The government is mulling stricter immigration rules for Hong Kong and Macau residents, as a response to national security concerns, a national security official said on Sunday last week on condition of anonymity.
Taiwan has different immigration laws for people from China — including Hong Kong and Macau — due to historical claims over territory now administered by Beijing. Typically, laws related to Hong Kong and Macau are more lax, given the comparative degree of freedom those cities enjoyed as former colonies of the UK and Portugal respectively.
However, now that China has begun stripping the two cities of their freedoms, made dissenting behavior (including showing support for Taiwanese independence) dangerous and begun relocating millions of mainland residents to Hong Kong, it has become exceedingly difficult to know whether would-be migrants to Taiwan from those places would be a threat to Taiwan’s democracy and institutions.
To tackle the issue, the government has proposed to rescind the preferential immigration rules that people from Hong Kong and Macau enjoy when they apply for residency in Taiwan. Under the new rules, they would need to wait the same length of time as foreign applicants from other countries before becoming eligible for permanent residency, and would not normally be eligible for citizenship after obtaining permanent residency. That change is long overdue, as Chinese citizens should not be treated differently from other foreign citizens to begin with. Taiwan’s claims over China-administered territory do not need to be revoked, but giving Chinese citizens special treatment under the law is a contradiction of the claim that Taiwan is a sovereign nation that is not subject to the laws of China — a claim that former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and President William Lai (賴清德) have made. In no other democracy are there laws in which the special treatment of citizens from a particular country is enshrined.
That peculiar aspect of Taiwan’s law comes from the fact that it does not recognize the sovereignty of China. It seems like this would be a simple matter and one that lawmakers would want to put into effect — particularly since they should want the Chinese administration to reciprocate by recognizing Taiwan’s sovereignty. However, while Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) lawmakers have often called on Beijing to engage with Taipei on the basis of mutual respect and reciprocity, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) members have never made such a demand. The reason is the KMT inherently cannot acknowledge China’s sovereignty. To do so would be to acknowledge that there are two Chinas, but that would present an existential crisis for the party. The KMT sees itself as the progenitor of modern China and the rightful heir to the nation founded by Sun Yat-sen (孫逸仙).
The idea that there is only one China is the key point of consensus between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party, and has formed the basis of the so-called “1992 consensus” upon which talks between the KMT and Beijing have been made possible. That is why the KMT regularly calls on the DPP to acknowledge the “consensus,” which the DPP inherently cannot do, as it would be a denial of the fact that there are actually two “Chinas.”
That political impasse is why no progress can be made on the issue of recognizing China’s sovereignty and, consequently, why the identity and rights of Chinese citizens in Taiwan remain obscure.
Taiwan is already a de facto independent nation. Perhaps the only thing stopping it from being de jure independent is not the lack of UN recognition, but its failure to formally recognize that there are two Chinas. Since there is unlikely to be the consensus needed to achieve that in the short term, the DPP’s best option might be to continue chipping away at laws that treat Chinese citizens in a special way.
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