Taiwan independence: one word for 4 dreams

The notion of “strategic ambiguity” that French President Emmanuel Macron recently adopted has long been familiar to specialists on the question of the Taiwan Strait and the possible attempted invasion of the island by China. popular. On January 1, 1979, following Washington’s break with Taipei and the establishment of diplomatic relations with Beijing by President Jimmy Carter, the American Congress passed a “Taiwan Relations Act” requiring the American executive to ensure that Taiwan can continue to protect itself, through arms sales, from a possible Chinese attack.

Since this date, the United States has maintained its one-China policy, recognizing only one state to represent China in the world and at the UN: the People’s Republic of China (capital Beijing), and not plus the Republic of China (capital Nanjing, then Taipei). The latter was a founding member of the UN, and survives today in Taiwan, whose official name the island retains in international law.

Taiwan (Republic of China) against the People’s Republic of China Credit: wikipedia

In truth, Washington has never done more than take note of the fact that Beijing considers Taiwan to be an integral part of China. The United States has in fact never legally validated Beijing’s claim to be, under international law, the sovereign state on the island. Attached as they are to status quo in the strait, the Americans have always maintained a double opposition: to the attack on Taiwan by China, and to the proclamation of Taiwan’s independence (taidu).

A look back at history: at the end of the Second World War, in application of MacArthur’s General Order No. 1 and in accordance with international agreements between the allies, the island and surrounding islets, then under Japanese control since 1895, were entrusted to the Republic of China, led by Chiang Kai-shek.

On October 25, 1945, the transfer of police power to Taiwan was officially recorded. The Republic of China, capital Nanjing, had announced, in a memorandum, to take possession of the territory and all Japanese possessions and public infrastructures on the island.

Then, in 1947 and 1948, Nanking organized general elections in which the Taiwanese participated, who were therefore included in the Chinese political and civic body. Finally, the Treaty of San Francisco (1951) then the Treaty of Taipei (a separate peace treaty between Japan and Republican China, now in Taipei) finalized, in 1952, the formal transfer of sovereignty after fifty years of colonization by the Japanese archenemy.

A few months after the inclusion of Taiwan in Republican China, a delegation of Taiwanese patricians flew to Nanking, to negotiate autonomy for Taiwan within the Republic. They received a dismissal from the Generalissimo. Already, many Taiwanese, exposed to the corrupt administration set up on the island by Nanking, dreamed of the emancipation of their island from the mainland Chinese Republic which had just absorbed it.

This request for autonomy certainly did not yet resemble an “independence movement” on the island controlled by the continent for several months. But the events that followed precipitated this development.

Then came the terrible events of 1947: the island’s uprising, following the death of a demonstrator, against the authority of the government of Chen Yi, the inept and corrupt governor general chosen by Chiang Kai-shek to lead Formosa. . The starting point of an island revolt, put down in blood: the events of March 1947, and the thousands of deaths among the Taiwanese elite and population after the savage repression by troops sent by Nanking. It was the founding act of the Taiwanese independence movement. From then on, the aspiration for autonomy was transformed into a dream of full independence. With, as a horizon, the construction of a sovereign State.

New upheaval in 1949: the withdrawal to Taipei of the Chinese republican central government, defeated on the continent by Mao’s armies, reduced the “Republic of China” to this large island of 36,000 km², but so small compared to the Chinese continent, which was not part of its initial national territory.

The very project of Taiwanese independence was changing ipso facto of nature since the island became the seat of the Republic, the center of which had moved to the margins of the continent. If the island declared its independence, then the Republic would disappear for good. In fact, in the insularized Republic, which became a dictatorship due to the anti-communist struggle, “Taiwan independence” became in an instant the supreme political prohibition. And, of course, the ban in question was not at all a project of independence from Mao’s new China, the People’s Republic of China, proclaimed in Beijing on October 1, 1949… which never controlled Taiwan.

The difficulty comes from the fact that Beijing was unable to put an end to the legal existence of the Republic that it claimed to replace, and whose seat at the UN it coveted. A seat that Taiwan retained until 1971.

