Taiwan's Relations with Mainland China

A Tail Wagging Two Dogs

Chi Su

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134040421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Politique

Taiwan's Relations with Mainland China is the first book to deal with the role of Taiwan's leadership politics, including the personal political styles of Lee Teng-hui and Chen Shui-bian, in the development of Taiwan's mainland policy and the consequences for U.S.-Taiwan relations.

Including analysis of the critical and volatile 1988-2004 period, the Taiwan Straits crisis and cross-strait tension associated with the 2004 Taiwan presidential campaign, Su Chi weaves in his personal participation in Taiwan policy making during critical periods in Taiwan's diplomatic history to provide insight and information on cross-strait relations that is not available elsewhere

As a study of Taiwan's mainland and US policy this will be a fascinating read for students and scholars of Taiwan Politics, Chinese Foreign Policy and East Asian Security studies alike.

1 Conciliation in cross-strait relations

At these talks in Hong Kong, the Association for Relations across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS) insisted on stating the One China principle. The Straits Exchange Foundation sought and obtained agreement from the responsible organ in Taiwan that it would be acceptable for each side to state (this principle) verbally. The actual content of our verbal statement would be based on the National Unification Guideline and the National Unification Council’s resolution on the “Definition of One China” of 1 August of this year.

Straits Exchange Foundation¹
3 November 1992

On 3 November, your Foundation sent our Association a letter formally stating that, the SEF “sought and obtained agreements from the responsible organ in Taiwan that it would be acceptable for each side to state (the One China principle) verbally.” We fully respect and accept your Foundation’s suggestion … We hereby inform your Foundation by this letter of the important points of our intended verbal statement: both sides of the strait uphold the principle of one China, and actively seek national unification, but the political interpretation of the “One-China Principle” will not be referred to in the cross-strait negotiations on functional issues.

Association for Relations across the Taiwan Straits²
16 November 1992

The date 2 November 1987 is generally considered as the beginning of the current cross-strait relations, since that was the day when Taiwan lifted the nearly four-decade-long restriction on travel to the mainland to visit relatives, and began developing closer cultural and economic exchanges.³ For 38 years prior to that, Taiwan and mainland China had experienced only military conflict, diplomatic confrontation, and political struggle between them. After 1987, however, even though the two sides had continued with military face-offs and diplomatic struggles, civilian economic and cultural contacts began to develop. Even bilateral negotiations began to take place. Cross-strait relations had since acquired soft other than the traditional, hard dimensions. The agenda items became more varied. And the influencing factors naturally increased.⁴

From the end of 1987 until July 1999, when former President Lee Tenghui proposed the “special state-to-state relationship” (hereafter referred to as “Two-States Theory”), the two sides experienced both conciliation and conflict. June 1995, the time of Lee’s visit to his alma mater, Cornell University, in the US, could also be used as a point of demarcation within these 12 years. Before the Cornell visit, there was more conciliation than conflict between the two sides, and strategically, Taiwan was more proactive. After Cornell, there was more conflict than conciliation; Beijing became proactive, and Taiwan became passive. With the passage of time, the consistently critical US factor also became even more direct and prominent.

The burden of history

Although the contributing factors were not the same, China, Germany, and Korea all became divided nations following the Second World War. The eruption of the Korean War and the intervention of the US Seventh Fleet served to make permanent the post-1949 Taiwan Strait divide. But neither side of the Taiwan Strait was willing to accept this fact, and each sought to change the situation, thus rendering the Taiwan Straits an important “hot spot” on the international political stage. As the most involved superpower, almost every US president had to deal with this “hot spot”.⁵

In the initial 20 years, cross-strait relations were mainly of a military nature. One side would want to “counter-attack the mainland, kill Chu-teh and Mao Tse-tung”, and the other would want to “liberate Taiwan by force”. Gradually, these slogans were replaced with slogans such as “70 per cent political, 30 per cent military” on the Taiwan side and “peacefully liberate Taiwan” on the mainland side. At the beginning of the 1980s, the two sides had further changed their previous respective slogans to “use the Three Principles of the People to unify China” and “peaceful unification, and one country, two systems”, hence reducing the relative weighting of the military to its lowest level.⁶

Nevertheless, the diplomatic competition for the recognition of other countries continued without interruption throughout all these years. During the 22-year period up to 1971, the Republic of China (ROC), as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, enjoyed US assistance, held the upper hand vis-à-vis China, and successfully defended its UN seat. In 1971, the Nixon Administration moved away from Taiwan in order to build the strategic framework for an “anti-Soviet alliance” with China, and the situation then reversed. The ROC not only withdrew from almost all inter-governmental organizations, one by one, but the number of diplomatic allies was quickly reduced from 54 in 1971 to 22 in 1979 (when the US broke diplomatic relations), and then to 21 in 1988 (at the death of President Chiang Ching-kuo).⁷

The political struggle continued unabated. Looking back from today’s perspective, we can see that the two sides were then taking the highest possible profiles. The ROC government in Taiwan considered itself legitimate from the beginning, declared that it continued to represent all of China, and belittled the Beijing authorities as a “rebellious group”. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) government in Beijing consistently asserted that the new China had been born, that the ROC had been annihilated, and that the PRC represented all of China, including the “Chiang-clique”-controlled Taiwan. With this state of mind, in addition to the enmity of 20 years of Kuomintang (KMT)—Chinese Communist Party (CCP) civil war prior to 1949, the two governments had had almost “no contact, no negotiation, no compromise” since 1949 and the people of the two sides had not the slightest amount of interchange.

