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. 

Two Chinas Policy

Taiwan tells Beijing to grow up over President Trump inauguration row
AFP
Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen speaks on the phone with U.S. president Donald Trump at her office in Taipei, Taiwan, in this handout photo made available December 3, 2016. 

China should not be so “narrow-minded”, Taiwan said Thursday, after Beijing pressed Washington to block the island from attending Donald Trump’s inauguration.
A former premier will lead Taipei’s delegation as foreign dignitaries from around the world descend on the US capital for the president’s swearing in.
But Beijing has asked the US to bar the self-ruling island it sees as a renegade province and part of “one China” to be reunified.
Former premier Yu Shyi-kun, who is leading Taiwan’s delegation hit back.
“Don’t be so small,” Yu, who belongs to the ruling Beijing-sceptic Democratic Progressive Party, was quoted as saying by Taiwan’s state Central News Agency.
“There hasn’t been any leader with such a narrow mind in all Chinese dynasties,” added Yu, referring to Xi Jinping.
Since Trump was elected in November, there have been a series of diplomatic upsets, with China incensed by a protocol-smashing phone call between President Trump and Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen.
It was further angered by Trump’s suggestion that the “one China” policy could be negotiable and demanded Washington ban Taipei from the inauguration.
A Taiwanese delegation has attended in previous years, despite the lack of formal diplomatic ties, but never includes the island’s president.
Washington remains Taiwan’s most powerful ally and arms supplier even though it switched diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing in 1979.
Chiu Chui-cheng, spokesman of Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council which handles China affairs, called Beijing’s rhetoric “unhelpful for the normal development” of relations.
“There is no need for China to restrict or suppress Taiwan’s regular interactions and exchanges with the US”, he said.
Taiwan’s delegation also includes some legislators including pro-independence rocker-turned-politician Freddy Lim of the New Power Party, which is calling for Taiwan to be recognised internationally as a country.
Ties with China have turned increasingly frosty since Tsai took office last year, with Beijing cutting off official communication with her government.
Beijing has recently stepped up military drills — its only aircraft carrier sailed through the Taiwan Strait last week, and military aircraft passed near Taiwan twice late last year in what was seen as a show of strength.

Two Chinas Policy

Taiwan, Thorn In China’s Side, Gets New Attention
By Mark Harrison
Taiwan's President Tsai Ing-wen. 

Since the 1940s, after Mao Zedong proclaimed the founding of the People’s Republic of China and the defeated Kuomintang retreated to Taipei, the Taiwan Strait has remained among the most intractable issues in international relations and a potential site for conflict in Asia. 

A brief phone call between the US President Donald Trump and Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen was a startling intervention in what’s become a warily balanced array of power relations sustained by arcane diplomatic formalisms.
The response from China, which maintains territorial claim to the island as sovereign territory, was relatively muted with more annoyance directed toward Taiwan. 

Immediate reaction elsewhere to the phone call included concerns about an escalation of the conflict for the entire region and the United States.
The call came at a time when cross-strait relations had already entered a challenging period. 

After some years of rapprochement between Taipei and Beijing under the government of Ma Ying-jeou, in power from 2008 to 2016, this year Taiwanese voters elected President Tsai Ing-wen of the Democratic Progressive Party. 

The new government is less sympathetic to Beijing’s interests, and Beijing has responded accordingly.
The call also highlighted the gap between Taiwan’s place in the broad strokes of international policymaking and the complexity of Taiwan’s circumstances.
The Taiwan issue emerged from the many ruptures in China’s modern history. 

Taiwan has an indigenous people, members of the great civilization that stretches across the islands of the Pacific. 

It was briefly a Dutch colonial outpost in the 17th century, then an exiled Ming loyalist kingdom, before being incorporated into the Qing Empire in 1662. 

Near the end of the Qing period, in 1895, Taiwan was ceded to Japan as a colonial territory.
On the mainland, the Chinese Nationalists, or KMT, overthrew the Qing and founded the Republic of China, ROC, in 1912. 