During these years of standoff between Chiang Kai-shek and Mao Zedong, the idea of ​​“Taiwan independence” took on new meanings on both sides of the Strait. The idea of ​​the separatists? Breaking off relations with (Republican) China which had brutally occupied the island, according to them, since 1945. An emancipation which allowed, on the international scene, to escape from the ambiguity of this insularized China, and not to risk one day fall back under the tutelage of the continent, now communist.

On the Beijing side, the meaning was different. Since 1949, the Communists have considered the island as an integral part of their territory, although no international treaty supports this reasoning. Any desire for autonomy for the island or change of name of its regime is therefore comparable, according to Beijing, to a desire for independence from People’s China, that is to say, an act of secession.

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However, strictly from the point of view of international law, Taiwan has never been integrated into the People’s Republic of China. Seen from Taiwan, there is therefore no independence to proclaim from People’s China.

On a legal level, we are in fact not in the presence of a case of Taiwanese secessionism, but rather of Chinese irredentism! In other words, Beijing’s nationalist demand for the return of territories where an ethnically Chinese population would live under foreign domination by illegitimate institutions claiming to be sovereign, while the “Republic of China”, according to Beijing, would have disappeared in 1949 to make way for the only “People’s Republic of China”.

If the Chinese Communists could establish that the desire of certain Taiwanese to proclaim a “Republic of Taiwan” by changing the name of their regime (the Republic of China) is a form of “secession”, then UN law would legitimate the use of force by Beijing to prevent the fragmentation of its national territory.

Except that’s not the case. And that as it stands, Beijing’s intention would rather be an attempt at annexation of a sovereign state by another sovereign state. Chinese irredentism reflects a desire, typical of an authoritarian regime, to annex a territory that does not belong to it, disguised behind the caricatured, and above all unfounded, term of secessionism.

Faced with this discourse from Beijing, and the militarism that accompanies it, a fourth meaning to the expression “Taiwan independence” has emerged, little by little, in recent years: that of the defense of sovereignty and independence. independence of the island, called the Republic of China. This is the concept called huadu : the independence of Taiwan as a Republic of China, without the need to change the name of the regime!

A singular situation to see the words “independence of Taiwan”, once hated by the Republic of Chiang Kai-shek, used today in the defense of this same insularized Republic of China!

Logical consequence: on the island, the radical “independenceists” continue to call for a change of name of the regime to abandon this Republic of China, certainly Taiwanized, but which they still consider to have come from abroad, and which has led for decades.

These breakaway separatists do not have harsh enough words towards the Progressive Democratic Party – committed to protecting the independence of the island – currently in power and whose strategic ambiguity they detest. An executive which is also attacked for its “independence” by both the Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party, supporters of one and the same China.

Cautious and pragmatic, the Democratic Progressive Party therefore strives not to touch the institutions of the Republic of China by limiting itself to the status what, and to postpone until better times the possibility of the proclamation of a new regime while avoiding any conflict.

Faced with this Taiwanization of the Republic, the post-war enemy brothers, the Kuomintang of Chiang Kai-shek’s heirs and the Chinese Communist Party, agreed, in 2004, to work hand in hand in order to prevent at all costs the proclamation of a national regime in Taiwan.

There are therefore several meanings to distinguish depending on who uses the expression. Arguably, the word is hardly appropriate to speak of Taiwanese opposed to unification (or annexation) by China, since the island has no independence to proclaim. However, decades of use of the terms “Taiwan independence”, including with multiple meanings, have infused so much into the minds of the Taiwanese that few replace it with other, more appropriate terms.

According to the latest polls to date, 1.2% of Taiwanese say they are in favor of immediate unification. Conversely, 21.5% of the population want the proclamation of a truly Taiwanese regime in a future that would be favorable to it. If we add those who wish to maintain the status quo indefinitely (33.2%), and the 3.8% in favor of the immediate proclamation of a new island regime, we arrive at a total of 58.5% of the population. which rejects unification in principle, whether now or in the future.

There remains 28% of respondents who, out of pragmatism, wait-and-see or opportunism, are in favor of maintaining the status quo until a decision is made to change the name of the regime… or unification under the aegis of Beijing. An approach whose opinion surveys have recorded an erosion since 2005 in the face of President Xi Jinping’s increasingly brutal threats of annexation.