TAIWAN: CHINA'S LAST FRONTIER

Taiwan: China's Last Frontier

Simon Long

M MACMILLAN

© Simon Long 1991

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First published 1991

Published by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RC2 l 2XS and London Cornpanies and reprcsc11tatives throughout the world

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Long, Simon, 1955 -Taiwan: China's last frontier. I. Taiwan. Foreign relations with China, history 2. China. Foreign relations with Taiwan, history I. Title 327.51'249'051

ISBN 978-0-333-51293-7 ISBN 978-0-230-37739-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230377394

To my Mother and Father

Contents

Acknowledgements

Note on Romanisation

Map: China and Taiwan

Map: Taiwan

Introduction

Geography and Early History

Xl

Xll

XllI

XIV

XVll

Topography: The beautiful island 1

Pre-history: Before the Chinese 2

Early contacts with the mainland 4-

Early foreign contacts 6

Taiwan under the Dutch: 1624-62 9

The Koxinga interregnum: 1661-83 11

The 'Wild East': Taiwan 1683-1850 13

Taiwan joins international politics: The nineteenth century 16

Early modernisation: Self-strengthening on Taiwan 20

The Japanese annexation and the Republic of Taiwan: 1895 23

Taiwan under the Japanese: 1895-194-5 26

2 The Kuomintang

The Kuomintang in 194-5

Sun Vat-sen and the origins of the KMT

The Kuomintang reorganises: 1916-28

Vll

33

33

34-

4-1

Vlll Contents

The Kuomintang in power: 1928-37 46

The second united front: 1937-45 50

3 Taiwan's Political Development: 1945-86 53

The KMT takeover of Taiwan 53

Defeat on the mainland and the 1946 Constitution 56

The KMT cleans up its act on Taiwan 59

Political development in the 1950s and 1960s: Mainlander dictatorship 61

The birth of the opposition: 1969-86 66

Chiang Kai-shek and the succession problem: The son also rises 72

4 Taiwan's Economic Development 75

Introduction 75

The first stage: Agricultural development 75

The driving forces of early economic growth 80

The second stage: Exports for growth 82

The restructuring of Taiwan's economy in the 1960s 86

The third phase: The 1970s and 1980s 89

Present economic structure: Assets 95

Present economic structure: Liabilities 101

5 Relations with China 1945-76 110

The lines are drawn: 1945-54 110

Hostili ty in the 1950s 116

Stalemate in the 1960s and 1970s 123

Contents IX

6 Taiwan's Foreign Relations 129

Introduction 129

Relations with the United States 130

Taiwan and the United Nations 140

Taiwan and Japan 142

Taiwan and the Soviet bloc 147

Relations with the overseas Chinese 150

Taiwan's current foreign policy 152

7 China Changes Tack: Peking's 1980s Taiwan Policy 158

Introduction 158

China's new approach - the Nine Principles 159

The Hong Kong example 165

China's pragmatic foreign policy in the late 1980s 169

China's Taiwan policy in the late 1980s 172

8 Political Reform in Taiwan 1986-89 180

The pressures on Chiang Ching-kuo 180

The lifting of martial law 182

Reform of the legislature 185

Reform of the KMT 189

The Democratic Progressive Party 194

The growth of protest 198

9 Taiwan's Opening to Mainland China 203

The 1980s debate in Taiwan on mainland policy 203

The change finally comes 206

x Contents

The trade and investment debate 210

The Thirteenth Congress and after: Mainland fever 216

Taiwan and the Peking massacre 221

lO What Next? Scenarios for the Future 227

Introduction and outline: The options for Taiwan's future 227

The preservation of the status quo 228

Reunification on China's terms: peacefully, under 'one country - two systems' formula 232

Reunification on the KMT's terms: Under the 'three principles of the people' (or 'one country-two governments?) 235

