Mobile Horizons: Dynamics Across the Taiwan Strait 1557291063, 9781557291066

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Notes to this edition This is an electronic edition of the printed book. Minor corrections may have been made within the text; new information and any errata appear on the current page only. China Research Monograph 69 Mobile Horizons: Dynamics across the Taiwan Strait Wen-hsin Yeh, editor ISBN-13: 978-155729-158-5 (electronic) ISBN-13: 978-1-55729-106-6 (print) ISBN-10: 1-55729-106-3 (print)

Please visit the IEAS Publications website at http://ieas.berkeley.edu/publications/ for more information and to see our catalogue. Send correspondence and manuscripts to Katherine Lawn Chouta, Managing Editor Institute of East Asian Studies 1995 University Avenue, Suite 510H Berkeley, CA 94720-2318 USA [email protected]

May 2015

Mobile Horizons

CHINA RESEARCH MONOGRAPH 69 CENTER FOR CHINESE STUDIES

Mobile Horizons Dynamics across the Taiwan Strait

Edited by Wen-hsin Yeh

A publication of the Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Although the institute is responsible for the selection and acceptance of manuscripts in this series, responsibility for the opinions expressed and for the accuracy of statements rests with their authors. The China Research Monograph series is one of the several publications series sponsored by the Institute of East Asian Studies in conjunction with its constituent units. The others include the Japan Research Monograph series, the Korea Research Monograph series, and the Research Papers and Policy Studies series. Send correspondence and manuscripts to Katherine Lawn Chouta, Managing Editor Institute of East Asian Studies 2223 Fulton Street, 6th Floor Berkeley, CA 94720-2318 [email protected] Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mobile horizons : dynamics across the Taiwan Strait / Wen-Hsin Yeh, editor. pages cm. — (China research monograph ; 69) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55729-106-3 (alk. paper) 1. Taiwan—Relations—China. 2. China—Relations—Taiwan. 3. China—Economic conditions—2000– 4. Taiwan—Economic conditions—1945– 5. Regionalism—China. 6. Taiwan Strait. I. Yeh, Wen-Hsin editor of compilation. DS799.63.C6M63 2013 303.48'251051249—dc23 2013003540 Copyright © 2013 by the Regents of the University of California. Printed in the United States of America. All rights reserved. Front cover: Sculpture from the Taichi Series by Taiwanese artist Ju-Ming. Image used with permission from the Nonprofit Organization Juming Culture and Education Foundation. Cover design: Mindy Chen

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Of War and Peace: History and Perspectives Wen-hsin Yeh 1. What Drives the Cross-Strait Rapprochement? Political Competition, Globalization, and the Strategic Triangle Yu-shan Wu and Lowell Dittmer 2. Redefining “China”: From the China Inside to the China Outside Shelley Rigger

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3. Shifting Frontiers: Cross-Strait Relations in the Context of Local Society Michael Szonyi

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4. Underground at Sea: Fishing and Smuggling across the Taiwan Strait, 1970s–1990s Micah S. Muscolino

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5. The Religious Dynamics of Region and Nation across the Strait Robert P. Weller 6. Mobilizing Gender in Cross-Strait Marriages: Patrilineal Tensions, Care Work Expectations, and a Dependency Model of Marital Immigration Sara L. Friedman 7. Global Business across the Taiwan Strait: The Case of the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Limited William C. Kirby

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8. Taiwanese Newspapers and Politics in China’s Shadow Timothy B. Weston

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9. Complex Characters: Relearning Taiwan Thomas B. Gold

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10. A Quiet Revolution: Oppositional Politics and the Writing of Taiwanese History Wen-hsin Yeh

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Glossary

287

Bibliography

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Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

WEN-HSIN YEH This volume is the result of a three-year writing project that aims to explore the non-state dimensions of cross-Strait interactions over the course of the past sixty years. The essays are also written with a general audience in mind. Earlier drafts were presented at several workshops at the Institute of East Asian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley and at the Institute of Political Studies at the Academia Sinica. All participants in the “Mobile Horizons” programs join me in extending special and warm thanks to my counterpart in Taipei, Dr. Wu Yu-shan, along with Academia Sinica President Dr. Wong Chi-huey, Vice President Dr. Liu Chao-han, and Vice President Dr. Wang Fan-sen. For their participation as keynote speakers and commentators to this project, I am grateful to Dr. Lien Chan, Dr. Tien Hung-mao, Ambassador Ma Zhengang, Dr. Su Chi, and Professor Yan Xuetong. For their participation as paper presenters, discussants, and moderators, I would like to thank, in addition to the contributors to this volume: Tzong-ho Bau, Yomi Braester, Melissa Brown, Yu-hsing Chang, Antonia Chao, Chao-ju Chen, Te-chih Chen, Youping Cheng, Chang-hui Chi, Leo Ching, Yun-han Chu, Penny Edwards, Yun Fan, J. Megan Greene, Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao, You-tien Hsing, Szu-Chien Hsu, Chang-ling Huang, Lin-mei Huang, Shumin Huang, Andrew Jones, Huei Kao, Paul Katz, Cheng-tian Kuo, Pei-chia Lan, Hong Yung Lee, K. F. Lee, Bruce Liao, Gang Lin, Wei-ping Lin, Yu-ju Lin, Tsui-jung Liu, Ming-cheng Lo, Peter Lorentzen, Tracy Yuen Manty, Kevin O’Brien, Lan-chih Po, Wen-hui Tang, Emma Teng, Chen-yuan Tung, Kuan-hsiung Wang, Yi-fan Wu, and Wan-ying Yang. I would like to mark the loss of Nancy Tucker, Alan Wachman, and Robert Scalapino, who contributed so thoughtfully to the project. In addition, Va Cun, Xing Hang, Pingqing Liu, Beatrice Shraa, Jennifer Wei, and Andy Zhou, whose graduate studies at Berkeley coincided with the “Mobile Horizons” project, participated in the programs in various capacities. And I note with special pleasure the interest and participation

