Taiwan has suffered its severest recession under
Chen. The DPP, on the other hand, justifiably sees itself as a
descendant of the political resistance to a brutal dictatorship. The
KMT's massacre of Taiwanese protesters in 1947 - estimates range from
7000 to 28,000 dead - is the founding episode in the memory of this
oppression. But the White Terror unleashed in the 1950s, after Chiang
Kai-shek was installed on the island, was still more ruthless. Targeting

suspected leftists, mainlanders as well as locals, it led to 90,000
arrests and possibly as many as 45,000 executions. Torture and
extra-judicial killings continued until the mid-1980s. The Green
tradition is rooted in brave struggles against this long trail of
Kuomintang thuggery - Chen's wife, paralysed by a truck attack, is a
living victim of the regime. A truth commission has yet to establish the

extent of the crimes of these years. Like Japanese colonial rule, the 35

years of KMT martial law - another world record, alongside the economic
miracle - remain deeply ambiguous in private and public memory.

The condition of this third formative experience remained, throughout,
the American overlord. The KMT regime was a ward of US power. When the
US began to normalise relations with China, it had no option but to
reposition itself. Once Carter had recognised the PRC in 1977, Chiang
Kai-shek's heir - officially, though probably not in biological reality,

his son - the Russian-trained Chiang Ching-kuo, seeing that he could be
left high and dry by Washington, moved to relegitimise KMT rule by
gradually liberalising its system from above, and then picking a local
successor - calculating that this would make it very difficult for the
US to abandon the island. Democracy, when it came to Taiwan, was thus
the combined result of an opposition pushing against dictatorship from
below, and a regime in quest of new credentials from above.

This dual movement found its ostensibly appropriate point of synthesis
in the politician who took over when Chiang Ching-kuo died in 1987. Lee
Teng-hui was a native Taiwanese, educated in Japan - he speaks better
Japanese than Mandarin - who had once been a Communist; subsequently
rose high in the anti-Communist ranks of the KMT; then, installed by the

party as president, broke up the KMT and ultimately shoehorned the DPP
into office. Today, having successfully betrayed everyone except
himself, this former Blue president heads the most extreme party in the
pan-Green camp, the TSU. Many people think he is the real political
intelligence behind Chen. In his mastery of the arts of 'black gold' -
the unrelenting use of political corruption and gang connections - he is

perhaps best compared to Kanemaru Shin, the once legendary godfather of
Japan's ruling Liberal Democratic Party, to whom he even bears a faint
physical resemblance.

But unlike Kanemaru, a backstairs capo, Lee revelled in the limelight
and had a consistent project. Democracy could be more than an insurance
policy for the KMT: its real future lay in becoming the cornerstone of
the cause of Taiwanese national independence. For what else could supply

the island with such impregnable credentials for complete separation
from the Communist dictatorship in China? And who was better equipped to

become at a single stroke the forger of democracy and the father of the
nation? The DPP is today the ultimate beneficiary of Lee's vanity and
artistry: having first opened the political system to real competition,
he then, when he himself couldn't run again, deftly engineered a split
in his party to allow Chen to win the presidency in 2000.

Out of this sequence of historical experiences has come a distinctive
kind of national sentiment. The typical forms of overseas settler
nationalism required little or no linguistic differentiation from the
homeland. In Taiwan, on the other hand, such a basis for local
identification has always existed, since 70 per cent of the population
speaks the Min-nan dialect of Fujianese, incomprehensible to Mandarin
speakers. But this cultural specificity has never so far been the
primary signifier of discursive identity. There are two reasons for
this. Even apart fr0m the aboriginal inhabitants of the island, who
still number some 350,000, the settlers who arrived from China formed
two different communities, with a long history of mutual hostility, the
traces of which are still evident. Earlier than the Fujianese, Hakkas -
a semi-outcast group, originally perhaps from Henan, who had found their

way to Guangdong - had migrated to Taiwan, where they still make up 10
to 15 per cent of the population. The Hakka have their own language, and

their cultural traditions are markedly different from Min-nan - there
is, for example, less subjugation of women. For centuries, relations
between the two communities were scarred by pogroms, leaving the Hakka
with an enduring suspicion and fear of the more numerous Min-nan.