Independence for Taiwan as a separate nation 237

The military option 239

A compromise? 243

Notes and References 246

Select Bibliography 252

Index 258

Acknowledgements

My debts to those who helped me form the knowledge and opinions expressed in this book are too numerous to catalogue. However, I would like to express thanks to Georgina Wilde, my friend and editor at the Economist Intelligence Unit, who, unawares, set this book in motion. Basil Clarke and Michael Williams at the BBC Far East Service gave me the time to write it. My editor at Macmillan, Belinda Dutton, and copy-editor Anne Rafique were models of professionalism and forbearance in dealing with a remote and unreliable author. But above all, I am indebted to Imogen Sharp, who made many invaluable comments on the manuscript, and helped me write it in many other ways besides. The errors are, of course, all my own.

Xl

Note on Romanisation

The question of how to transliterate Chinese names into English is a vexed one. The 'pinyin' system now standard on the mainland has made no inroads on Taiwan, which still refers to mainland leaders under the older 'Wade-Giles' sys­tem (Deng Xiaoping, for example, is known as Teng Hsiao­p'ing). To complicate matters further, many in Taiwan use yet other methods of spelling their own names in English. The author has opted in this book to follow no consistent system, but rather to Romanise in what seems to him now the most familiar form to the reader of English, e.g. Mao Zedong, not Mao Tse-tung, but Chiang Ching-kuo, not Jiang Jingguo, and Kuomintang not Guomindang.

XlI

CHINA GG

EAST CHINA

SEA ,I:)

~()iPei.) ~.

~ ri' Ryukyu Is.

HONG KONG

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ITAIWANI

.-" Strait

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PHILIPPINE

SEA

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Mindoro'\) () 'I:

Nan J ~panaYD ~ S\ Samar

pala;? ~ 0 • «fD Yi~ " Su/u Sea ~Mindanao

o '" . o

p= :/

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PACIFIC

OCEAN

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Of-I _----,r-2--'?_o""T, __ ..-J,4~0 Miles o 200 400 600 Km

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.' II 'V. ,:aisha rao

MakUng~ ;:,. e.r;;nghu

Tao

o· Pachao Tao

1I'ChimeiHsu

Key

Taiwan

Strait

TAIWAN

Liuchiu Hsu C>

Hsian (County) Boundary

Main Road

~ Main Railway

® International Airport

XIV

PACIFIC

OCEAN

'1 Lu Tao

c:1 Lan Hsu

20 40 Miles r-----2r~--~1--4Tb-----6~~'Km

In the present and in the fUture we seek the peacefUl unification of the motherland. We will not easily abandon this wish. But if this wish cannot be realised for a protracted period, and if it is clear that some elements in Taiwan are opposing unification with foreign encouragement, then we should re-examine the situation. If we're sure of our capabil­ities, then why not consider other means of unification? But we should be sure of the result. Unification is the last frontier for China. We must recover our fUll sovereignty.

Hu Yaobang, 1986 (at the time General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party) I

xv

Introduction

On the very night of the massacre, there was a mass rally in Chiang Kai-shek's memorial in the centre of Taipei. The crowd there sang songs, which, through a connection of telephone lines were listened to by students in Tian An Men Square, so they were overjoyed about the connection of telephone lines. But suddenly, the other side, namely in Peking, said, 'They opened fire', and the line was cut off. The crowd in Chiang Kai-shek memorial suddenly became silent, and they all wept.2

Thus Ma Ying-cheou, Chairman of Taiwan's ruling National­ist Party's Mainland Affairs Committee described the events of the early hours of 4- June 1989, in Taipei. That was how the first news reached Taiwan of the Chinese People's Liberation Army's brutal suppression of nearly two months of peaceful pro-democracy agitation on the streets of Peking.