The Chinese Communist Party was established in 1921, and the two began the long civil war.
At the end of World War II, Taiwan passed from Japan to the authority of the ROC under the KMT. The result was disastrous. 

The Taiwanese rose up against KMT rule in 1947, and the uprising was crushed with the loss of tens of thousands of lives. 

From the violence emerged a Taiwanese nationalist movement, building on political activism from the colonial period. 

Then, in 1949, the KMT lost the civil war against the communists on the mainland and relocated the national ROC government to Taipei.
Through the 1950s, Taiwan became the exemplar of an Asian Tiger, focusing on development and a booming export-oriented economy, under a brutal military dictatorship.
In this period, Taiwan found a place at the intersection of state ideologies of the People’s Republic of China, the ROC and the United States. 

For the nationalism shared by both the PRC and the ROC, Taiwan’s former colonial history symbolized China’s humiliation at the hands of foreign powers during the last decades of imperial rule. 

The standoff between Taiwan and mainland China from the 1950s to 1980s, with both claiming to be the legitimate government for all of China, expressed the notion of a nation divided by civil war. Taiwan also served as a key expression of US global power, as “Free China,” during the Cold War.
This alignment of ideologies, contemporary and post-imperial, carried the idea that the direction of Taiwan’s history with mainland China was towards unification as a single nation-state, either the ROC or the PRC. 

Unification would represent the end-point of the conflict: A shared identity as Chinese would bring the two sides together, China’s late-imperial territorial losses would be exculpated, and Cold War ideological differences would dissolve.
However, in the 1980s, Taiwan began the political and institutional process of democratization. 

The first free and fair elections for the president of the ROC took place in 1996. 

Democracy also set free the ideals and ideology of Taiwanese identity and nationalism, the seeds of which were sown in the Japanese colonial era, hardening after the 1947 uprising.
In the years since democratization, even as Taiwan’s economic relationship with the mainland grew to more than US$200 billion of annual cross-strait trade, Taiwanese identity politics have found institutional political expression in the Democratic Progressive Party and cultural and social expression in art, literature, museums, education and media.
During these political changes, Beijing presented the concept of One Country Two Systems as a model for unification. 

Ultimately applied to Hong Kong, the model would have allowed Taiwan to maintain its capitalist economy and administrative autonomy as part of the People’s Republic of China. 

One Country Two Systems largely disappeared as a policy position by the mid-2000s, replaced by a policy of economic integration backed by military threat and the formula known as the 1992 Consensus, holding that each side agrees that there is one China and that Taiwan is part of China while setting aside respective definitions of the meaning of China.
However, the reality of Taiwan’s contemporary political and cultural life is that a majority of Taiwanese do not want unification. 

After nearly a century of political struggle for self-determination under Japan and then KMT authoritarianism, Taiwanese identity is galvanized by activist politics. 

Any attempt by Beijing to exercise governance over Taiwan would be met with intense resistance.
Setting aside the disastrous possibility of invasion and military occupation of Taiwan by the People’s Liberation Army, even through a non-military negotiated process, Taiwanese resistance to Beijing governance could only mean the start of instability, with no resolution of the Taiwan issue.
The long history of the democracy struggle and civic resistance from a Taiwanese majority would be a challenge for the most sophisticated and accommodating political institutions to manage. 

However, as Hong Kong has shown in recent years, Beijing’s responses to opposition in Taiwan are unlikely to be subtle or obliging. 

As a result, Taiwan within the PRC would threaten not only the cross-strait balance, but also destabilize Beijing and the region.
There is any number of scenarios of post-unification instability. 

Beijing could decide to implement patriotic education in Taiwanese schools, as it has done in Hong Kong. 

The Taiwanese, already bitterly divided, would erupt in protests intense and prolonged enough to create leadership splits between hardliners and moderates in Beijing over how to respond. 

