Robert Scheer, author of The Pornography of Power: How Defense Hawks Hijacked 9/11 and Weakened America, was recently seen at Huffington Post, SFGate, SFChronicle, Digg, and other sites arguing that "Taiwan had Declared Peace on China". Scheer's misunderstanding of the situation is profound and his portrayal is factually inept. What it really shows is how progressives continue to fail Taiwan and its democracy by viewing the island through Cold War lenses.
Scheer writes:
Not that it was much noticed by the media or presidential candidates, but this long chapter of Cold War conflict has been closed and a new era of peace proclaimed by once strident foes. Taiwanese businessmen already are major investors in the mainland, and the new Taiwan government has recognized that reality by quickly pushing for full normalization of trade and other accommodations.
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For years now, the Chinese on both sides of the strait have been acting as if they are members of one nation, with the descendants of those who fled the mainland with Chiang Kai-shek building mansions in their old villages and increasingly preferring that their offspring study in China rather than at American schools. Thus, it was not surprising when the leader of the old nationalist Kuomintang Party, which won the recent Taiwan election, quickly went to the mainland to pledge the dawn of a new era. Gone is the prime excuse for a major U.S. military presence in the Pacific, now that the Taiwanese have made their separate peace.
In Scheer's view the flights herald "peace", China has no designs on Taiwan, the Taiwanese have made peace with China, and the Bush Administration is trying to push weapons on the island.
All of this is completely wrong.
Scheer's piece is shaped by the outdated, uninformed Cold War lenses that continue to prevent progressives from taking a good look at Taiwan. As a result, the US defenders of the progressive pro-democracy side in Taiwan politics are all neo-cons, while the US left either sides with the authoritarians in Beijing, or the right-wing party, the KMT, that now controls both the executive and the legislature in Taiwan.
What has actually happened is that the KMT, which gave Taiwan 50 years of martial law and a totally corrupt developmentalist state that continues to impair the growth of progressive politics and policy here, took total control of the legislature in January, and put Ma Ying-jeou, who built his political career in opposition to democracy before experiencing a sudden conversion in the 1990s, into the Presidency in March.
The KMT had long been coordinating policy with Beijing to suppress the growth of the island's democracy movement and its unique identity. The KMT party Chairman, Wu Po-hsiung, who indeed went to China after the Presidential election, went there as part of this ongoing cooperation, the key components of which are back-channel and unknown to the public.
Both the KMT and Beijing hated the previous President, Chen Shui-bian, a former corporate lawyer and human rights lawyer who came to power in 2000 and thence negotiated with China from the firm position that Taiwan's sovereignty was non-negotiable. The current flights between Taiwan and China stem from the groundwork laid in the negotiations by the pro-Taiwan and pro-democracy party, the DPP with Beijing. China, for its part, was very successful in portraying Chen as "troublemaker." In this it has been supported by the Bush Administration, which has, in the words of Jonathon Manthorpe, the veteran Canadian journalist, "outsourced its Taiwan policy to Beijing." Obsessed with its defeats in the Middle East, the Bush Administration does not want Taiwan to joggle its elbow. Further, it wants China's cooperation on North Korea. Hence, it has decided to sell out the island.
To understand how uninformed Scheer's piece is, imagine that it was discussing not Taiwan but Ukraine. Imagine further that a pro-Russian anti-democracy party came to power in Ukraine and wanted to annex the nation back to Russia. Now imagine that Scheer was praising the resulting situation in which Ukraine's sovereignty was impaired for no gain at all, but because the pro-Russian party hopes to annex the nation back to Russia. And imagine that the US was backing the pro-Russia party.... that is what has happened in Taiwan, where the current President, Ma Ying-jeou, was backed by both Beijing and Washington. In other words, this is a situation in which a progressive out to call into question the actions of Beijing, Taipei, and Washington, not laud them as "peace moves."
The current party in power, the KMT (Chinese Nationalist Party) has ruled Taiwan since 1945. In 1949 it relocated its government there, falsely claimed that Taiwan was part of China, and has been aching to annex the island back to China ever since. The US position helped prevent this tragedy; it was, and remains, that the status of Taiwan is undetermined. With the advent of democracy KMT elites have responded by moving closer to Beijing even as they assure the rank and file that they love Taiwan and court moderate votes by promising they will not sell out the island.
Far from Taiwan being some Cold War stalking horse for a war with China, the Council on Foreign Relations and other Establishment groups are quietly pushing for Taiwan to be annexed to China, because they want to make big bucks off China. Progressives having abandoned Taiwan's democracy, the only support it has in the US is in Congress, and among right wingers.
The flights are not "Taiwan declaring peace" because Taiwan is not the cause of conflict, China is. China wants to annex Taiwan, a nation no ethnic Chinese emperor ever owned, and which the PRC has never controlled, and China has threatened to kill anyone who gets in its way, and to plunge the region into war. Far from "making money" China is continuing a massive military build up aimed at Taiwan, and is not only claiming Taiwan, but also other islands in the South China Sea and abroad. At present 1,300 missiles are pointed at the island. There cannot be "peace" until the military threat to Taiwan ceases.
The DPP, which had already instituted limited flights and tourism, had bundled tourist flights from China with cargo and shipping links, which the island really needs. China does not want those; because Taiwan's logistics firms are far better than its own. The KMT instead accepted a flight agreement under which all Chinese tourists travel only on Chinese aircraft to Taiwan. This is no "declaring peace." It is capitulation. Because the DPP drew the limit at sovereignty, it had a strong negotiating stance. By the same token, because the KMT does not care about Taiwan's independent sovereignty, there is no limit to what it can give away. Ma has already indicated that Taiwan's independent foreign policy will be suspended, and the KMT has already begun to roll back the separation between the party and the military achieved as a series of democratic reforms under the DPP.
Ironically, Scheer's wrongheadedness is driven his Cold War analysis of events. Bush is not trying to sell weapons to Taiwan -- quite the opposite! As a number of major publications have reported -- including Defense News and WaPo, the Bush Administration has instituted a de facto arms freeze on Taiwan since 2006, when it decided not to sell Taiwan the F-16 fighters we need if we are to keep our democracy here. The Bush Administration's policy is in fact just the opposite of what Scheer claims: thee Administration is quietly shoving the island into China's arms and refusing to give it weapons. If Scheer was not guided by his out of date Cold War analytical stance, he might, with a ten minute Google search, have discovered this.
The Taiwanese and Chinese are not acting like they are one nation. Few Taiwanese want to become part of the PRC. Rather, they are doing what any pragmatic people might do: invest where they can make money. Peace cannot prevail across the Taiwan Strait until China gives up its desire to annex Taiwan by force, and that cannot happen until US progressives and conservatives get together on this issue. Until Taiwan means something to progressives, the way Tibet does.
There's so much that is wrong in this awful article, but I think the saddest part of this misguided piece is that it is just another example of how progressives have completely failed Taiwan's democracy, because they refuse to see Taiwan as it is, and instead use analytical stances that are now 40 years out of date. Tragically, while history has advanced, they have not. Indeed, judging from the cluelessness of Scheer's writing, they haven't even discovered Google yet.
Michael Turton
The View from Taiwan
http://michaelturton.blogspot.com