The scene he described would have been unthinkable just months before. Who would have believed that the people of Peking would so long have defied their government to pursue their protests? Who would have believed that the old men of the Chinese leadership would have sent tens of thousands of armed soldiers in tanks and armoured personnel carriers bearing automatic rifles to fire on unarmed civilians in the heart of China's traditional capital? And who would have believed that, in the middle of Taipei, in the memorial to the fiercely anti-communist founder of Nationalist China on Tai­wan, Chiang Kai-shek, the general public would be singing songs in unison with communist students in Peking?

The Peking massacre marked the end of a chapter not just in China's ten-year pursuit of 'reform and the open door'. It also marked a turning point in relations with Taiwan, and the end of another chapter in China's international image, during which it had been possible to argue that the rein­tegration of China's 'separated territories' - Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macao - could be achieved smoothly.

That telephone lines could be established with Peking was a feature of a remarkable opening up of Taiwan to the mainland

XVll

XVlll Introduction

in the late 1980s. Sinc;e 1979, China had been trying to woo Taiwan into acknowledging Chinese sovereignty with offers of autonomy and friendship. But the rival Nationalist govern­ment on Taiwan had refused any contact with the mainland; it saw the communists as rebels, bandits and usurpers of its proper position as the legitimate government of all of China. However, by the late 1980s, the Nationalists decided they had little to fear from allowing some tourist and commercial dealings with China, so by the time of the Peking massacre, the sense of kinship with mainland China went beyond the sense of ethnic and national identity that the Nationalists had tried to instil. Many had been to the mainland, had met long­lost family there, had made friends there, and felt involved in the struggle for democracy.

In Taiwan itself, some would argue that this is 'false consciousness'. Almost nine-tenths of the population have no parental or grandparental links on the mainland. They are ethnically Chinese, but in the way that many Australians are ethnically British. Taiwan's people had the dubious distinction from 1895 to 1945 of living in Japan's first colony of modern times. They have been ruled since 1945 by an elite of mainland-born administrators and soldiers who took refuge there when Chiang Kai-shek's armies were routed in the civil war of 1945-9 by Mao Zedong's communists. They had moved their government, still purporting to be the 'Republic of China', to Taiwan, and had built it up as a 'bastion for national recovery'.

Since then Taiwan's history has been one of remarkable economic achievement, accompanied by political repression, and growing diplomatic isolation. It has prospered financially but has seen its political status in the world dwindle, so that now all the world's major powers and diplomatic organisa­tions, and all but a couple of dozen mostly tiny countries, recognise the claim of the Peking government to rule China, and that 'Taiwan is part of China'.

This volume will consider the relationship between Taiwan and China. It will examine Taiwan's history, and show that the ideal of national unity to which governments in both Peking and Taipei pledge loyalty is a dream with only tenuous roots in past reality. It will then consider the background of the Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang, which has ruled Tai-

Introduction XIX

wan since 1945, and claims to have had the right to rule all of China since 1928. As a background to the present relationship with China, economic and political developments in Taiwan since 1945 will be considered, as well as the way tensions across the 100-mile straits which divide them have ebbed and flowed since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949.

The last decade has been a period when tensions have been at a low ebb, when there has seemed no immediate reason why the peculiar status quo should not last. Peculiar, because two governments, each claiming legitimacy over a fifth of the world's population, have survived for so long without anni­hilating each other. I will argue, however, that this state of affairs cannot endure indefinitely, and that the present impasse holds the seeds of a transformation that will result either in confrontation, in the reintegration of Taiwan into China in some way, or in Taiwan's achievement of some form of separate nationhood. This last eventuality, independence in name as well as in fact, seems to me the least likely outcome. And I think that is a shame. There are 20 million people on Taiwan, who have made a good job of turning their island into a prosperous, booming, lively home. They have done this under the watchful eye of an overbearing communist neigh­bour, and increasingly abandoned by their ally, the United States, for whom they at one time promised to be an 'unsinkable aircraft carrier'. The author's bias is to feel they have a right to determine their own political future. That they are unlikely to be given that chance, seems to me one of the tragedies of the post-war era.