Overlaying these tensions, in turn, is the more recent stratum of
mainlanders, in origin an exile rather than migrant community, speaking
mainly Mandarin and making up another 15 per cent of the population.
Though urbanisation, education and intermarriage have reduced the
differences between the three groups, they remain sharp enough to define

much of the political map of the island. The North, where mainlanders
and Hakkas are concentrated, is typically Blue; the South, where the
Min-nan are dominant, is overwhelmingly Green.* Aboriginals in the
mountainous East, like Hakka enclaves elsewhere, vote Blue for fear of
Green. There are ways in which this division recalls Ireland, a
nationalist South chafing at a semi-unionist North. Calls by the DPP for

the 'Taiwanisation' of the civil service, education or culture at large
are read, and resisted, by others as Min-nanisation. Fears of a
narrow-minded, philistine nativism - so to speak, a Formosan version of
Fianna F?il - are increasingly expressed by the island's artists and
writers, whatever their origin. In much the way that Joyce or Beckett
detested the petty bigotry and chauvinism of official Irishry, so
Taiwan's world-famous film directors, Hou and Edward Yang, have voiced
their forebodings at the crudity and arrogance of Green talk of
'de-sinicising' the island's culture.

So far, however, 'fundamentalist' appeals - the local term for such
ethnic jingoism - have remained subordinate in the repertoire of the
DPP. Specifically cultural claims of difference, though on the rise, are

still secondary as discursive themes in Taiwanese nationalism, in part
just because they are tactically divisive, tending to split Green from
Blue constituencies, but also because they offer little international
leverage. The principal definition of national identity lies instead in
the contrast between democracy on the island and dictatorship on the
mainland. The right of Taiwan to independence follows from its
achievement of a democracy that the mainland has signally failed to
realise. This is a claim that can both unite the inhabitants of the
island, whose attachment to democracy leaves no room for doubt, and
rally world opinion to their side.lllll

In itself, such a political - as distinct from linguistic, ethnic or
cultural - construction of the nation is not unusual in the history of
settler nationalisms. The revolt of the Thirteen Colonies against the
British ancien r?gime, or of South American creoles against Spanish
absolutism - upheavals creating republics in a world of monarchies -
could be regarded as early modern versions of the same programme. The
peculiarity of the Taiwanese case lies in the fact that the nation
claiming independence is itself completely dependent on a foreign power.

The separation from the mainland that has formed its distinctive
experience for the past century has always been a function of empire,
not a revolt against it. First Japanese, then American suzerainty has
been the condition of all else. The vitality of the democracy that has
emerged from it is by any standards remarkable. It puts to shame that of

both its overlords. But the underlying reality is that the island
remains a protectorate of US imperial power.

If this set of traits distinguishes the Taiwanese case from previous
settler nationalisms, what of the Chinese homeland? Here too, a number
of features make it a case apart. First, and most simply, there is the
question of distance. The overseas settlements of the European empires,
all of them major maritime powers, were characteristically separated
from the homelands by thousands of miles of ocean, favouring the growth
of strong local identities and creating insuperable logistic problems
for reconquest once they began to break away. By contrast, China was
never a maritime power, and Taiwan is no more than a hundred miles away
across the straits. The only European overseas settlement of comparable
proximity was Ulster, planted in the 17th century, which still remains
attached to the UK. In one respect, the parallel is not entirely remote.

For, not unlike Tudor-Stuart Ireland, Taiwan was historically of concern

to the Qing court primarily as a potential base for enemy attack on the
mainland.