Protests would test loyalty of local law enforcement while overseas Taiwanese communities would mobilize in the United States, Australia and elsewhere. 

If Beijing were to send its own law enforcement from the mainland to restore order, the echo of the 1947 uprising would be strong enough for cross-strait relations to be unrecoverable.
The inevitable destabilization of relations in a post-unification scenario raises crucial consideration of the status of Taiwan’s military force. 

China spends almost 15 times as much on its military as Taiwan, but Taiwan has advanced combat systems supplied by the US, including recent deliveries of advanced missile technologies.
Yet for any prospect of peace after unification, a precondition would require demilitarization for Taiwan. 

Such an unprecedented task, vast in scale and complexity, would require independent oversight and full commitment of the international community.
The question of Taiwan’s demilitarization suggests that there is no serious proposal for negotiated unification in play from Beijing. 

Needless to say, as Beijing no doubt understands, the act of making a proposal public would generate a counter-reaction from Taiwan’s polity only highlighting the difficult path forward.
Far from China’s economic and military power allowing a resolution of the Taiwan issue on Beijing’s terms, Taiwan illustrates the limits of China’s power and the importance of maintaining the current status quo. 

Extensive international involvement and cooperation would be required for Beijing to achieve its aims without destabilizing China and throwing the region into chaos.
In this context, Trump was right to take a call from Taiwanese President Tsai. 

It was an appropriate acknowledgement of a democratically elected leader and also illustrated the calcification of international policymaking on the Taiwan Strait, something Beijing has long relied on in its goals. 

But having disrupted policy norms, the incoming Trump administration is now tasked with leading the international community towards a meaningful understanding of the Taiwan issue that shows a path towards continuing peace and prosperity in the region.

China tries to 'divide and rule' Taiwan by befriending pro-Beijing towns

By J.R. Wu | TAIPEI

Taiwan's landmark building Taipei 101 is seen during sunset in Taipei, Taiwan April 19, 2016. 
China is embarking on a divide-and-rule campaign on self-ruled Taiwan, offering to boost tourism to pro-Beijing towns and counties while giving the new pro-independence government the cold shoulder, government officials and politicians say.
Whether Beijing's promises materialize remains to be seen, but the political rift is pressing Taiwan's ruling Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) to come up with measures of its own to counter an alarming decline in mainland tourists.
Eight Taiwanese local government officials, mainly representing counties controlled by the China-friendly opposition Nationalist Party KMT, were promised greater tourism and agricultural ties when they met China's top Taiwan policymaker in Beijing last month.
And this week, Xi Jinping is scheduled to meet Nationalist Party chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu when she visits Beijing during an annual party-to-party gathering about economic and cultural ties.
In contrast, Beijing has withheld official communication with the government of DPP leader and President Tsai Ing-wen, until it agrees to recognize the "one-China" policy.
"The Chinese government has put political conditions relevant to Taiwan surrendering our sovereignty and our right to determine our own future on the outflow of tourists to Taiwan and that's what makes this a very politically complicated issue," said Hsiao Bi-khim, a DPP lawmaker for Hualien, on Taiwan's east coast.
Hsiao and the Hualien county chief, an ex-Nationalist who went to Beijing last month, do not see eye to eye on tourism development.
"We have to condemn this divide-and-conquer strategy and also individual politicians who seek to play into the Chinese divide-and-conquer strategy," Hsiao said.

The Two Chinas
China says Taiwan is part of one China, ruled by Beijing. 

It regards the island as a renegade province, to be united by force if necessary, and ties have become strained since Tsai took office in May.
The previous Nationalist administration agreed to recognize the "1992 consensus", which states that there is only one China, with each side having its own interpretation of what that means.
The eight officials who went to Beijing came home to a storm of criticism for being lackeys to Beijing's one-China policy.
One of them, Liu Tseng-ying, chief of Matsu, a group of small islets off China's Fujian province but held by Taiwan, told Chinese officials that he wanted more Chinese to visit Taiwan's smallest county.
"I said I hoped Chinese tourists can increase to 40 percent of the total," Liu told Reuters.
China's Taiwan Affairs Office head Zhang Zhijun agreed to expand trade and travel specifically between China's Fujian province and Matsu and Kinmen. 

