Taiwan in 2006-2007 — Showing the World We're a Nation
The year 2007 is the anniversary of two events of special significance in Taiwan's political and social evolution. One of them was a heartbreaking tragedy that marked the onset of a dark age in its history. The other marked the dawning of the present bright new age.
In 2007, many events were held to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the February 28 Incident of 1947—also known as 228—and the subsequent islandwide uprising of Taiwanese against the administrators and armed forces of the Republic of China (ROC), then headed by Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Nationalist Party or Kuomintang (KMT), which had taken over administration of Taiwan on behalf of the Allied Powers and accepted the surrender of Japanese troops in 1945. During the uprising, thousands of locals were killed, executed, and imprisoned.
The dark age of repression that followed 228 finally came to an end two decades ago, in 1987, with the lifting of martial law imposed by Chiang Kai-shek in 1949 and continued by his son Chiang Ching-kuo. It was in 1949 that Chiang Kai-shek and his Nanjing-based ROC government gave up the fight against rebel Communist Party of China (CPC) forces in the Chinese Civil War and took refuge on Taiwan. In the same year, the government of the People's Republic of China (PRC) was established, and supplanted the ROC as the sole government of continental China.
In commemoration of these two events, and serving notice that the days of party-state tyranny are gone forever and that deification of dictators is no longer tolerable, statues of Chiang Kai-shek were removed from military bases and other public properties and the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall was renamed the National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall. Earlier, in September 2006, Chiang Kai-shek International Airport was renamed Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport, and the word "China" was removed from the names of major state-run enterprises.
Over the two decades since the lifting of martial law, Taiwan has transformed itself from a land ruled for centuries by a succession of externally imposed regimes into a robust, self-governing democracy.
Still, our nation is shut out of the United Nations. What is the problem? In a word, China—the PRC. Its authoritarian CPC regime in Beijing claims that we are a province of the PRC and has persuaded governments and UN officials to deny, or at least not openly affirm, our statehood—the basic requirement for UN membership.
In fact, Taiwan has never been under the thumb of Beijing's dictators, and never will be. It has been a state for more than half a century, satisfying the criteria specified in the 1933 Montevideo Convention on the Rights and Duties of States: It has a functional government that exercises sovereignty over a well-defined territory and population and conducts its own foreign relations. In addition, it has its own currency, passport, and armed forces, and was the world's 16th-largest trading nation in 2006.
Most importantly, the legitimacy of Taiwan's government derives from its championing of the universal values of freedom, human rights, rule of law, and peace. For several years now, we have been rated by Freedom House in its annual Freedom in the World survey one of the world's freest societies. According to the 2006 survey, Taiwan was Asia's freest country, and in 2007, we shared the top score in Asia with Japan and the Republic of Korea. We have never resorted to violence against any nation, and at home, our democratization has been a bloodless revolution.
In stark contrast, freedom is a distant dream for China's people. Violence and the threat of violence have been the most trusted, routine tools used by the CPC regime to maintain "social harmony" and international respect. The gravity of Beijing's suppression of human rights in China has prompted widespread calls to boycott the Beijing Olympics. China has deployed some 1,000 missiles targeted at Taiwan and is building a vast war machine with the avowed primary purpose of "liberating" it.
Beijing has left no stone unturned in order to denigrate Taiwan's sovereignty and sabotage its participation in international affairs. In announcing the route of the Olympic Torch relay in April 2007, it publicized Taiwan as the first stop in its "domestic route." Later, when it indicated a willingness to change its wording and designate Taiwan as an "extraterritorial stop," it said the price for doing so would be a guarantee not to allow Taiwanese to display their national flag or play their national anthem along the route.
Meanwhile, China sees nothing wrong with taking credit for the accomplishments of star Taiwanese athletes, such as New York Yankees ace pitcher Wang Chien-ming.
No realm of human activity is immune to Beijing's "sovereignty games." At the 2007 Venice Film Festival in September, world-renowned Taiwanese movie director Ang Lee's Lust, Caution won the Golden Lion Award for Best Film—his second Golden Lion, after his film Brokeback Mountain won the award in 2005. Trying to take credit where none was deserved, Beijing succeeded in persuading the festival organizers to list the country of origin of Lee's film as "USA/China/Taiwan, China," despite the request of Lee's office that it be listed as "Taiwan." As Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council put it, "The black hand of China has entered the pure world of art."