Second, the European powers that generated transoceanic settlements were

typically much smaller in territory than their overseas outposts and in
due course became so in population, too. Today's geographical and
demographic ratios between the United States and Britain, Latin America
and Spain, Brazil and Portugal, speak for themselves. But in the case of

China and Taiwan, the disproportion in scale of population and power
between the mainland and the island is enormous. The PRC is nearly three

hundred times the size of Taiwan, and contains five hundred times as
many inhabitants.

In living standards, the boot is on the other foot. Taiwan continues to
be much more prosperous than the PRC, with an income per capita more
than ten times higher. But since the 1990s the growth of the mainland
economy has far outpaced that of the island, which has become a small
moon revolving around the huge planet of Chinese industrialisation.
Historically, capital as well as labour flowed from the European states
to their former overseas settlements, once these gained independence. In

the case of Taiwan, the process has been the other way around. Vast
amounts of capital - in the region of $100 billion - have gone from the
island to the mainland, and now reverse migration is following
investments. Getting on for half a million Taiwanese currently live in
Shanghai and other coastal cities of the PRC. Such economic and
demographic intermeshing has only just begun, historically speaking. It
represents the opposite of the European settlement pattern.

What follows from this double set of co-ordinates? The cause of
Taiwanese independence rests politically on the national right of
self-determination. The DPP is positioning itself to call a referendum
that would give formal effect to the claim of national sovereignty by
popular vote. In doing so, it can appeal to the authority of one of the
rare principles expressly shared by both of the two great antagonistic
political ideologies of the 20th century, articulated respectively by
Woodrow Wilson and Lenin, and embodied in the Charter of the United
Nations, to which all existing states are formally committed.

Since it was canonically formulated, the right of national
self-determination has historically had two main zones of application,
corresponding to its dual ancestry. The first accorded independence to
nations in Central and Eastern Europe which had previously been
contained within dynastic empires - Romanov, Habsburg, Hohenzollern -
but whose aspirations to statehood stretched back to the era of romantic

ethno-linguistic nationalism in the 19th century, and were realised
after the First World War: the Wilsonian moment. The second ratified the

independence of the former colonial possessions of the European empires
outside Europe, in the wave of anti-imperialist struggles during and
after the Second World War: the Leninist moment. In both areas, the
right of self-determination brought new nation-states into being.

At the same time, this right has always encountered a limit. Where a
nation-state was already constituted, rather than still to be created,
self-determination has been systematically rejected. In such cases, the
right typically reverses into a taboo. For ideologically speaking, what
is then at stake is not 'self-determination', but 'secession'. This is
the Lincolnian moment. Its historical record is virtually as uniform as
its Wilsonian or Leninist opposites. The American Civil War with its
600,000 dead - the largest military-industrial massacre of the 19th
century - was fought to suppress the separation, approved by
unimpeachable democratic majorities, of the Confederacy from the Union.
Since the Second World War, the same bloody campaigns against break-outs

from the nation-state have been fought again and again, with comparable
results. Such has been, in Nigeria, the fate of Biafra; in Russia, of
Chechnya; in Turkey, of Kurdistan; in India, of Nagaland; in Sri Lanka,
of Tamil Eelam; in Spain, of the Basque country. No standard
nation-state has so far ever allowed the detachment from its territory
of a breakaway community.?

Separations, however, have occurred in multinational federations. In the

cases of the USSR and Yugoslavia, constituent republics based on ethnic
or linguistic identities became independent states with the collapse of
the Communist order, in the former without much strife, in the latter
strewn with violence. Three cases of the peaceful separation of
bi-national states are on record: Norway and Sweden in 1905, Malaysia
and Singapore in 1965, the Czech Republic and Slovakia in 1993. In each,

political leaders on both sides saw mutual advantage in the break-up of
a union of two territories, of approximately equal weight, whose
linguistic or ethnic difference was constitutionally acknowledged from
the start. One further case of separation, in Africa, was much bloodier,

when Eritrea achieved independence from Ethiopia by reverting to
pre-established colonial boundaries. Explicitly multi or bi-federations
have proved friable as self-declared nation-states have not.