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of the Berkeley chapter of Strait Talk, a non-partisan and student-run dialogue program that seeks to transform international conflict by connecting young people from both sides of the Taiwan Strait and the United States. For their outstanding program and administrative support, I would like to thank Caverlee Cary (without whom this project would not have been possible), Martin Backstrom, Alyssa Yoneyama, Liz Griegg, and Rosalie Fanshel at the Institute of East Asian Studies at Berkeley. For the production of this volume I would like to thank Kate Chouta, Keila Diehl, Charlotte Cowden, and Erik Lyngen. Mindy Chen deserves a special acknowledgment for her innovative cover design. This project has benefited from the financial support of the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office (TECO) in San Francisco, which has been exemplary with its generosity and its respect for academic integrity. It is not within the purview of the TECO and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Taiwan to fund academic projects that do not immediately advise on current policies and international relations. I am therefore most grateful, in this case, to the Ministry and the TECO for their willingness to extend their support to works that focus on matters of culture, society, and history. I hope this volume acknowledges its appreciation by contributing to a better and broader understanding of the experiences of and relations between the peoples on either side of the Taiwan Strait.

Introduction Of War and Peace: History and Perspectives

WEN-HSIN YEH What is the Taiwan Strait and why does it matter? As a starting point for this volume, it is useful to recognize the Strait as a strategic maritime channel linking a chain of ports from the Strait of Malacca to the Sea of Japan, connecting vast bodies of water flowing between the Indian and the Pacific oceans (map 0.1). We do not know how these connections might have functioned in ancient times, but it is evident that they mattered. The genetic code of Taiwan’s “indigenous people” of today, for instance, gives evidence that Taiwan was a navigational link when ancient people made passages along the western Pacific archipelago. In the sixteenth century, European sailors found their way to Japan by way of Taiwan.1 Today, oil tankers sail through this region to deliver the energy supply of East Asian economies. The Taiwan Strait commands a strategic importance in a globalized economy. Well before the Europeans arrived, the Chinese, Japanese, and other traders crisscrossed the East China Sea to call on ports stretching from Nagasaki 長崎 to the Philippines. The first decades of the seventeenth century witnessed much maritime activity in these waters, thanks to the momentous convergence of East Asian and Indian Ocean trade routes spearheaded by the Europeans. The fall of the Ming in 1644 and the ensuing Qing (1644–1911) conquest of coastal China further spurred Ming loyalists

1  For the earlier history of Taiwan, see Michael Stainton, “The Politics of Taiwan Aboriginal Origins,” 27–44; and Eduard B. Vermeer, “Up the Mountains and Out to Sea: The Expansion of the Fukienese in the Late Ming Period,” 45–83, both in Taiwan: A New History, ed. Murray A. Rubinstein (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994). See also John E. Wills, “Zheng Chenggong,” in Mountain of Fame: Portraits in Chinese History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 216–230; and Tonio Andrade, How Taiwan Became Chinese: Dutch, Spanish and Han Colonization in the Seventeenth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008).

Map 0.1 Taiwan and Maritime East Asia. Source: Wikipedia Commons/Public Domain.

Map 0.2 Taiwan in the Chinese World. Source: Wikipedia Commons/Public Domain.

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to sea in search of a maritime base of resistance.2 Against this backdrop Taiwan became a naval base for Zheng Chenggong 鄭成功 (Koxinga 鄭 成功), who sailed from the southern Fujian 金門 port of Jinmen 金門 at the head of a large fleet and forced the Dutch to surrender their fort in Zeelandia.3 In the following centuries cross-Strait connections strengthened. Taiwan fell under Qing administration. Buoyed by a steady flow of trade and migration with the mainland, the island prospered, and even the hills came under cultivation.4 Camphor, tea, and sugar were large items on the export list.5 Han immigrants brought their mainland dialects, temples, kinship networks, ancestral shrines, and market towns.6 The trading of the island’s natural resources, from fish to coal and timber, transformed its coastal villages into the most commercialized settlements in the Qing empire toward the end of the nineteenth century.7 On the eve of the Qing concession of Taiwan, the island was no longer a maritime frontier but a well-integrated part of the Chinese world (map 0.2). Qing governance of Taiwan ended in 1895. Up to that point and within the framework of the Chinese-speaking world, there were two patterns of interactions across the Strait. The Strait had functioned as a natural barrier, and the island as an unsinkable base for hostile forces warring against mainland political authorities. Hidden in its mountains were the untamed forces of aborigine tribes that did not speak the language of the civilized people. Yet, once pacified, the Strait could also function as a thoroughfare of multiple waterways and the island as a maritime trading post, a 2 