With the arrival of the 1980s, the situation began to change, particularly on the Taiwan side. With 30 years of incessant hard work, Taiwan had nurtured a prosperous economy; economic development had fostered pluralistic social aspirations; and social aspirations had in turn become the catalyst for their surging political energy. These three types of power combined to demand democratization and liberalization internally and a return to the international community and the development of a new relationship with the mainland externally.⁸

President Chiang Ching-kuo took a very close look at the evolving situation in the last years of his life, and made a series of policy adjustments in conformity with this trend. For instance, in June 1986, he decided to abandon the long-standing policy of “no co-existence” with Beijing in any international organizations, and continued to attend meetings of the Asia Development Bank “under protest”, despite the name change (“Taipei, China”) for the ROC. With this, the foundation for “pragmatic diplomacy” was laid.⁹ On 28 September 1986, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) announced its establishment at the Grand Hotel, and Chiang decided to fold his arms and allow the process of Taiwan’s party politics to be born. On 2 November 1987, two months before his death, he took another major step and opened travel to the mainland to visit relatives, and began new cross-strait relations. From this perspective, one could see that the new cross-strait relations were born of the same embryo of democratization and pragmatic diplomacy, and that the evolution of the three would henceforth be closely intertwined.

The first step is always difficult

The initial stage of cross-strait relations following the opening of travel to the mainland presented a brand-new problem to most people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. In the late 1980s, very few officials and people in the mainland had had any contact with Taiwan. Perhaps less than 3 per cent of the people living in Taiwan had been born in the mainland.¹⁰ The rest, 97 per cent, including even those officials dealing with mainland affairs, had had no contact with the mainland at all. Everything had to start from scratch.

Taiwan’s internal situation was then more complicated than what appeared at first sight. On 13 January 1988, just two months after opening travel to the mainland, President Chiang Ching-kuo passed away. The then-serving vice-president, Lee Teng-hui, immediately took over as president and KMT chairman, and began to promote “democratization”, “new cross-strait relations”, and “pragmatic diplomacy”, whose seeds had been sown in Chiang Ching-kuo’s last years, even months. Having been immersed in the so-called “Chiang Ching-kuo school” for many years, and with his educational experience in the US and Japan, Lee Teng-hui was prepared for these issues early on.¹¹ Regarding the cross-strait issue, his initial domestic focus seemed to be to build a bureaucratic framework and solidify a consensus; his outward focus was to develop a cross-strait communication channel.

On 18 August 1988, the Executive Yuan (Cabinet) established an interagency Mainland Affairs Committee to coordinate the government agencies that were dealing with mainland affairs. This was a high-level body, with Vice Premier Shih Chi-yang acting as the convener, and minister-level Chairman of the Research, Development and Evaluation Commission (RDEC) of the Executive Yuan, Ma Ying-jeou, acting as Executive Secretary. On 7 October 1990, President Lee invited senior officials from the government and various parties as well as representatives from all walks of life, to meet at the Presidential Office Building to establish a National Unification Council (NUC). The NUC sought the services of tens of outstanding members of the academic community as researchers.¹² On 30 January 1991, the Cabinet-level Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) was established, and became the Executive Yuan’s legal organ in charge of overall planning and handling of mainland affairs, with Vice Premier Shih Chi-yang acting as Chairman and Ma Ying-jeou as its minister-level first Vice Chairman. On 19 February 1991, the MAC authorized the formation of the Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF), with the highly prestigious businessman Koo Chen-fu assuming the role of Chairman of the Board. The purpose of the SEF was to act as the official “white glove”, and to directly handle first-line communication, dialogue, and exchanges. The MAC then began to work assiduously with other ministries on the Statute Governing Relations between People of the Taiwan Area and the Mainland Area, and its by-laws. On 18 September 1992, the statute was enacted. And a bureaucratic framework was thus in place.

Solidifying a consensus proved to be much harder than setting up a system. During the initial stage of the Lee administration, the KMT internal power struggle was tumultuous. On the mainland policy, one could distinguish at least two tendencies. One might be labeled the “anti-Communist, unification tendency”, and the other the “anti-Communist, status-quo tendency”. Outside the KMT, the DPP’s challenges were becoming sharper every day. The freely expressed clamor of the people was evident everywhere. Although their strength was still not enough to shake the policy-making power of the KMT, it could not be completely ignored.

Under these treacherous circumstances, Lee took several measures to forge an internal consensus within Taiwan. As a means of appeasement, he consecutively appointed the three individuals that Chiang Ching-kuo trusted most toward the end of his life (Yu Kuo-hwa responsible for the government, Lee Huan for the party, and Hau Pei-tsun for the military) as Premiers of the Executive Yuan in 1988–92. He also visited more than 500 senior National Assembly members and Legislators at their homes, used public opinion and offered preferential treatment in order to encourage these fiercely anti-Communist seniors from the mainland to retire. Furthermore, he organized the NUC to bring together different voices from the KMT, the DPP (Kang Ning-hsiang) and society as a whole, including Tien Hung-mao, Kau Ying-mao (Michael Kau), Wu Rong-i, Chang Jung-feng, all of whom would later become important officials in the DPP administration. Finally, the NUC passed the National Unification Guidelines (NUG) on 23 February 1991, which became the guiding principle for the Lee administration’s mainland policy.¹³ Years later, Lee admitted candidly in an interview with a Western scholar, Dennis Van Vranken Hickey, that the NUC and NUG were strategic moves designed to “help consolidate my position” and to outwit the old guard of the KMT.¹⁴

The NUG was a grand compromise. Its text had only 824 words, and the wording was fairly flexible. It set national unification as a goal to be attained, thus satisfying the “unification tendency.” But the goal had to be attained after moving through three phases: near term (mutually beneficial exchanges), mid term (mutual trust and cooperation), and long term (negotiations on unification). Whereas Taipei saw the cross-strait relations as already moving along in the near-term phase, the conditions for the mid-term and long-term phases were rigorous to say the least. For example, the mid-term conditions included “three links” and participation in international organizations and activities. And the long-term conditions included “political democratization and economic liberalization” in the mainland. Therefore the NUG was in effect a document sustaining the status quo. This compromise was hence able to satisfy the demands of both tendencies. Furthermore, the NUC and its research organ comprised other members of the opposition and society, including a DPP elder, Kang Ning-hsiang, who was expelled from the party for accepting NUC membership, so the NUC had a certain level of representation and credibility. And because of this, the NUG became a consensual document of the time.

On 1 August 1992, the NUC approved the resolution, “Definition of One China”, to express Taiwan’s position on the cross-strait dispute over “One China”.¹⁵ These documents had been continually quoted up to the change of power in 2000.

Equally significant, if not more, was the proclamation of the “Termination of the Period of General Mobilization for the Suppression of the Communist Rebellion” by Lee Teng-hui on 30 April 1991.¹⁶ This proclamation was epoch-making in two major ways. One, internally, the martial law decree that was instituted in 1949 was officially ended; democratization and a process of constitutional revision would soon ensue. Two, the Chinese mainland that was under Communist control was no longer regarded as a “rebellious group”, but as another part of China, and a political entity on an equal footing. As a corollary, civilian visits, trade, investment, and other activities would no longer be viewed as “communicating with the rebels” or “aiding the rebels”. The governmental policy of “no contact, no negotiation, no compromise” also changed. In other words, the ROC’s mainland policy, from this point on, entered an entirely new stage since the government had re-located its seat to Taiwan in 1949.

But internal disputes continued to mar Taipei’s decision-making and implementation processes in the first half of the 1990s, most notably the incessant quarrels between the “glove” (SEF) and the “hand” (MAC). Theoretically, the “glove” should do the “hand’s” bidding. But the SEF, being in the frontline, felt it had better judgment of its counterpart, ARATS and the overall situation. In retrospect, this “structural” problem transcended the power struggle between President Lee Teng-hui and Premier Hau Pei-tsun, because the problem continued after Chen Charng-ven, then known as Hau’s close confidant, left the SEF. It was also not due to the mainlander/native Taiwanese factor, because Chen’s successor, Chen Rong-jye, a native Taiwanese, was every bit a nuisance to the MAC Chairman, Huang Kun-huei, also a native Taiwanese. Surprisingly, the SEF—MAC relationship did not improve after President Lee sent his deputy Secretary-General Chiou Chin-yi, to SEF to take over from Chen Rong-jye. Chiou once complained that the SEF was indeed subordinate to the MAC, but that did not mean the MAC could dictate everything the SEF was to do, including the type of suits and ties to wear during the Koo-Wang talks, leaving no room for improvisation.¹⁷ This problem ameliorated only after 1995 when cross-strait talks became few and far between, and Lee Teng-hui completely centralized his power after the direct presidential election of 1996.

During this period, the tempo of Beijing’s change relative to Taiwan moved to a slower beat. The Taiwan Affairs Leading Small Group of the CCP, set up in 1956, was re-organized on 24 December 1987 (just after Taiwan opened travel to visit relatives), with Yang Shangkun, the standing vice-chairman of the Central Military Commission serving as its head (Yang later took up the position of Nationa...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Chronology
• 1 Conciliation in cross-strait relations
• 2 Tension after the Cornell visit
• 3 The Two-States Theory bombshell
• 4 The new ROC president
• 5 Two sets of “Five Nos”
• 6 The new Taiwan Strait policy of George W. Bush
• 7 One country on each side
• 8 US preventive diplomacy
• 9 Contentious Taiwan
• 10 Treacherous strait
• 11 Conclusion: six variables
• Epilogue The tail keeps wagging
• Notes