What are the implications of this three-sided record - the national
right to self-determination; the taboo on national secession; the
friability of pluri-national federations - for Taiwan? No overseas
settler nationalism has acquired independence since the Treaty of
Versailles, but the lapse of a century does not as such make it
impossible. The difficulty lies with the modern self-definition of the
Chinese state. The PRC, unlike the Kuomintang's Republic of China,
acknowledges the existence of multiple nationalities within its
territory, and concedes them a number of autonomous jurisdictions. But
unlike the USSR, it has never accorded any of them republican status:
China remains a unitary, not a federal state. Within it, three large
areas - Tibet, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia - contain ethnic and
linguistic communities completely distinct from the Han who make up 92
per cent of the total population. They form part of today's PRC as
bequests from the Qing empire, and it is not difficult to imagine them
winning national self-determination in a democratised China. Taiwan, on
the other hand, is ethnically Han, and by the late 19th century was
administered as a normal province by the Qing. If China today can be
envisaged as a large, relatively homogeneous nation-state, with an
allogenous belt of dependent territories in Central Asia, by ethnic and
linguistic criteria Taiwan falls within the 'national' core rather than
'imperial' periphery of this hybrid structure. In comparative terms, its

independence would be a secession.

It is for this reason that there is little likelihood that the attitude
of a future Chinese democracy towards the secession of Taiwan would
differ significantly from that of the present dictatorship. Democracies
show no more pity for such leanings than tyrannies, as the
killing-fields of Lincolnism made plain from the start. In so far as the

case for Taiwanese independence rests on the island's democracy, it
would on the contrary be weakened rather than strengthened by the
elimination of the authoritarian Other that is currently the main ground

of its own identity.

The standard means of preventing or crushing a secession is war. But in
the case of Taiwan, the PRC is in no position to send troops to the
island, since it is protected by American naval might, against which
China has no chance of prevailing. Military threats from the mainland
are in that sense pure bluster, of no immediate significance to the
island. As matters stand, the CCP's only hope is that growing
cross-straits economic integration will eventually persuade Taiwanese
business of the advantages of reunification. This is a delusion, based
on a false analogy with Hong Kong, where a deal behind closed doors with

a handful of billionaires, in a city that had never known a breath of
democracy under the British, was enough to clinch a political settlement

satisfactory to Beijing. No comparable magnates dominate the ranks of
Taiwanese capital, which are both less stratified and much more
numerous, while the business community as a whole enjoys significantly
less political influence in a fully organised democratic system based on

large mass parties. The chances of buying separation from a club of
tycoons are virtually nil.

If Beijing has in effect no policy towards Taiwan, other than impotent
complaint, Washington has little more. On the one hand, it is formally
committed to the principle of One China, as proclaimed in the joint
Shanghai communiqu? of 1972. Furthermore, the US is now critically
dependent on Chinese financial flows to cover its trade deficit and prop

up the dollar, so has every reason to maintain close relations with the
PRC. On the other hand, it is tacitly bound by the Taiwan Relations Act
of 1979 to protect the island against any threat of an invasion. Since
the 1990s, moreover, Washington is politically a hostage to Taiwanese
democracy. The US, in other words, cannot accept Taiwanese independence
de jure, but must ensure it de facto. This is a contradiction no less
paralysing than the noisy threats and empty hands of the PRC. America's
only policy is therefore to cling to the indeterminacy of the status
quo. Both big powers are immobilised by the conflict.

In this situation, the only dynamic force is Taiwanese nationalism.
Flushed with an electoral victory its leader ascribes to divine
intervention, the Green camp has the wind in its sails, and seems likely

to win an outright majority over a divided and demoralised Blue
opposition in the legislature in December. Possible defections from the
KMT benches to the DPP are already rumoured: a bandwagon logic could set

in. The electoral system, offering minimal differences between the two
leading parties in social or economic policy, is increasingly organised
around identity politics. Here the Green bloc has a built-in advantage,
since it can always set the patriotic pace and accuse its Blue opponents

of foot-dragging, or much worse, in the advance to Taiwanese
sovereignty. In this year's campaign, the DPP regularly attacked the KMT

as Communist fellow-travellers doing the bidding of Beijing. So long as
the national card is a trump, the Blue camp is forced onto the
defensive, and can be easily outflanked.