For an early modern vision of the maritime nexus of Fujian-Taiwan and the region’s orientations, see John E. Wills, “Contingent Connections: Fujian, the Empire and the Early Modern World,” in The Qing Formation in World Historical Time, ed. Lynn Struve (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004), 167–241. 3  For the various bibliographical sources in Chinese scholarship for the preceding paragraphs, see, in this volume, Wen-hsin Yeh, “A Quiet Revolution: Oppositional Politics and the Writing of Taiwanese History.” 4  Emma Teng, Taiwan’s Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683–1895 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2004). See also Liu Ts’uijung, “Han Migration and the Settlement of Taiwan: The Onset of Environmental Change,” in Sediments of Time: Environment and Society in Chinese History, ed. Mark Elvin and Ts’ui-jung Liu (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 165–202; and John Shepherd, Statecraft and Political Economy on the Taiwan Frontier, 1600–1800 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993). 5  Lin Manhoung, Cha, tang, zhangnao ye yu wan Qing Taiwan [Tea, sugar, and camphor in late Qing Taiwan] (Taipei: Lianjing chuban she, 1997). 6  Chen Qinan, Taiwan de chuantong Zhongguo shehui [The traditional Chinese society in Taiwan] (Taipei: Yunchen chuban she, 1991). 7  Stevan Harrell, Ploughshare Village: Culture and Context in Taiwan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1982).

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destination for settlers, and a site for sojourners from the mainland intent upon experiencing the reach of Chinese civilization. Both patterns reappeared in the second half of the twentieth century. A history of the relationships across the Taiwan Strait from 1949 to the present can be summed up, in some ways, as a gradual shift from one pattern to the other, from armed hostilities to contained tension, from warring parties to trading partners.8 Yet this shift has been neither smooth nor irreversible, and it is not the whole story about the relationships across the Strait. For the bulk of the twentieth century, with the exception of a brief interlude from 1945 to 1949, the two sides of the Taiwan Strait were under the governance of different states and authorities.9 Alongside the shift from military standstill to negotiated connections, a second discourse emerged toward the end of the century, framing the cross-Strait relationship as a choice between political unification and the formation on Taiwan of a separate and independent nation-state. This discourse centers on issues of sovereignty, legitimacy, and the claims, rituals, jurisdiction, and prerogatives of the modern state. It is also intricately embedded in an international system of treaties, organizations, agreements, and representations that concern a state’s capacity to act on behalf of its citizens beyond the boundaries of its direct control. Taiwan in the first half of the twentieth century (1895–1945) was a part of the Japanese empire. The making of an independent Taiwanese state was hardly an issue on anyone’s agenda. Chinese revolutionaries, to be sure, sought to use Taiwan as a base for anti-Qing activities. Sun Yat-sen and his followers built a branch of the Revolutionary Alliance in Taipei with the support of Japanese authorities.10 Meanwhile, important differences emerged in the experiences of the people on either side of the Strait. Taiwanese people, as the newly assimilated subjects of Japan’s emerging em8  Henry Kissinger characterized China’s relationship with Taiwan in the interlude of open wars as a state of “combative coexistence.” See Kissinger, On China (New York: Penguin, 2011), 151–158, 172–180. 9  For foundational discussions of the history, culture, society, and politics of Taiwan in English, see Murray A. Rubinstein, ed., The Other Taiwan: 1945 to the Present (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994); Murray A. Rubinstein, ed., Taiwan: A New History (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1999); Alan M. Wachman, Why Taiwan? Geostrategic Rationales for China’s Territorial Integrity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007). Also see Stephen Phillips, “Confronting Colonization and National Identity: The Nationalists and Taiwan, 1941–1945,” Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 2, no. 3 (Winter 2001), available at http://muse.jhu. edu/journals/journal_of_colonialism_and_colonial_history/. 10  Chen Sanjing, Guomin geming yu Taiwan [The national revolution and Taiwan] (Taipei: Jindai Zhongguo chuban she, 1980), 10.

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pire, wore no queues, learned Japanese, saw trains and steamships, and went to other parts of the empire where the Japanese flag had reached.11 The colonial government built schools, trained doctors, set up experimental farms and forests, and incorporated plantations. Tokyo was the center of a new administration of science and technology that worked to transform Taiwan’s agrarian economy and village society.12 Upon the fall of the Japanese empire in 1945, the island was repatriated to Nationalist China. Chinese decolonization of Taiwan, by all accounts, was poorly managed. The February 28th Incident in 1947 scarred the relationship between the Nationalist authorities and the Japanese-speaking Taiwanese population.13 The Chinese Civil War (1946–1949) between the Nationalists and the Communists on the mainland hardly helped the cause of the Nationalists on Taiwan. In late 1949, the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek 蔣介石 crossed the Strait to Taiwan. Nearly a million mainlanders—soldiers, military families, students, officials, and others, including teachers, professors, curators, and archivists—joined the Nationalist flight from the advancing Communist troops. On the coastal islands of Zhejiang 浙江 and Fujian, the retreating Nationalist army took its last stand. The troops thwarted the further advance of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The Nationalist government reestablished itself in Taipei. The party-state suspended the national constitution, institutionalized political control of press freedom, declared being Communist a crime of treason, and promulgated a set of wartime provisional laws. The regime continued to see itself as the sole legitimate government over all of China. It bent the island to a war against the mainland and placed the population under the power of a military police administration. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, the Nationalist regime continued to represent China in the United Nations. A signatory of the charter of the UN, it held a seat on the Security Council and received U.S. diplomatic recognition. The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 brought American naval presence into the Taiwan Strait, and Taiwan’s security was further assured by the signing 11 

For a succinct discussion of Taiwan under Japan, see Mark E. Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea, 1910–1945 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2009), 70–80. 12  Regarding Taiwan’s colonial history, see Leo T. S. Ching, Becoming “Japanese”: Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Liao Ping-hui and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, 1895–1945: History, Culture, Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006). 13  There is a large body of scholarly work and archival materials on the February 28th Incident published in recent years in Chinese. In English, see Tse-han Lai, Ramon H. Myers, and Wei Wou, A Tragic Beginning: The Taiwan Uprising of February 28th, 1947 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1991); and Douglas Lane Fix, “Taiwanese Nationalism and Its Late Colonial Context” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1993).

