About the protests in Taiwan - 30 March 2004

Keep in mind that they are being magnified a bit by the journalistic need to find drama. For the most part, things are running nicely. Some windows got broken, but the fact that Taiwan was able to get through a attempted political assassination and really close election with nothing more serious than people threatening lawsuits is a really good sign. One thing that is important here is that the people in power really have a good sense of how far they can push things without causing really large problems.

Chen Shuibian's Washington Post interview - 30 March 2004

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33076-2004Mar29.html

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A33322-2004Mar29.html

First of all, people give interviews to the Washington Post when they want to send a message to American foreign policy establishment, and Chen's message to the United States was not to worry too much about him. One should note that most of the Taiwanese papers really didn't mention the interview much, largely because he didn't say anything new to anyone living on Taiwan.

I certainly felt better after reading what he has to say. He might be lying through his teeth, but even if he were, the lies that he choose to tell indicates a good understanding of his situation.

Given that something that I found odd was that the Washington Post characterized Chen Shuibian's remarks as being "hard line" when they seemed to me to be much softer than anything that he has said in the last year. He basically said that he is willing not to talk about his two country theory if the PRC doesn't press one China, and that he is going to structure constitutional reform so that it doesn't antagonize Beijing.

Something that might be a problem here is that the interviewer was based in Beijing and I don't think he was able to pick up a lot of the nuances that Chen was trying to get across. This might be a serious problem if Chinese leaders in Beijing don't pick up the nuances, but I think they will.

I do think that Chen Shuibian didn't seem to be aware of how divisive his policies are on Taiwan and how much a range of opinion there is on Taiwan. Something to keep in mind is that in 2000, even though he got only 40% of the vote, post-election polls gave him a 70% approval rating. Now he got 50% of the vote, but his approval ratings are in the 40-50% range. Also the number of people on Taiwan who hate him is much higher now than it was in 2000.

Much of the problem is that Chen is trying to construct a Taiwanese identity that is anti-Chinese or at least non-Chinese. His theory is that by creating a strong separate identity, that Taiwan will be in a much better position to resist the PRC and be a "normal" nation.

The trouble with this is that a lot of people in Taiwan don't like this. It is true that only a very small number of people on Taiwan want to be ruled from Beijing, but taking China off the name of everything and trying to arrange things so that people can't been simultaneously Chinese and Taiwanese at the same time is causing a large backlash on Taiwan itself. Ironically, by touching this issue, Chen is actually decreasing Taiwan's capacity to resist the PRC.

But Chen is smart, and he'll figure it out. Chen does have this tendency to absorb new ideas, and you can often tell from his interviews who he talked to last. Unfortunately, he has been spending a bit too much time talking to Lee Teng-Hui, and one thing that worries me a bit is that Chen seems to have caught "messsiah fever" from Lee Tenghui.

Can't change a tiger's stripes - 30 March 2004

I can't seem to shut up.....

I've seen a number of articles that look like this about Taiwan's growing identity and the loss in reunificationist sentiment.

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FC31Ad03.html

These articles are useful but they miss two important points....

1) There has been a strong sense of Taiwanese identity, but these strong Taiwanese identity not not necessarily incompatible with a strong Chinese identity. Indeed, the whole debate on the island itself is not Taiwanese vs. Chinese, but whether or not the two identities are polar opposites or not.

2) The other point that is being missed is that reunification is far closer to reality now than it was twenty years ago. Actual integration with the Mainland China is much higher now than it ever has been, and the cultural distance is much lower. Yes people from Taiwan have haircuts that are a little different than people from the PRC, but the difference between a 20-year old PRC resident and a 20-year old Taiwan resident today is much smaller than in 1980 or even in 1970.

Sure, twenty years ago, Taiwan talked much more about reunification, but it was easy to talk about it when there was no chance of it happening. It was something like the second coming of Christ. Something in the distant future that had very little relation to current events.

Today things are different. Something that is very obvious when you talk to people in Taiwan (regardless of their political views) is that Mainland China is far more of a "presence" in people's daily lives than it was twenty or even ten years ago. Pretty much everyone knows someone who does business in the PRC or has visited there. The PRC is becoming part of pop culture in a way that it wasn't twenty years ago. (For example, the Apple Daily is a Hong Kong-style newspaper that has really changed Taiwan journalism.)

Part of the reason for the rise in independence sentiment (as well as the rise in anti-independence sentiment) comes from the fact that the PRC is no longer this closed off place which you can ignore. There is a real fear among some sectors of Taiwan that the PRC will just swallow up Taiwan, and this is part of the trigger for assertions of cultural identity. At the same time, other sectors of Taiwan see the PRC as a golden opportunity for Taiwan, and its this difference in attitude which is causing such large divisions in Taiwanese society.

On hiatus for now. It's just gotten too stressful looking at Chinese news for now. I'll start this back up again in a few months after I get a chance to relax a bit. One good thing is that there is unlikely to be much of a crisis in the next few months, and this will give me a chance to take a break for a while.

March 22, 2004