mardi 28 février 2017

China-Taiwan Diplomacy Falls To New Low With Latest Spain Deportation Incident

By Ralph Jennings 

After a tour bus crashed two weeks ago along a freeway ramp in Taipei and killed 33 people, China expressed condolences and Taiwan said thanks for the thought. 
The two hadn’t exchanged basic pleasantries like that since May, when a new Taiwan president took offices and pushed China relations way down the list of government priorities after eight years of brisk, upbeat dialogue. 
But the condolences were just Taiwan’s proverbial sunny day before another typhoon.

Pro-independence activists gather in 2003 outside a park in Taiwan to mark the anniversary of the bloody 1947 military crackdown that left thousands of people dead.

China claims sovereignty over Taiwan, which is self-ruled. 
Most people here say in opinion surveys they oppose China’s ambition to unify the two sides. 
A lot of those people voted for President Tsai Ing-wen, who's cold to the unification idea herself.
China and Taiwan began arguing through statements from government agencies last week after Spain agreed to deport more than 200 Taiwanese fraud suspects – to China. 
Like Kenya, Malaysia and other countries that have done the same with Taiwanese fraud suspects over the past year, Spain made the move because it backed Beijing’s political idea that people from both places belong to China and should be prosecuted there. 
They were suspected of using Spain as a base to defraud people of a combined $17 million in China, not in Taiwan where citizens are used to the scam because they were once the victims. 
Taiwan’s governmental Mainland Affairs Council slammed China for a “unilateral” decision that could damage prospects for trust and cooperation. 
China is likely to give the fraud suspects a harsher trial than what they would get in Taiwan, where judges might order one to five years in prison.
“This has taken place before, for sure,” says Alexander Huang, strategic studies professor at Tamkang University in Taiwan. 
This case stood out for Taiwan partly because “Spain is a larger country in Europe," he says. 
Taiwan said it had expected Madrid to take a more humanitarian approach. 
"But the thing that really triggered a nerve is China saying the suspects are not Republic of China citizens,” Huang says, using the legal name of Taiwan’s government.
China’s Taiwan Affairs Office touched off another storm last week when it said would hold formal events to mark the 70th anniversary of the “228” incident in Taiwan. 
On Feb. 28, 1947 a dispute between a cigarette vendor and an enforcement officer in Taipei ignited an anti-government rebellion. 
Strongman Chiang Kai-shek violently repressed it for years, killing tens of thousands. 
Feb. 28 is now an annual public holiday held in Taiwan, democratic for 30 years, to oppose any authoritarian rule. 
Beijing casts the Feb. 28 chain of events as part of a struggle to break free of Chiang’s then-ruling Nationalist Party, which had governed all of China before losing a civil war to the Communists.
But Taiwanese "secessionist forces" have "distorted facts of the uprising to stoke conflict and split public opinion on the island," China's official Xinhua News Agency said last week, citing a Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson. 
"Secessionist forces" probably refer to advocates of Taiwan's legal independence from China, and those advocates tend to support Tsai's Democratic Progressive Party
Taiwan, though self-ruled, still claims mainland China in its constitution as Beijing claims Taiwan. Beijing prefers that tethering over independence. 
The Taiwan government’s Mainland Affairs Council on Thursday asked China to be fair, “understand the essence of this event correctly” and share Taiwan’s experience in remembering the date.
These rows between China and Taiwan will pass but pile up on other problems between the two sides. China didn’t like Tsai talking to Donald Trump by phone in December because it feared a stronger U.S.-Taiwan relationship despite a formal China-U.S. diplomatic alliance. 
Taiwan didn’t care for China’s passing its aircraft carrier near the island in December and January. Those are just two examples. 

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