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of a joint security agreement with the United States. These arrangements set the framework within which the Taiwan Strait, for much of the midtwentieth century, became a patrolled zone of war. Families were broken up and all civilian connections in finance, information, shipping, travel, and communication across the Strait were cut off. Taipei functioned as a national capital of embassies, state visits, diplomatic missions, and all the other trappings that came with international recognition of its statehood. Things changed in the 1970s. In 1971 Beijing displaced Taipei as China in the UN. In 1979 the United States normalized its diplomatic relationship with the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and the U.S. Embassy to China moved from Taipei to Beijing. Détente between Washington and Beijing eased the tension across the Strait. In the 1980s Taiwan’s economy underwent a “miracle” in its growth. Nationalist authorities and U.S.-trained technocrats jointly engineered the island’s industrial transformation.14 The decade also witnessed, on the Chinese mainland, the trial of the Gang of Four, a transition from a planned to a market economy, a joint agreement with the British government about the retrocession of Hong Kong in 1997, and a renewed emphasis on the use of diplomacy and collaboration to achieve territorial goals. This combination of factors released critical dynamics that were to launch China’s record-setting economic transformation in the coming decades. They were also to launch Taiwan’s thoroughgoing democratic transformation, energized by its booming economy, by the end of the century. Between China’s state-sponsored economy and Taiwan’s voter-driven democracy, however, the two states’ paths of development further diverged. Yet at the same time, the liberalization in economy and polity provided the incentives and the conditions for people on the two sides to resume connections. On Taiwan, in response to the erosion of its statehood in the international system and a perceived diplomatic isolation, the Nationalists began, in the 1980s, to take their focus away from the mainland, to invest in the infrastructure and the technological development of the island, and to indigenize their constituency on Taiwan. Within a little over a decade, the regime, one of the “newly industrialized” “Asian dragons” of its day, declared an end to the Civil War, lifted martial law, relaxed its restrictions on the freedom of the press and the formation of political parties, loosened its control over the flow of capital and the movement of population, revised the constitution, and reorganized the administrative structure of

14  Thomas B. Gold, State and Society in the Taiwan Miracle (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1986); J. Megan Greene, The Origins of the Developmental State in Taiwan: Science Policy and the Quest for Modernization (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008).

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the state to suit the needs of an island rather than a continent.15 By the end of the century political power on Taiwan rested not only with a locally elected legislature but also with a general electoral process for all levels of state executives, including the president. In 2000 an opposition candidate, Chen Shui-bian 陳水扁, won the presidential election, and the transition of power from the Nationalist Party (or Kuomintang [KMT]) to the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) took place without violence or disorder. Taiwan’s successful democratic transformation represents a first in the Chinese-speaking world. It gave powerful momentum to the country’s agenda, especially under the administration of the DPP (2000–08), to advance Taiwan’s independence as a new nation in the international arena. Meanwhile, across the Strait, China had successfully weathered the Asian financial crisis of 1997 and was poised to become, a little over ten years later, the world’s second largest economy. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, the two Chinese-speaking societies had become more integrated in economic and societal interactions than they had ever been since 1895. However, the two sides did not hesitate, from time to time, to move to the brink of war over the issue of Taiwan’s political unification with or independence from China. Existing works in social science studies have given much space to the democratic transformation of Taiwan.16 An even larger body of literature has appraised the economic transformation of China.17 A third line of work, produced largely in the circles of policy analysis and international relations, has focused attention on the pressing issues of cross-Strait contestation.18 Scholarly participation in this third discussion has often taken place in the spirit of a “third channel” that seeks to facilitate exchanges of information, to further the mutual acquaintances of key strategic think15  On the “Confucian societies” of East Asia and their modern industrialization, see the classic studies of Robert Bellah, Tokugawa Religion: The Cultural Roots of Modern Japan (New York: Free Press, 1985); and Ezra Vogel, Japan as Number One: Lessons for America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979). On the “third wave” of democratization of East Asian societies, see Larry Diamond and Mark Plattner, eds., Democracy in East Asia (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998). 16  Shelley Rigger, Politics in Taiwan: Voting for Democracy (London: Routledge, 1999); Steve Tsang and Hung-mao Tien, eds., Democratization in Taiwan: Implications for China (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Robert P. Weller, Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and Taiwan (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1999). 17  For orientation, see Barry Naughton, The Chinese Economy: Transitions and Growth (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2007). 18  Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Strait Talk: United States–Taiwan Relations and the Crisis with China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009); Chi Su, Taiwan’s Relations with Mainland China: A Tail Wagging Two Dogs (London and New York: Routledge, 2009); Edward Friedman, ed., China’s Rise, Taiwan’s Dilemmas and International Peace (London and New York: Routledge, 2006).

