Former president Lee Teng-hui’s (李登輝) statement to a Deutsche Welle reporter that the cross-strait relationship was a state-to-state relationship or a special state-to-state relationship may have been legally flawed, but his aim and logic were abundantly clear.
When President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) drew parallels between the two Germanys and the cross-strait situation when speaking to German visitors, he had no idea what he was talking about.
After its defeat in World War II, Germany was occupied by the Allied forces and its division was forced to accommodate the US and Russia, making it a prototypical divided country.
Taiwan, on the other hand, was ceded by the Qing Empire to Japan, which Tokyo later renounced in the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Legally speaking, Taiwan did not belong to China and so it stands to reason that it never seceded from it.
Since there are both fundamental legal and factual differences, the only useful example Taiwan can extract from the German experience is that the two Germanys coexisted peacefully as two sovereign states and that both joined the UN, although they maintained a special state-to-state relationship.
From this perspective, Lee’s special state-to-state dictum is actually a concession because it implies that there are two Chinas and that there is a possibility that the two in the future will merge into one China through peaceful means.
However, Lee’s pragmatic view had been criticized by both China and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) for creating an “independent Taiwan” and “Taiwanese independence.”
The KMT does not recognize that Taiwan is an independent and sovereign state, nor does it promote the view that the relationship between Taiwan and China is a special state-to-state relationship.
That only leaves the unification part of the German comparison, but that part is unacceptable to Taiwan.
The German division was forced and the communist government in East Germany was supported by the Soviet Union which did not want unification.
This problem was not resolved until the weakening of the Soviet Union toward the end of the 1980s, when the East German public voted to join democratic West Germany and return to one united Germany.
The two sides of the Taiwan Strait differ tremendously in both territorial and population size.
In addition, the Chinese communist state aims to annex democratic Taiwan. This is the exact opposite of the situation in East Germany, where the population was only too happy to accept the West German democratic system.
However, even if the Chinese authoritarian system were to collapse, the Chinese people would not likely hold a referendum to join democratic Taiwan.
And even if they were, we have already seen how the incompetent KMT government would be unable to rule such a country.
Ma does not promote the view that Taiwan is a sovereign state, nor does he dare promote the view that the cross-strait relationship is a special state-to-state relationship.
Instead, he accepts the “one China” principle and promotes eventual unification.
Empty talk about the experience of the two Germanys only reinforces the impression that he is supporting China’s ambitions to annex Taiwan and incorporate it into China’s bastardized communist system.
James Wang is a political commentator.
TRANSLATED BY PERRY SVENSSON
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