Former president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) trip to China provides a pertinent reminder of why Taiwanese protested so vociferously against attempts to force through the cross-strait service trade agreement in 2014 and why, since Ma’s presidential election win in 2012, they have not voted in another Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) candidate.
While the nation narrowly avoided tragedy — the treaty would have put Taiwan on the path toward the demobilization of its democracy, which Courtney Donovan Smith wrote about in the Taipei Times in “With the Sunflower movement Taiwan dodged a bullet” — Ma’s political swansong in China, which included fawning dithyrambs to the mythical Yellow Emperor, and weeping at the site generally regarded as where the Second Sino-Japanese War began, a lodestar of Chinese nationalism, is more akin to farce.
Ma once said that the growth engine of China’s economy offered Taiwanese the prospect of prosperity. Now he attends vigils to prehistoric figures talking about how Taiwanese should “firmly remember the roots of Chinese culture and the Chinese nation.” This tells its own story.
Nothing about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is left up to chance. Ma’s trip — the visit to the Yellow Emperor, the Marco Polo Bridge, the Great Wall and especially his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — were carefully choreographed to convey a political message. It is not coincidence that Xi and Ma were singing from the same hymn sheet at the Great Hall of the People about Chinese history, culture and unity.
When Ma was in office, the view in Beijing was not only that the gravitational pull of its massive economy meant economic integration was inevitable, but also that deepening trade would encourage political integration. However, not only has that strategy failed, but the opposite has occurred. The more Taiwanese get to know the CCP, the more they value protecting their independence.
Now, government data on cross-strait trade suggest that Taiwan might be undergoing a historic economic decoupling from China as President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) New Southbound Policy gathers steam.
If deepening economic ties with Taiwan has not encouraged political integration, instead bringing about the reverse, it would certainly set red lights flashing in Beijing and might explain why China has been ramping up its military coercion in the past few years.
If China can no longer use economics to bring about unification and coercion is at least suboptimal in that it instills in Taiwanese a feeling that Beijing does it harm, what other policy options does it have, short of war, to bring about unification?
Last year, it was reported that CCP Politburo Standing Committee member Wang Huning (王滬寧), the CCP’s “chief ideologue” and China’s most senior official in charge of Taiwan policy, has been tasked with coming up with a new framework for unification “fit for the Xi era.” The report said that Xi recognizes that, after its failure in Hong Kong and the clear hostility toward it in Taiwan, “one country, two systems” is a game plan that no longer works. Xi wants his own flagship theory of unification.
As yet, we do not know what this new theory would be, but given how fundamental nationalism is to the fabric of Xi’s “China dream,” an emphasis on history and culture might be a significant component.
Regardless of whether “one country, two systems” is replaced, it is clear that a new CCP approach to Taiwan is emerging, one that emphasizes “shared roots,” history and culture, while de-emphasizing the former rhetoric of political difference and economic interest.
Helped along by willing accomplices such as Ma, this is just the beginning of that new approach.
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