Last week, it was reported that former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) might be granted an audience with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). If true, Ma would be afforded an opportunity few get. Even US President Joe Biden has met Xi only twice since he assumed office in January 2021, neither meeting occurring in Beijing.
It is an invaluable opportunity for the former president of Taiwan to speak directly and candidly with Xi, the “chairman of everything” in China, who sits atop a hierarchical system that has powerful incentives to transmit to the leader only the information that he would like to hear.
Indeed, part of the motivation for French President Emmanuel Macron’s visit to Moscow in early February 2022, when Russia had amassed hundreds of thousands of troops at the Ukrainian border, was the opportunity to transmit information directly to Russian President Vladimir Putin. The belief in allied capitals at that time was that with COVID-19 restrictions and his personalist dictatorship, Putin had surrounded himself with “yes men” and become increasingly detached from reality.
Macron traveled to Moscow because it was in the French state’s interest to avoid war. Ma might see himself as embarking on a similar mission. However, unlike Macron, it is not clear whether Ma has the core interest of the state, in his case Taiwan, in his heart. Like his Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) predecessors Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙) and Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), Ma is a nationalist who sees himself as heir to a great revolutionary mission to unify and “rejuvenate” the Chinese nation.
Ma has more in common with Xi than he does with the wishes of the Taiwanese electorate. Both want to “revitalize” China and both see unification as a sacred mission.
When Ma delivered a speech at Sun Yat-sen’s mausoleum in Nanjing, China, last year, he said: “We sincerely hope that the two sides will work together to pursue peace, avoid war and strive to revitalize China.”
It is odd that Ma talks about “revitalizing China” at a time when Xi casts Taiwan’s “return” to China as the sine qua non of the “great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation.” In Xi’s “China dream,” a revitalized China would mean the destruction of Taiwan and the end of its sovereignty.
In the 17th century, when asked why he allied Catholic France with the rebellious Protestant kingdoms in northern Europe against the Catholic Habsburg Empire, then-French chief minister Cardinal Richelieu said: “Man is immortal, his salvation is hereafter. The state has no immortality; its salvation is now or never.”
In other words, for the statesman, the purpose of diplomacy is the state’s survival and, in its pursuit, the temporal must be separated from the spiritual.
However, it seems Ma is unable to separate the higher ideals of his Chinese nationalism from the cooler, harder interests of Taiwan and its preservation. If he could, he would make central to his mission that the Chinese Communist Party renounce the use of force against Taiwan. It is worth thinking about why he does not.
Ma billed his trip as furthering peace and deepening communication. However, if he truly had the interests of Taiwan at heart, he would build a united front with the Democratic Progressive Party to jointly protect the nation.
Ma cannot, because he does not want to relinquish his dream of Chinese “unity.” His fixation on this not only undermines the negotiating position of the democratically elected government, but over time makes Taiwan less safe.
A statesman in the tradition of Richelieu Ma is not.
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