Examining Taiwan's options with China

Martin Woollacott, Guardian News Service, London

Outside the old fort in Tainan, Taiwan's second city, a group of statues shows Koxinga, the 17th-century Chinese adventurer who ousted the Dutch from the island, accepting the surrender of their commander. The Dutchman, some say, was originally shown down on both knees. Then, to limit offense to Holland -- one of Taiwan's better friends in recent years -- he was replaced by a figure on one knee, and, finally, after the Hague ignored threats from Beijing and sold submarines to Taiwan, by another standing entirely upright, head only slightly bent.

History, in other words, can be flexible. But it can also be provocative. Koxinga figures strongly in debate about identity in Taiwan, as well as in academic dispute between Beijing and Taipei. Was he an imperial official and general who restored Taiwan to China after it had been occupied by western colonizers? Or was he a ruler who set Taiwan on a separate path from that of the mainland, one which it follows to this day?

Here we have a debate about the 17th century which is also a debate about the 21st, and it is particularly relevant now. The Taiwanese president, Chen Shui-bian, has emphasized the island's right to a separate path again and again in his campaign for re- election in March, especially through his calls for referendums.

Chen has kept an earlier promise not to demand a straight referendum on independence, but has tried to establish a right to call a referendum on constitutional change. Blocked on this, he has proposed a vote on whether to demand that China withdraws missiles deployed against Taiwan.

Looking for the margin that will bring him victory, he is appealing to those who favor permanent separation from China and gambling that they are ready to come much further into the open than in the past. His moves have been sufficiently popular to have pushed his opponents in the Kuomintang -- although committed to Chinese unity -- to develop their own referendum proposals. Beijing is furious, and Washington has issued an unprecedented rebuke to the Taiwanese leader.

Chen risks upsetting the formula which has prevented a war over Taiwan and allowed China and the U.S. to work with one another on many issues. What he is doing may or may not be irresponsible, but it is not at odds with social and cultural change in Taiwan. Education, entertainment, literature, music, and film have already gone where formal politics has so far been reluctant to venture, as the Koxinga debate shows.

On Chinese postage stamps and phone cards he is pictured as the hero who restored a part of China seized by foreigners. Taiwanese descended from the mainlanders who came to the island when the Kuomintang retreated here toward the end of the Chinese civil war would tend to agree.

But most Taiwanese descended either from the original non- Chinese population, or from the settlers who arrived over the centuries, mainly from the Chinese province of Fukien, would not. To many of them Koxinga is the "Father of Taiwan", the man who created the conditions in which the island could be settled and developed, resulting in a society that is part of the Chinese world but not necessarily part of the Chinese state. A novelized version of the Koxinga tale was a bestseller in Taiwan last year.

Taiwanese history, once almost a non-subject under the KMT, re-emerged as the country became more democratic. The subject has come even more into its own since the presidency passed from the KMT to the Democratic Progressive party three years ago. The DPP, the party of choice for most ethnic Taiwanese, always argued that Taiwanese culture got short shrift from the old KMT.

Schoolchildren, it was said in those days, knew more about the Yangtse than they did about the Tamsui River. A leading historian, Prof. Fu-san Huang, says that "the KMT saw themselves as re-Sinicising Taiwan, after it had been Nipponised by years of Japanese rule, so Taiwanese history was politically taboo until martial law ended in 1987". Then President Lee Teng-hui, from the KMT but a native Taiwanese, brought educational and academic programs under his slogan of "Knowing Taiwan".

Fu-san Huang is sure that Taiwanese history, as it is now being researched and taught, is reinforcing the Taiwanese sense of separateness. The island, he says, was started on the path to a development more advanced than that of the mainland by the Dutch, and was later "part of Japan's successful modernization at a time when China's own efforts to modernize were faltering... The history of Taiwan is quite different from that of China."

When the nationalists took over, the population was seen by its new masters as backward, but was in fact better-educated and moreprosperous than that on the mainland. The new history, as it bears on the period of repressive nationalist rule, has helped younger people of mainland background to understand how badly the regime behaved in its early days and why many Taiwanese of local origin do not wish to be part of China. Efforts to popularize Taiwanese culture under the DPP have included the recording of folk songs, a history of the island in comic strip form, and support for plays and operas -- including several about Koxinga -- and for painting, architecture, and historic buildings.

All this, partly disguised politics in the first place, is inevitably playing out more clearly into politics proper. The first passports with the word Taiwan on the cover were issued in September, while Chen has taken to declaring that there is "one country on each side" of the Taiwan Strait. The division which results is a complex one.

Those ranged intellectually against each other in Taiwan on mainland-island questions share a sense that history matters and an anxiety that the younger generation is not listening as much as it should to this long-delayed debate. Fu-san Huang worries that "young people are more globalised than Taiwanised, in fact. People who suffered resisting KMT rule see a lot of ignorance among the young about the recent past and their parents' and grandparents' sacrifices."

The older mainland generation has similar doubts about its young people and their historical memory of the struggle against the communists. These unengaged among the young, watching Japanese TV and following global fashion, constitute a third party. The pragmatists, who know there must be some accommodation with the fact of Chinese power and want Taiwan to feel its way towards it, are present in all camps.

China continues to try to influence Taiwanese politics by fiat, by threat, or by pressure exerted through the Americans. But this is not just a matter of the choices made by leaders. Democratic politics make their demands, as politicians like Chen look for the votes they need. They may push beyond the line which prudence would lay down, but powerful forces are propelling them.