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ers, or to test the baselines and conceptual frameworks on critical points. These highly advanced discussions tend to happen, as is to be expected, within discrete circles and among individuals with deep knowledge and expertise. They also tend to observe the intellectual requirements and divisions of disciplines, fields, genres, offices, policies, and so forth. It is evident that cross-Strait relationships within the full context of Taiwanese democracy and the Chinese economy are an important issue for the future of Taiwan, China, and the broader region. It is also evident that the issues are so complex and dynamic that they require an integrated approach in scholarly scrutiny. Did the economic transformation of China and the democratic transformation of Taiwan work in concert to facilitate the interactions of the two populations across the Taiwan Strait? If so, then how did these same factors propel the two sides to confront each other across the divide? Why did Taiwan’s opposition fear a betrayal of the island’s democracy when the Nationalists moved to reduce tension and promote trade with mainland China? How do we assess the volume and velocity of cross-Strait interactions since 1987, when Taiwan partly lifted its ban on travel to the mainland? How did the people’s growing wealth, mobility, and access to information about the opposite side impinge upon state actions in either context? At present, how do the two sides rearrange their Civil War memories, and how is the rise of a new generation changing the tone of crossStrait talks? How do these new factors intersect with a changing configuration of the “Taiwan problem” in the trans-Pacific relationship between the United States and China, or with an East Asian understanding of the legacies of the Cold War? Cross-Strait issues, the authors of this volume argue, are both pressing subjects in contemporary politics and an opportunity to open up a new vista in scholarly understanding. The essays collected here are the results of a three-year writing project, facilitated by regular seminar meetings and several rounds of exchanges of drafts. The authors examine the dynamics of cross-Strait exchanges in national, regional, local, as well as transnational contexts, engaging with happenings in the arenas of culture, society, economy, and politics. The actors in these essays range from coastal fishermen, mainland brides, local councilmen, religious pilgrims, revisionist historians, political activists, newspaper professionals, and American students to policy makers and billionaire executives. Without marginalizing the role of the state, this volume argues that cross-Strait relationships involve nonstate actors who act on norms and expectations of the past as well as the present, remembered as well as reconstructed, and on local as well as international levels, and are concerned with issues of identity as well as interest. In addition to the reasoning of national security and

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international relations, there are other structural factors at work. Only by taking into full account the shifting alignment of these interactions can we place the actions of the states in context. Politicking: Cross-Strait and Trans-Pacific Internal and external factors have both been at play in Taipei, Beijing, and Washington, driving the cross-Strait entities toward either rapprochement or a higher level of tension. Cross-Strait relationships, thanks to historical connections going back to the first half of the twentieth century, involve at least a three-way strategic calculation that straddles both the Strait and the Pacific Ocean. Economic globalization matters, especially as the world moves into the new century. Yu-shan Wu and Lowell Dittmer, in their essay, offer an analysis of the rapprochement policies pursued by the Nationalist administration of President Ma Ying-jeou 馬英九 since his inauguration in 2008 and the structural constraints on such policies. Taiwan’s tilt toward the PRC in recent years, the authors argue, stands for a shift of the island’s domestic politics away from issues of identity to issues of the economy. During the DPP administration, for the impressive success of Taiwan in the democratization and indigenization of its polity, the island paid the price of international isolation and economic stagnation. Taiwan’s high-sounding insistence on a separate and distinct Taiwanese identity antagonized the PRC and provoked strong Chinese responses, which in turn led to the closing out of Taiwan from international markets at a time when the PRC was outpacing the United States in global economic performance. It is notable, for instance, that Taiwan from 1997 to 2007 fell behind Singapore, Hong Kong, and South Korea, its peer group of “Asian dragons,” in its per capita income and growth rate. In the late 1990s the GDP of the island was valued at nearly a third that of the PRC, and Taiwan ranked as the first among the “provinces” of China in overall GDP. By 2008 the ratio stood at a mere one-eighth, and the island had been overtaken by Guangdong, Shandong, and Jiangsu in the domestic Chinese “provincial” rankings. With cross-Strait tension as an outstanding issue and the choice of identity over economy, the people of Taiwan, thanks to the particularities of their history, geography, and politics, have been locked out of an East Asian economic system in which China assumes a dominant role. Taiwan has a “China problem,” while others—the United States and China—are vexed over their “Taiwan problem.” What is the nature of Taiwan’s “China problem,” and how did it evolve over the course of the past sixty years? Shelley Rigger, in an essay about the evolution of Taiwan’s political systems, argues that the people of Taiwan have had two China problems in the second half of the twentieth century. There was,

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first, the problem of a “China within,” or a problem with the Nationalist Chinese authorities, who had not only imposed a Chinese identity on the island but also implicated the population in Nationalist China’s Civil War against the Communists. This first China problem was solved in Taiwan’s successful transformation into a democracy: the people of Taiwan indigenized their power, put an end to martial law, and forged a new Taiwanese identity. Yet Taiwanese democracy was hardly adequate to rid the island of its second China problem, which concerns a “China without.” Beyond the horizon looms a Communist Chinese regime, an authoritarian state that has greatly expanded the size of its economy and is exerting its strength on the global stage. It is significant, Rigger notes, that this externalization of China in Taiwanese popular discourse complements the rise of a Taiwan-centered consciousness and the construction of a distinct Taiwanese identity, separate from that of China. What price might the people of Taiwan be willing to pay for asserting their separateness from China, for their autonomy, for a distinct identity? Will such an identity find a sustaining environment once the people of Taiwan leave their home island? Will the next generation, born and raised after the bitter struggles and sometimes referred to as members of the “Strawberry Clan,” be hardy enough to stand their ground against the claims of the mainland? Rigger’s essay, along with that of Wu and Dittmer, underscores the centrality of this tension between identity and economic interest in the past as well as the future of Taiwanese politics. Reconnecting: The Strait as a Region During the Cold War, the tiny island of Jinmen, barely 59 square miles in size, was at the very forefront of a hot war between the two sides across the Strait. Jinmen made headlines in 1958, along with Mazu 馬祖, when the PLA launched a campaign and shelled the island with artillery. Over 450,000 shells were fired on Jinmen over a period of 44 days. The island, a swimmable two miles from Xiamen 廈門, was one of the most heavily mined zones in the world.19 Michael Szonyi shows in his essay that there is no better place than Jinmen for catching a glimpse of what the transition from war to peace might have meant for people who see themselves as simply locals. At the height of the Cold War, Jinmen was a garrisoned frontier and an eerie landscape dotted with shrines for fallen soldiers, Communist as well as Nationalist. In addition, it was a military colony under a central command 19 