Both Taiwan-controlled islands lie closer to China than Taiwan.
Group tourists from mainland China, which Beijing can effectively control via state-run Chinese travel agencies, fell 71 percent year-on-year from October 1-18, Taiwan data showed, coinciding with China's National Day holiday, a Golden Week for travel for Chinese.
The sector was also hit by a bus fire in Taiwan in July that killed 24 mainland tourists. 

The driver, among the victims, had poured petrol inside the bus and locked its emergency exits before setting it alight, prosecutors said.
The severity of the decline in tourism led to a major protest in September and prompted the government to pledge T$30 billion ($960 million) in loans to the industry and work on attracting tourists from other Asian countries.

Canada's disgraceful silence on Taiwan

By Terry Glavin

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen speaks during National Day celebrations in front of the Presidential Palace in Taipei on October 10, 2016. Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen on October 10 called for a resumption of talks with China and pledged that "anything" can be on the table for discussion. Relations with Beijing have deteriorated under Taiwan's first female president, whose China-sceptic Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) took office in May after a landslide victory over the Kuomintang party (KMT). 

TAIPEI – The backwash from the last of three wicked typhoons wasn’t enough to dampen the mood during Taiwan’s National Day celebrations this week, although a lingering gloom hung in the air nevertheless. 

It had come from across the Taiwan Strait, as it so often does. 

From mainland China.
From her perch on a reviewing stand outside the century-old Japanese colonial governor’s complex, reconfigured in 1950 as the Republic of China’s President’s Office, 60-year-old Tsai Ing-wen was all smiles on Monday. 

More than 10,000 people had gathered in what everyone was happy was only some occasionally drizzling rain to hear what she’d say in her first key public speech since the inaugural address she’d delivered after being sworn in as Taiwan’s most defiantly democratic president last May.
There was a parade of lumbering military hardware and performances by folk ensembles. 

There were high school marching bands, pop stars, Taiwan’s medal winners from the Summer Olympics in Rio and the Taiwanese baseball team’s cheerleaders. 

Tsai stuck to the upbeat tone: “The new government will conduct cross-strait affairs in accordance with the Constitution of the Republic of China,” as Taiwan is otherwise known. 

But there was also this: “We will not bow to pressure, and we will, of course, not revert to the old path of confrontation.”
Yes to negotiations, yes to the “status quo” of trade, yes to peace, but no to kowtowing. 

It was about as conciliatory a tone as Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party will allow her to take in any statements she makes about the People’s Republic regime in Beijing.
Tsai’s DPP was swept into power by the turbulence of the pro-democracy Sunflower Movement of 2014 – an anti-Beijing, anti-corruption revolt that was both a model and a replication of Hong Kong’s near-simultaneous Umbrella Revolution. 

The Taiwanese are not in the mood to turn back now, and Tsai’s speech was mostly well received among Taiwan’s 24 million people.
Nobody wants a fight with Beijing. 

Neither does anybody want to go on putting up with Beijing’s insistence that Taiwan is merely a temporarily wayward Chinese province that needs to mind its manners or be taught a lesson. 

Predictably, China’s Communist Party bigshots were furious about Tsai’s speech. 

A regime spokesman reiterated Beijing’s demands that Tsai submit to what the People’s Republic calls “the 1992 consensus” between the rival republics, a convoluted agree-to-disagree diplomatic fiction involving the term “One China” that was never even close to a consensus to begin with.
In Beijing’s view, the 1992 consensus was an acquiescence by Taiwan that the “status quo” meant a continuation of the Communist Party’s domination of the country until the full realization of Mao Zedong’s vision of retaking the island from the remnants of the 1912 Chinese republic that his communists had overthrown on the mainland. 

