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
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017
RSS