Michael Szonyi, Cold War Island: Quemoy on the Front Line (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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headquartered in Taiwan. The army had taken control of the island, and the residents were reduced to making their living provisioning the soldiers. Jinmen’s history from 1949 to the present has gone through three phases. After the first phase during the Cold War, the second phase was demilitarization and democratization in the years after 1979. This was a time of ambivalence and bewilderment for local people as well as Nationalist soldiers. The old certainty of ideological divisions fell apart. Much anxiety was generated in the wait-and-see period, when test balloons of new ties flew across the great divide and the public speculated on the limits of the conceivable. The decisive break came in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, with Jinmen island becoming the site of the “three direct links” in shipping, travel, and communication. Jinmen rediscovered its time-honored connections with the Fujian city of Xiamen and the mainland beyond. In no time at all the locals became property owners in Xiamen. They made daily shopping trips to the city. They debated a proposal to build a bridge for easier connections. Taipei, to be sure, remained in charge, and it vetoed the bridge to Xiamen. Still, with the Fujianese city in sight, the islanders have regained a significant share of control in their local affairs. What better use to make of Jinmen’s past, the military tunnels, the bomb shelters, and the minefields, indeed, than to turn them into historical sites and attractions for tourists? There were plenty of hardships, furthermore, in local experiences with the Nationalist military: hardships that deserved compensation under the terms of Taiwan’s new democracy. Jinmen in the twenty-first century safely belongs to its people, who are busy finding new ways to make a cross-Strait living. As the war becomes a memory, in their eyes the peace must not be wasted as a business opportunity. Regional connections across the Strait via shared dialects, kinship networks, common faiths, and customary practices have long predated the divisions separating the claims of the modern nation-states. The fishermen, villagers, and smugglers of Taiwan and Fujian had ways to build their communities of interest even when operating without the blessings of their states. Apart from being a navigational zone for naval vessels and cargo ships, the Taiwan Strait was a fishing ground and a field for smuggling, as Micah Muscolino shows. Between Pingtan 平潭, a harbor on the Fujian coast, and Nanliao 南寮, a port near Xinzhu 新竹 in western Taiwan, there were plenty of locals who understood this. They were also keen to exploit the benefits. When the fishing craft of the two sides met in the Strait, the fishermen understood each other’s dialect and were able to work out, in a traditional fashion, their fair rules of exchanges and enforcement in the

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absence of banks and courts. The scale of these exchanges was impressive. China’s aquaculture industry at one point supplied an abundance of fresh yellow croaker (huangyu 黃魚), a favorite item on Taiwanese family dinner menus, when the natural supply had been exhausted as a result of overfishing. Smuggling made Nanliao one of Taiwan’s richest villages. Besides fish and watches, the fishermen dealt also in guns, drugs, and prostitutes, thus criminalizing their interactions. The authorities on the two sides responded differently to such maritime connections. Both sides afforded shelter and havens for ships in distress. Mainland authorities were keen to mount propaganda campaigns and to entice the Taiwanese ships to remain. Taiwanese officials, in contrast, wanted to make sure that no mainlanders stayed on past their welcome. Taiwanese fishermen meanwhile exploited the discrepancy between the myth and the reality of the Nationalist claim to be the one and only legitimate government of all China. When caught by their own authorities for smuggling across international lines, they were quick to retort that their ships had never sailed beyond national boundaries, for wasn’t Fujian, like Taiwan, part of the same Republic of China? The maritime world gave expression to long-standing folk connections and a community of economic interest, despite the wars between the modern states across the Strait. Paradoxically, it was precisely out of a desire to curb these acts of local complicity that the governments of the two sides sat down together in the early 1990s, to better coordinate legal moves against their unruly citizens. On the subject of temple networks and worship communities, Robert Weller shows that a separation of sixty years was hardly long enough to break deep-seated cross-Strait connections at the local level. Such capacities to remain connected defied the intentions and the measures of the modern states. Both the Nationalists and the Communists promoted a secular political ideology. The two party-states shared a disdain for traditional faiths and dismissed folk worship as superstition. They differed, though, in their implementation of religious policies. The Nationalists had been lax in their control of village worship, while the Communists had mounted vigorous campaigns to root out religious experts. In the 1980s, as soon as the Nationalists relaxed the ban on travel to the mainland, Taiwanese temple communities organized cross-Strait pilgrimages both to reconnect with the ancestral temples and to reinvigorate their spirituality. Local Communist cadres, primarily those in Fujian, seized upon such overseas initiatives as an opportunity to attract business investment, to increase local income, and to receive social welfare and medical services from charitable organizations such as the Buddhist Ciji 慈濟. The busy religious crossings revitalized a regional network of preachers and believers,

