At the end of last month, I traveled to Williamsport in Pennsylvania to cheer on the Little League baseball team from Kaohsiung in the finals against Japan. It was an exciting extra-inning game in which the 11 and 12-year-olds from Taiwan battled it out against their counterparts from Japan.
At least in Williamsport, the team from Taiwan was able to play, albeit under the anachronistic “Chinese Taipei” title. This would be akin to having a team from, let’s say Los Angeles, play under the title “British Washington.” How silly can you get, but this is the game played by the grown-ups in the international community.
That brings me to the main issue to be discussed here: Taiwan’s exclusion from international organizations. This has been an unfair and unjust fact of life since the 1970s, when the UN accepted China’s membership, and — with UN Resolution 2758 — kicked out “the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石).”
The reason was the decades-long competition between the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Chinese Communist Party to represent “China.” The Chinese Civil War had ended in 1949 with a Communist victory, but the Nationalists — who had been driven out of China and occupied Taiwan — had continued their forlorn claim, which led to Taiwan’s isolation in the international community.
However, through hard work and perseverance in the 1980s and early 1990s, Taiwanese were able to engineer the country’s transformation into a democracy. To use a baseball analogy: The old and worn-out pitcher has disappeared, and a potent young pitcher has emerged, ready to rock the field and show the world what he’s got.
However, after much sweating and tireless practice at the bullpen, he finds out that he has been barred from the game, not because he doesn’t have the technique, but solely because one of the other players — a bully — had a fight with the old pitcher, and thus pressures the whole team to boycott him.
Taiwan deserves to be in the game, just like the other players in the global baseball game. The question is: How do we make that happen? Certainly not by giving in to the bully; that will only make the bully more aggressive and intent to make everyone else play by his rules.
We also won’t make it happen if we try to sneak in through the back door. This seems to be the approach of the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who — for the first time since 1993 — in 2008 stopped asking Taiwan’s allies in the UN to make the case for Taiwanese membership in the global body. Ma has also pushed for a fuzzy “meaningful participation” in specialized agencies, such as the World Health Assembly and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The best and most principled way is for the international community to stand by the basic principles which are enshrined in the UN Charter — freedom, democracy and self-determination — and let Taiwan in through the front door and be a full and equal member. Only then we can really play ball.
Jean Wu is a graduate in diplomacy and international relations from Seton Hall University in New Jersey. She works at the Formosan Association for Public Affairs in Washington.
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