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| March 24, 2000 | atimes.com | ||
|  | China Taiwan: Points for Beijing to ponder In sharp contrast to its threatening pre-election rhetoric, Beijing's reaction to date to the election of the Democratic Progressive Party's candidate, Chen Shui-bian, as Taiwan's next president has been measured and inoffensive. President Jiang Zemin's statement that Beijing would hold negotiations with Taiwan only on the basis of the ''one China'' principle comes as no surprise. Rather than foreshadowing an inflexible hard-line attitude, we suspect Jiang for the time being couldn't think of anything better to say and thus reiterated what China's leaders have said all along. But just in case Beijing - for lack of imagination and divisions within the leadership - considers holding on to such a doctrinaire and unproductive stance, we have some unsolicited advice for it to ponder. * Though Beijing has gotten used to viewing and sorting any and all political statements coming out of Taipei and political events in Taiwan in terms of their pro and con independence, pro and con ''one China'' contents and putative implications, that approach is short-sighted and self-defeating. The DPP's pro-independence stance DID figure in the presidential election; but that doesn't mean it was the only or even the pre-eminent election issue or main reason why voters chose Chen. Mainly what resonated with voters was Chen's call for reform and for cleaning up once and for all the corruption, money politics, and gangsterism that had characterized 50 years of KMT rule and had continued unabated even after the first democratic presidential elections held in 1996. Taiwan's voters have thrown the corruption-ridden KMT out on its ear and for the life of us we can't see why Beijing wouldn't want to welcome that result. Didn't Taiwan's ''popular masses'' finally, however belatedly, overthrow ''Chiang Kai-shek's butchers'' as Chairman Mao preferred to call the Kuomintang? * With that in mind, doesn't it make a whole lot more sense to negotiate cross-strait relations with a clean politician with strong popular support and excellent anti-corruption credentials than with yet another KMT boss even if the latter paid lip service to ''one China''? * Would it not behoove the Beijing political leadership to pay some attention to the old adage that all politics is ultimately local and to the fact that it was local conditions first and foremost that Taiwan voters, like most voters anywhere, wanted to see changed? The DPP grew and gained its support as an anti-KMT force. To be credible, it had to reject wholesale what the KMT stands for, including the latter's hardly credible claim of representing the whole of China's interests - its version of the ''one China'' principle. It's in opposition to such nonsensical KMT claims that the DPP's independence stance was born. But in victory, it now appears quite ready to give up the notion of an independent Republic of Taiwan. In a dramatic gesture of goodwill both toward the mainland and president-elect Chen's aspirations for better relations with Beijing, Taiwan's parliament, still dominated by KMT legislators, dropped a 50-year-old ban on direct trade and transport and communications links with the mainland. Apparently, even a sizeable group of KMT parliamentarians is sick and tired of five decades of KMT political precepts. We would predict that one of President Chen's first acts after he is inaugurated on May 20 will be to clean up the Mainland Affairs Council presently staffed by some of the most reactionary KMT types. If and when he does so and gives far-reaching policy functions on mainland relations to Nobel prize winner Lee Yuan-tseh, we can only hope that Beijing as well will give up some of its encrusted policy notions in the interest of constructive dialogue. | |||||||||
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