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patrons and guardians. State directives and government policies of course mattered. And Beijing’s wishes must not be totally overlooked even at local religious sites. It is remarkable that local participants in these religious reunions showed a ready understanding of the “proper” religious practices—in line with traditional expectations—and were able to perform accordingly. It is equally remarkable that local Communist cadres readily found a list of secular justifications to accommodate the latest cross-Strait religious fervor while remaining, rhetorically at least, safely within the acceptable framework of state objectives handed down from Beijing. It is notable from the works of Szonyi, Muscolino, and Weller that despite the hard barriers forcefully imposed by the modern states, at the local level across the Strait there existed a vibrant regional community that vigorously reasserted itself when opportunities arose. The locals, to be sure, spoke the official language of the state in terms of national service, sovereign claims, and secular rationality. This was evidenced, in the case of Jinmen, when the locals turned the battlefields into sites of memorabilia and veteran entitlements, and in the case of the Taiwanese fishermen, when the smugglers innocently insisted that they had crossed no national borders when dealing in Fujian. Local officials in Fujian were promoting trade and investment rather than superstition when they joined the welcoming parties for the pilgrims from Taiwan. All three essays point to the existence of a bedrock of shared understanding based on centuries of common cultural practices and memories. This cross-Strait regional culture connected individuals at a level different from that of the politics of unification versus independence, national security, or international treaties. It prompted the locals to talk back to the state, subverting the intent of the official speech while observing the form of it. The state is modern and omnipresent. The society, made of dialects, kinships, temples, and historical memories, was no less capable of reinvigorating local practices in defiance of central norms—at least in the interstices of official policies and languages. Contesting: Cross-Strait Politics and Transnational Bonds By the turn of the century—and despite the absence of direct links—the growing connections across the Strait were generating millions of phone calls each year. About one million Taiwanese were doing business in China. About half of them had taken up residence in Shanghai. Over 10 percent of Taiwan’s residents have had some type of firsthand experience visiting the mainland. Between 1987 and 2007, Taiwan’s direct capital investment in China grew from under $1 billion to over $200 billion. For centuries since the beginning of Chinese migration to Taiwan, marital ties had been central to the formation of social networks across the

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Strait. The Civil War disrupted this pattern in the mid-twentieth century. Family visits began in 1987, when the Nationalist government partly lifted the travel ban, permitting aging Nationalist soldiers to go on their first home visits since 1949. These visits opened up a Pandora’s box for the courts on Taiwan. Who was at fault, for instance, if a mainland spouse of a first marriage sued for abandonment and asked for compensation, or if she insisted that her husband’s post-1949 marriage on Taiwan was legally invalid—hence without the legal rights of communal property and inheritance? Such lawsuits pitted the reality of the jurisdiction of the Taiwanese state against the myth of the Nationalist claims of sovereignty and threatened the interests of Taiwanese spouses and children against those of their newly discovered mainland brothers and sisters. By the early 1990s, former Nationalist soldiers had won not only the right to bring to Taiwan their mainland families for reunion but also the right to bring new brides from the mainland to be caretakers in their declining years. Such practices set a precedent. Over the next two decades, what started as a trickle grew into a torrent. Not only did aging Nationalist soldiers bring over care-providing mainland brides. As multinationals and Taiwanese firms opened up offices in China’s Special Economic Zones, younger and educated Taiwanese men also found opportunities to marry their Chinese women coworkers. Thanks to a low birth rate and high per capita income, Taiwan has become, by the first decade of the twenty-first century, a regional destination of transnational labor and migration. In 2003, 32 percent of all Taiwanese registered marriages involved a non-Taiwanese spouse, and 20 percent of all registered Taiwanese marriages involved a Chinese citizen. By the end of 2010 nearly 300,000 mainland spouses had applied for entry into and residency in Taiwan. Nearly 10 percent of newborns on Taiwan in 2010 had mothers who were non-Taiwanese. Historically as well as worldwide, gender has played a significant role in the transnational experience of migration. Sara Friedman examines the connections between gender and migration in the cross-Strait context and asks: In what way did the tension across the Strait play a role in the gendered experiences of mainland spouses on Taiwan? Friedman finds that legal codes on Taiwan, promulgated over the past two decades, have been treating Chinese citizens neither as outsiders nor as insiders. Under the administrations of Lee Teng-hui (KMT) and Chen Shui-bian (DPP), Chinese mainlanders in Taiwan have fallen into a special category that is neither foreign nor domestic. They are subjects of special legislative actions. As a result, the mainland spouses of Taiwanese citizens must follow more stringent rules than any other foreigners.

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Mainland spouses, first of all, tend to come under suspicion of being in a sham marriage for the sake of immigration status. Mainland women, in addition, tend to be stereotyped as strong and shrewd—products of the Cultural Revolution—and thus unlikely material for good wives and mothers. They need to work harder than others in order to earn their place in Taiwan. Taiwanese government propaganda and immigration rules have made clear that Chinese spouses are valued almost exclusively for their reproductive and care-giving functions to their Taiwanese families. Friedman argues that the state, through legislation, advances a feminized ideology of domesticity, which places mainland spouses in a position of dependency on their Taiwanese spouses for income and autonomy outside the household. Cross-Strait tension produces the condition, Friedman suggests, in which mainland spouses are seen as subjects who would have to be tamed, through the twin venues of legal constraints and patriarchal norms, to become loyal and dependable members of their Taiwanese families. It is not only that gender inequalities have been operating discursively, politically, and socially, as in many other places in the world, to shape immigration policies and feminize norms of domesticity. It is also that homes are the first front that will have to be secured if Taiwan is to be safe from threats coming from across the Strait. To put it differently, state legislation on Taiwan concerning the immigration of mainland spouses, expanded under the DPP administration, has not been about women and men building families together. DPP-sponsored laws about mainland spouses were legal means to battle, in intimate settings, the constructed political differences presumably separating the peoples of the two societies. At the same time that the Taiwanese take their spouses from China, they send to China their capital for direct investment. As the DPP administration passed laws that viewed mainland spouses with political suspicion, it viewed the outflow of the island’s capital as a national security risk and introduced legislation accordingly. In the field of semiconductor manufacturing, in which Taiwan has claimed the largest share of the global market in the 1990s, William Kirby takes up the question: What does it mean for a global company such as TSMC (台灣積體電路公司), which has its headquarters in Taiwan, to find itself in this environment? In what way do cross-Strait relationships impinge upon TSMC’s business decisions and affect its ability to maintain global competitiveness? TSMC, as Kirby explains, is among the world’s largest foundries in the global business of semiconductor manufacturing. The pride and product of Taiwan’s state-sponsored industrial development strategies of the 1980s, it was a star offspring of the Hsinchu Industrial Technology

