Former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) once called former US president Richard Nixon a “clown.” Chiang’s son and successor, Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國), called former US secretary of state and national security adviser Henry Kissinger a “traitor.” In contrast, Chinese leaders from former Chinese Communist Party (CCP) chairman Mao Zedong (毛澤東) to Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近) have called Nixon and Kissinger “old friends of China.” In the zero-sum game played by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the CCP, the two parties have sharply contrasting love-hate attitudes toward Kissinger because he sold out the KMT and embraced the CCP.
The unworthy successors of the Chiangs now praise Kissinger, who died on Wednesday last week, for his contributions to “peace in the Indo-Pacific region.” They forget how the “blood letter from Nanhai,” which was fabricated by the KMT, said that Kissinger’s actions in negotiating the Paris Peace Accords caused South Vietnam to fall into the hands of the communists and countless “boat people” to flee across the seas as refugees.
Kissinger was a pragmatist who had no regard for the rights of small and weak nations. He disregarded the “legitimate right to govern China” concocted by the KMT. Although Kissinger was not the person to establish diplomatic relations between the US and China, it likely would have happened around the middle of a second presidential term had Nixon not been impeached.
FICTITIOUS
Chiang Kai-shek’s regime, which lost the Chinese Civil War to the CCP and fled in exile to Taiwan, claimed the fictitious “legitimate right to govern China.” Relying on US support, it continued to occupy China’s seat in the UN until Kissinger accepted the idea of “one China,” which led to the right to represent China in the UN being “restored” to the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This turn of events was a mortal blow to the KMT.
It made no sense for the KMT government to represent China, so it kept losing support. In 1971, the US changed its tune, proposing a “dual representation” formula in response to a UN motion to oust the ROC from China’s seat, but Kissinger visited Beijing just as the issue was being debated in the UN General Assembly. Seeing which way the wind was blowing, many countries altered their positions and the “representatives of Chiang Kai-shek” were driven out of the UN.
The KMT got away with its fictitious “legitimate right” and played a zero-sum game for 20 years until the US acknowledged “one China” in the 1972 Shanghai Communique, eventually changing its diplomatic recognition of China to the PRC. The KMT brought all this on itself. When make-believe collides with reality, the fantasy is doomed to lose.
Kissinger sold out the KMT, but he did not sell out Taiwan. Former Chinese premier Zhou Enlai (周恩來) knew that Taiwan’s status in the Treaty of San Francisco had been left undetermined, so he asked the US to declare that Taiwan had been given back to China after World War II. Kissinger refused, so in the Shanghai Communique, the US only “acknowledged” that “all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Strait maintain there is but one China.”
As Taiwan’s democratic evolution proceeds, the majority of people in Taiwan identify as Taiwanese, and believe that the Republic of China is sovereign and independent and that it and the PRC are not subordinate to each another. Only the traitors and clowns of the KMT, who would be scolded by the Chiangs, echo the fictitious “1992 consensus” and “one China.”
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Julian Clegg
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