The political system has already been bent in this fashion. The Green
camp demanded that a law be passed allowing the executive to call a
referendum. Seeing what might be coming, the Blue majority in the
legislature baulked at this, but under pressure voted through a
mechanism allowing parliament, not the president, to approve a
plebiscite. After much negotiation, however, the fine print of the new
law included a clause permitting the latter to call a referendum in a
situation of urgent external threat. Chen then coolly announced that
such an emergency existed, since China (as always) was threatening
Taiwan, and put a referendum on beefing up the island's defences to the
vote for the same day as the presidential elections - with the aim both
of polarising debate around the national question to his own benefit,
and setting a precedent for appealing directly to the people when the
time was ripe for moving to independence.

Manipulation could scarcely have been starker. One of the Green
intellectuals involved in drafting the referendum remarked afterwards
that he didn't care what was in it, and didn't even read it before
signing it: the important thing was simply to set a plebiscitary
precedent for future eventualities. In the event, the Blue camp - crying

foul - called on voters to boycott the trick, and it just failed to
secure the necessary 50 per cent of the electorate. But a mechanism is
now in place that in principle enables Chen to call a plebiscite on
independence when he wishes, though he would want to be sure of the
result before doing so. The speed of DPP growth in the last four years
suggests that this threshold is within reach. A date has been pencilled
in by some of its tacticians. In 2008, Beijing will be hosting the
Olympics in a blaze of global publicity and bogus bonhomie. Could it
afford to sully its image by cracking down on the renegade province,
even as the television cameras of the world are doting on the latest
Lolita of the uneven bars?

The US has made clear its opposition to any declaration of Taiwanese
independence. But what could it do to prevent one? Once the momentum
towards a plebiscite began to roll, the only deterrent at its disposal
would be a threat to withdraw the Seventh Fleet from the straits. But
this is a bluff that Taiwanese nationalism could call, since the public
rationale of the American protectorate is the need to protect a vibrant
democracy, which would now be finding its culminating expression in a
popular mandate. Within the US itself, the mainstream media and public
opinion would whip up an unweatherable storm at the prospect of leaving
the island at the mercy of the PLA.lllll

The PRC, of course, would step up its denunciations of the DPP, but so
long as the American military shield remains, it has few means of
affecting political developments in Taiwan, about which it has in any
case consistently shown its ignorance. At most it can seek to frighten
the island's jumpy stock market, and hope for knock-on effects among
voters. Beijing could apply real pressure on Washington, in a way that
it cannot on Taipei, since a Chinese threat to sell US treasuries could
pull the rug from under the dollar, with potentially destabilising
consequences for the whole American economy. But, even setting aside the

costs to the PRC itself of any such line of action, which would by the
same stroke cripple Chinese exports to America, the authorities in
Beijing have no appetite for any conflict with Washington.

The CCP leadership has pursued international policies of all-round
submission to the US for so long now - Hu Jintao has even received the
chairman of the puppet government in Baghdad with all honours - that any

reflexes of tough resistance seem at present very unlikely. Huffing and
puffing about One China would become shriller than ever, but few
consequent actions would follow. Behind closed doors the Standing
Committee would tell itself that the problem can be left to succeeding
generations, when China has become the world's leading economic power
and its will irresistible. Meanwhile everything would continue as
before, maybe with some extra harassments and restrictions for Taiwanese

travellers to the mainland.

