COMMENT Anti-secession bill reveals China's
fears By Li YongYan
If
Chinese legislators cared to learn a bit more about
their own product lines, they wouldn't have bothered
with writing a bill duplicating part of the Chinese
constitution on China's unity.
Last
week the official Xinhua News Agency reported that
the Standing Committee of the People's Congress,
China's ornamental tribute to the democratic process, will present
a draft Anti-Secession Law by the end of December
for formal presentation in March, when the lawmaking
body holds its annual meeting. The news agency did
not give further details on the draft law, but judging
by the name of the bill, the government will make it
a crime for anyone to advocate or practice secession of
the country's territories. As if afraid that people will
fail to take notice of for whom the bell tolls, an
official was quoted as saying that the recommended law
is not aimed at Hong Kong or Macau, leaving Taiwan the
obvious target by default and by the obvious political
analysis. That sounds familiar. At least it should to
the lawmakers themselves. For the preamble to China's
constitution clearly says that "Taiwan is part of the
sacred territory of the People's Republic of China. It
is the inviolable duty of all Chinese people, including
our compatriots in Taiwan, to accomplish the great task
of reunifying the motherland."
If Beijing
likes playing different variations on the same theme,
fleshing out a vague claim or emphasizing its determination
to prevent Taiwan from asserting independence, then
that legislation may be a worthwhile cause. However, as
with the constitution, the mainland government has
not figured out how to enforce the law. Sure, Beijing
has never officially given up the option of military force
against Taiwan. The report of some 500 missiles pointing
southward at Taiwan is a deterrent no
independence-minded people among the 22 million
Taiwanese take lightly. But then the military threat has
hung over the Taiwan Strait since long before the law
was proposed, and the threat remains very credible,
irrespective of the new law that could be construed in a
sense as legalizing the use of force. Does this signal a
newly acquired respect for law on the part of Beijing?
While a great respect for the rule of
law would be a welcome development - a law-abiding
government is always better than a lawless one -
assuming the interpretation is not widely off the mark, it
still begs the question and raises more questions than
it answers. The first one: Why bother with justifying a
civil war against renegades (China calls Taiwan
a renegade province) at this time, when you have been
doing that, talking about retaking Taiwan, for the past
half-century?
Some pundits put forward a theory:
Beijing is now openly discussing how to morph from a
revolutionary party into a governing one - as if there
were any opposition party around. Despite the misnomer,
the move is still a step in the direction of the rule of
law. Even if the government writes its own book, China
is after all trying to go by the book, reducing the
unpredictability that is usually associated with
totalitarian rules.
Actually, another
explanation is more plausible. Beijing is simply at the
end of its wits when it comes to dealing with Taiwan.
The Chinese have a folk saying, "A family
fortune will not survive three generations." It is as
easy to nod one's agreement at the observation as it is
hard to name a single Chinese brand that is more than a
hundred years old. A typical story runs like this: the
founding generation creates a powerhouse, the successors
try to preserve it and the third generation squanders it
all away. If the Chinese are not particularly renowned
for building on the strength of their ancestors, they
certainly know how to slide downhill fast.
The de facto separation of Taiwan was created when
the communists, renegades themselves at the time, drove
the government of the Republic of China into the sea
in 1949, and they fled to Taiwan. Beijing has
been adamantly against "any attempt to create two
Chinas", but in reality, it is the victorious Red Army that
was the first to establish a second China - New China, as
it is called - when Mao Zedong declared the founding
of People's Republic of China 54 years ago. His policy
was simple and straightforward: we must liberate
Taiwan. There was no place whatsoever for law, something Mao
had despised all his life. In spite of Mao's
unflinching determination, however, Taiwan has managed to
decline the kiss of the Reddest Red Sun. The expanse of
sea water in the Taiwan Strait and the US 7th Fleet
helped, too.
Former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping knew
he needed America's assurance of neutrality before he
launched a "punitive" war into Vietnam in 1979 to "teach
a lesson" for Vietnam's December 1978 invasion of Cambodia.
It is still not exactly clear which side ended up
punished in the subtropical jungles that had once defeated
the mighty United States, but Deng toned down the
saber-rattling directed against Taiwan and let the
island's leader Chiang Ching-kuo, son of Chiang
Kai-shek, pursue the democratization of Taiwan under a
lifting cloud of war.
When it came time for
former Chinese leader Jiang Zeming to define
cross-strait relations between Taiwan and the mainland,
he had fewer chips left on the table. The Cold War was
lost, the Berlin Wall had been torn down, and the
breakup of the Soviet Union removed the biggest
distraction to the United States in terms of deployment
of its military resources. War may be a viable option
for one superpower to implement a regime change half a
globe away from Washington, but it is unequivocally
discouraged across a 120-mile-wide strait for another
large country in an attempt at "reunification of the
motherland". It was during this period that Taiwan
president Lee Teng-hui, then head of the Nationalists
(Kuomintang, or KMT), ruled Taiwan, nurturing the force for
independence of the island, based on Beijing's weakness.
The balance of power has shifted so much by
now that the new leadership in Beijing is even
indicating that under the one-China principle, everything is
negotiable between the mainland and the island. But the
fact remains that Taiwan talks and acts like a fully
sovereign nation, whether the United Nations embraces it
or not. Certainly it is self-governing.
Under
the circumstances, it is doubtful what good the proposed
new law will do to bring about reunification. Once again
the aphorism is demonstrated that each generation is
less powerful and less persuasive that the last.
Remember that Mao didn't bother with a declaration of
war when he ordered troops into Korea to fight the US
Army. Now, even if a law is in place, Chinese President
Hu Jintao may still have to continue biting his nails as
he watches Taiwan drift further away.
Some say
the new law is designed to silence critics of Beijing's
hardline Taiwan policies and tough warnings to the
obdurate island, rather than to intimidate Taiwan, but
Beijing doesn't have to pass a new law to do that. In
China, critics are easily silenced.
Li
YongYan is an analyst of Chinese politics, business,
economics and social affairs.
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