Taiwan’s now-defeated Kuomintang government was willing to go along with that, so long as the 1992 consensus came with the “status quo” of its continuing enrichment by collaboration with its former enemies, the communists-turned-capitalists on the mainland.
Tsai’s refusal to go along with capitulation by either of these cynical understandings is seen by Beijing as a provocation to invasion and war. 

Over the past few months, China has been putting the squeeze on Taiwan by shutting down all formal and informal Beijing-Taipei communications, blocking Taiwanese imports, cutting off the flow of tourists from the mainland and throwing its weight around on the “world stage” to further Taiwan’s isolation. 

Only 22 United Nations member states extend full diplomatic recognition to Taiwan.
Canada isn’t among them.
Tsai has little choice but to stand firm. 

Subservience to Beijing – either in the form of Leninist centralism or corporate gangsterism – was overwhelmingly rejected by Taiwanese voters when they elected the DPP in droves in January. 

The Beijing-friendly Kuomintang was left without either the presidency or a legislative majority for the first time in Taiwan’s history.
Tsai is the first woman to be elected Taiwan’s president. 

Her government is committed to gender equality, a stronger safety net, a robust middle class, an emphasis on small-to-medium-sized business, social justice, reconciliation with the island’s aboriginal people, massive investment in public infrastructure and social housing, more generous pensions, a national daycare program and a special focus on youth.
With the election of Justin Trudeau’s avowedly feminist, socially progressive and emphatically democratic ideals, you might think Canada would be standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Tsai’s DPP – the Taiwanese affiliate of Trudeau’s party through the Liberal International. 

The opposite is the case.
I was in Taipei as a guest of Taiwan’s foreign ministry, and while the Taiwanese officials I spoke with were too polite to say so out loud, they’ve noticed Canada’s quietude. 

When China strong-armed Taiwan away from the recent conference of the International Civil Aviation Organization, the United States and several European countries loudly objected. Canada did not, even though the ICAO conference was in Montreal.
Ottawa and Beijing have lately agreed to begin discussions on a free trade agreement, an extradition treaty and the resumption of Chinese state-owned enterprises buying up Canadian energy-sector companies. 

Trudeau has been lavishly flattered in an official visit to China, and he has returned the favour in Canada to Li Keqiang. 

Although not yet a year in government, Trudeau’s Liberals have struck 29 separate agreements with China, and have set out to double bilateral trade over the next 10 years.
But such single-minded devotion to business deals with the Beijing regime will inevitably invite the worst kind of influences and will exact a price to be paid in democratic values, warns Szu-chien Hsu, president of the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, an institute that operates at arms-length from Taiwan’s government. 

Xi Jinping is no friend of democracy, Hsu told me. 

“It alarms us. We have to be very objective about what’s going on in China.”
Xi is adept at consolidating his own power and pursuing what the Communist Party regards as China’s national interests, “but not in accordance with universal values,” Hsu said. 

“Quite on the contrary. It’s not just peculiar to Taiwan. It’s happening everywhere, in Australia, Canada, and even in the United States.” 

Beijing’s anti-democratic reach is spreading quickly. 

“I think we have to be very alarmed about that.”
Hsu said he was heartened by the recent submission to the Liberal government, prepared on behalf of 35 international organizations by the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, calling on Canada to put human rights, especially freedom of expression and press freedom, at the heart of Canada’s renewed relationship with the People’s Republic. 

The submission’s backers include Human Rights Watch, the National NewsMedia Council, PEN International, Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists and Index on Censorship. 

National and regional groups to sign on include journalists’ associations from Afghanistan, Palestine and the Pacific Islands.
“The relationship between prosperity and democracy – we would like to see a positive relationship between these two paths. If we don’t have a healthy path, one will destroy the other,” Hsu said. 

“This is very, very dangerous. It is self-destruction. It is the destruction of civilization. We are not opposing China. We have to defend democracy. It’s civilization for human beings. It’s even for China’s sake.”