Viewed in this light, the plebiscitary dynamic in Taiwan looks less
risky for the DPP than many commentators assume. The Greens could
probably engineer a declaration of independence without paying any
apocalyptic price. Not that they would gain any further international
recognition by doing so. No other states of significance would
acknowledge such a self-declared transformation into the Republic of
Taiwan, any more than they recognise the mythical Republic of China
today. But equally Taipei might not suffer any significant reprisals for

a symbolic change either. The cross-straits stand-off would continue
much as before.

If such a scenario seems quite credible, what are the contingencies that

might derail it? One would be a deepening of the 'ethnic' split within
the island itself. The Green camp is becoming increasingly nativist in
its rhetoric and practice, with a sharp edge of prejudice against
ex-mainlander families, who still number perhaps a sixth of the
population and form the core of the People First Party, and a milder one

against correct Mandarin speakers, a much larger group. Part of this
expresses a natural resentment at earlier discrimination against Min-nan

speakers. But pressed too crudely, Min-nanisation of the educational
system, the civil service, the media and, in due course, the armed
forces and security services could create a backlash, polarising
Taiwanese society over internal issues, rather than - as intended -
mobilising the nation in a union sacr?e against the external enemy. But
while the DPP leadership has given its fundamentalists some rein, it is
probably alert to the dangers of prematurely unleashing such a process,
and is more likely to focus on the immediate goal of winning over
opportunist sectors of the KMT.

A second contingency would be a sudden stiffening of attitude by the
CCP, however improbable that appears to be on current performance.
Theoretically, the PRC could escalate pressure on Taiwan by lobbing
demonstration missiles at uninhabited targets on the island, high over
the masts of the Seventh Fleet, as a shot across the bows of
independence. Beijing could perhaps hope that symbolic military action
of this kind, well short of a casus belli with the US, might galvanise
Washington into imposing a settlement along 'one China, two systems'
lines, with complete Taiwanese autonomy within the PRC for fifty years,
which it is still in a position to do, but would find much more
difficult once a Taiwan Republic has already been declared. It remains
difficult, however, to imagine any White House in prospect grasping this

nettle with much resolve.

Whatever the short-term eventualities, the long-term prospects of China
ever accepting a breakaway of Taiwan seem small. From the standpoint of
the nation-state, for a former province without ethnic difference from
the majority population to attempt independence is secession. So far, no

nation-state has ever permitted this. There is, moreover, effectively an

international pact against recognising such a breakaway, since so many
states have reason to fear they would be the first to suffer once the
precedent was set. Within China itself, fear of the precedent would be
even more acute, since a province like, say, Guangdong, with its own
distinct language, has a much stronger claim to separate cultural
identity than Taiwan, a population four times larger and a standard of
living (already well above the mainland average) which it could
certainly improve by no longer having to pay taxes to Beijing. Freely to

accept the independence of Taiwan would, in the eyes of the central
government, be to invite a dynamic of disintegration along Yugoslav
lines. So long " as Taiwan remains an American protectorate, Beijing
will put up with it, much as Nanjing put up with Manchukuo as a Japanese

protectorate. But historically, some kind of reintegration seems the
least unlikely outcome in the long run.

Footnotes

* The regional contrast is also a function of the greater
industrialisation of the North, which has benefited from more investment

and possesses a larger and better educated urban population. The
Blue-Green divide thus also has a class aspect. Prosperous Min-nan still

vote in significant numbers for the KMT, whose base remains ethnically
more varied than that of the DPP.

? Post-partition Pakistan, circumscribed purely by religion, was never a

conventional nation-state. The independence of Bangladesh was assured by

overwhelming foreign intervention from India, as once - without the same

popular basis - Panama was wrested from Colombia by US intervention.

Perry Anderson teaches history at UCLA.

>From the LRB letters page: [ 8 July 2004 ] Kenneth Choy, A.J. Caston.


* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
* Li chu-chheh e e-mail khau-cho si:  SAKAI Toru .
* Beh kia phoe ho' tak-ke tioh iong chit-e khau-cho chiah kia-e-kau.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *