Writing for UnHerd, Bill Hayton wonders just how Chinese Taiwan really is. Looking back to the essentially colonial relationship between the island and mainland since the time when most of modern Taiwan was brought under Chinese rule in the 17th century, Hayton sees some similarities to the relationship between Britain and Ireland. I certainly don’t claim to be an expert on the history (and Ireland is an intriguing if imperfect analogy), but this article is an interesting and provocative read (it’s worth looking at some of the comments too).
Moving on through the years, Hayton notes that:
Taiwan only formally became a distinct province of the Qing Empire in 1887, two years after the end of a war with France, in which control of the island’s ports had become strategically important. The new provincial administration made a display of bringing the benefits of civilisation from the mainland: railways, medicines and taxes. Local reactions were mixed.
Reading that made me think of Algeria, which formally became a French département in 1848 and remained one until independence over a century later. Taiwan’s status as a Chinese province did not, however, last so long:
The island remained under Qing control for just eight years before it was snatched by Japan at the humiliating end of the 1894-95 Sino-Japanese War. The treaty signed in the port city of Shimonoseki granted Japan control of Taiwan “in perpetuity and full sovereignty”. Taiwan became a colony again, this time to a different master. There was some resistance on the island, but it was rapidly snuffed out. Another set of railways, medicines and taxes were introduced.
Within a few years, people on the Chinese mainland forgot the cause of Taiwan. There was no agitation to “restore” the country to mainland control.
For years, neither China’s Nationalist regime nor its communist opponents saw Taiwan as a part of the country, and Hayton points out that:
At its sixth congress in 1928, the [Chinese] Communist Party recognised the “Taiwanese” as a separate nationality. In November 1938 the party plenum resolved to “build an anti-Japanese united front between the Chinese and the Korean, Taiwanese and other peoples”, implicitly drawing a distinction between Taiwanese and Chinese. Both Nationalists and Communists regarded the “Taiwanese” as a distinct minzu — which can mean both “nation” and “ethic group”.
The attitudes of the Nationalists changed during the Second World War, and they reclaimed it after the Japanese surrender, receiving a distinctly mixed reception. Ironically, of course, they were to make it their refuge after the communist victory in 1949, but the divisions between the arrivals from the mainland and the native Taiwanese remain to this day:
The ranks of the Guomindang are still largely filled by the descendants of those who came to the island with Chiang Kai-shek. The current ruling party, the Democratic Progressive Party, represents that part of the population that resists the idea of mainland control. The family of Taiwan’s current president, Tsai Ing-wen, is of Hakka origin, for example.
Hayton concludes as follows:
Most Taiwanese — let’s call them that — enjoy the status quo across the Taiwan Strait. The PRC is Taiwan’s biggest trading partner, many Taiwanese are related to families living on the other side of the water, and in normal times the island benefits from the relatively free flow of people and trade across it. Aside from a few fantasists, no-one in Taiwan wants a war with the PRC, but nor do they want to be “reunified” with an authoritarian state that appears to be on a political journey from “socialism with Chinese characteristics” to “national-socialism with Chinese characteristics”.
Xi Jinping learnt his history from the simplistic nationalistic books of his youth: just like Chiang Kai-shek, he is a colonialist. As the people of Tibet and Xinjiang can testify, he has a “steamroller” view of national unity. He orders homogeneity in the name of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation”. He will not rest until he has ‘restored’ every rock and reef in the South China Sea and barren Himalayan mountainside to the motherland. Taiwan would be the jewel in his proletarian crown.
Interesting, and it’s worth noting that Hayton considers that the Chinese Communist Party is on, to use his phrase, a “journey” to fascism, a view with which I would certainly agree.
How much difference all this makes, I don’t know. Probably not much. As someone reminded me the other day, the U.S. has long accepted the idea of “one China” (for a brief discussion of a concept that, to the U.S., is more nuanced than Beijing would like, please take a look here). And there is no doubt that, as Hayton observes, if Taiwan were to formally declare independence, China would regard it as grounds for war. Nevertheless, amid all the angry rhetoric from Beijing, Hayton’s article is worth pondering. And, even regardless of the history, the basic principle of self-determination ought to mean that the Taiwanese — by which I mean the inhabitants of Taiwan and its other islands — ought to be fully free to decide their own future. That they are denied that choice says everything about practical reality, and nothing about what is right.