At the same film festival, another Taiwanese director, Lin Jing-jie, won the International Critics' Week Award for his film The Most Distant Course. Perhaps because he is not yet so well-known to the world, he was able to list his film's national origin simply and correctly as "Taiwan."
One would think that in the field of health, at least, China's rulers could bring themselves to put human wellbeing ahead of politics. No such luck. Beijing persists in keeping Taiwan from participating in World Health Organization (WHO) activities and refusing to allow the WHO to have direct contact with Taiwan's health authorities, even as it keeps the WHO in the dark regarding epidemiological conditions in China.
Due to such obstructionism and dishonesty, hundreds of Taiwanese died or were disabled by the 2003 SARS epidemic, which originated in China and caused billions of dollars in losses to Taiwan's economy. China has succeeded in denying Taiwan's health authorities the opportunity to participate in WHO technical conferences on the H5N1 avian flu pandemic, which has swept Asia and reached into Europe and Africa. Fortunately, Taiwan has thus far succeeded in preventing the H5N1 virus from entering its territory, likewise believed to have originated in China.
The year 2007 was a very eventful one for Taiwan in regard to its efforts to join the WHO and the UN. In previous years, the Taiwanese government had taken a conciliatory approach, postponing demands for full membership in these two organizations. It modestly sought only observer status in the annual World Health Assembly (WHA) and requested the UN General Assembly to study the question of Taiwan's international status and the dangerous tensions between Taiwan and China.
As many years of such efforts have come to naught, however, President Chen Shui-bian has decided the time for polite half-way measures is over. He sent applications for full membership to WHO Director-General Margaret Chan in May 2007 and to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in August 2007.
In both instances, Taiwan's applications were returned without being processed, and the reason given was the same: Accepting the applications would run counter to these organizations' "one China" policy. Secretary-General Ban even went so far as to claim that according to UN General Assembly Resolution 2758, Taiwan is a territory of the People's Republic of China.
These actions set off storms of protest in Taiwan because both Chan and Ban clearly overstepped their authority. According to the two organizations' charters and rules, Chan must immediately refer applications to the WHO membership, to be debated and voted on during the WHA meeting, and Ban must automatically refer applications to the UN Security Council for review before the matter is relayed to the UN General Assembly for discussion and voting.
This forthright approach—demanding our rightful place in the family of nations—has produced encouraging results. Even countries that do not wish to upset China have criticized the chiefs of the WHO and UN for abusing their power, and have urged them to obey their organizations' rules. And in response to Ban's claim that Taiwan is a part of the PRC, several nations that previously had maintained a policy of "creative ambiguity" concerning Taiwan's international status felt compelled to take issue with Ban's interpretation of Resolution 2758. They denied that the resolution has anything to do with Taiwan, and the United States proclaimed that it adheres to the same policy it maintained during the first decade after World War II: Taiwan is not part of the PRC, and its status has yet to be decided.
The great majority of Taiwan's citizens consider their land to indisputably be a nation, and they find it hard to comprehend how fellow democracies could imagine that Taiwan's statehood is in doubt. Many feel relieved, nevertheless, to see its economic and strategic partners finally remove at least one layer of ambiguity and agree with the people of Taiwan that we are not owned by a dictatorship.
Governments that insist Taiwan's status in the international community is undecided should explain why they think so and put forward approaches to peaceful solution of the issue in accordance with principles enshrined in the UN Charter and international conventions. After all, they have had more than half a century to make up their minds. Further delay with no resolution in sight can only aggravate tensions.
All in all, the biggest story in Taiwan over the period 2006-2007 is the surging expectation and demand for progress in convincing the international community to accept the reality that Taiwan is a nation, and to realize that its people will never sacrifice their freedom and democracy to appease China. Once this has come about, and once China has begun to keep its promises to democratize and respect human rights, a wonderful new era of lasting peace can begin to bloom in East Asia.