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Research Institute. It features a thousand-member research arm, of which up to 20 percent of the personnel hold doctoral degrees in hard sciences and engineering, including those conferred by elite American institutions in the league of MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, and Cornell. By 1999 Taiwan led the world in the production of computers and peripherals, claiming a dominant market share in the production of scanners, keyboards, motherboards, and the like. Meanwhile, under the seasoned executive leadership of Morris Chang, a former senior executive of Texas Instruments, TSMC implemented a business model dedicated to running fabrication lines on the basis of the most advanced technology. These facilities, to be sure, are among the most capital intensive, annually requiring an investment in the billions. At the same time, the chip technology is fast changing. As a rule, a new generation of design entails an enhanced margin of cost efficiency, which invariably translates into major successes or failures in the highly price-sensitive businesses of consumer electronics. In short, TSMC, to maintain its global competitiveness, must perfect finding the right balance between inflexible manufacturing costs and agile and advancing technology. It must also maintain a firm grip on the pulse of the ever-changing market for consumer electronics. By the first decade of the twenty-first century, China had emerged as the world’s second largest market for consumer electronics. TSMC’s global clients, a majority of them North Americans, saw it as a plus that the company did its manufacturing in China, because this assured an easy and uninterrupted supply to their customer base. During the same decade (1999–2008), Taiwan’s domestic politics intervened and cross-Strait ties became a politicized issue. Under the DPP administration, Taiwan’s government placed restrictions that impinged upon TSMC business operations in three critical areas: State policies ban the company from deploying the most advanced level of technology in its Chinese manufacturing facilities. They hamper the mobility of the company’s Chinese employees across the Strait for assignments on Taiwan. And they provide no direct links in shipping, mailing, travel, and communications between Taiwan and the mainland. These constraints drove up the company’s costs of doing business. To judge by TSMC’s experiences, DPP policies restricting the travel and migration of Chinese citizens to Taiwan threatened to insulate the island from the emerging pool of human talent in China. They also threatened to close the island off from an expanding market of business opportunities. Until the government of President Ma signed, in 2008, the agreements governing the “three direct links” with China and liberalized Taiwan’s China connections, the Taiwanese state, under DPP administration, had

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demonstrated its power by throwing up legal barriers via a range of civil legislation. These laws and policies carried ramifications for cross-Strait interactions concerning marriages or businesses. In spite of the informal ties and regional networks connecting the fishermen and the pilgrims of Fujian and Taiwan under the radar screen of Beijing and Taipei, the state continues to be a major actor in cross-Strait relationships, dictating the terms and setting the limits of the cross-Strait pursuits of its people, especially for families and corporations that do not have the options of ferrying across the border or becoming smugglers. In the context of accelerating global economic interdependence there are, of course, often constraints on state options—constraints that derive from the norms and the rules of international bodies such as the World Trade Organization and the World Health Organization.20 Still, the territorial state asserts its presence, whether in a regional or an international system. Diverging: Cultural Practices and Ideology In no other arena does the divergence between the two sides of the Strait find a sharper articulation than in the various fields concerning culture and information: the reporting in the press, the practices of language, the trends in academia, the shows in museums, the writing of history, and so forth. Government officials and business executives, as we have seen, are actively concerned with matters about the other side. They are often pragmatists who take into account the bounds of reality. Newspaper editorialists, university professors, radio commentators, television talkshow hosts, writers, novelists, and other cultural producers, in contrast, are oriented toward a domestic rather than a cross-Strait audience. The media and academia on Taiwan have spearheaded and enjoyed freedom of expression in the island’s democratization. Culture has been the arena in which the changing societies of Taiwan (and China) have worked out their self-understanding and self-representation. In China, the question of Taiwan stands as one among many issues of the day. It also falls under the careful management of government officials in the domain of national security. On Taiwan, the China question looms large as the single most significant factor affecting all aspects of Taiwanese lives. China studies on Taiwan have increasingly become the specialized domain of policymakers and researchers who focus on the mainland. Taiwan studies have

20 

See Scott L. Kastner, Political Conflict and Economic Interdependence across the Taiwan Strait and Beyond (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), on the political economy of national security. Kastner argues that the impact of international political conflict on trade will be reduced when nations become accountable to international economic bodies and interests.

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meanwhile emerged to become one of the most vibrant fields of scholarship with a popular following at the turn of the century. The press and the media on Taiwan under the Nationalists, like their counterparts on the mainland, were among the most tightly controlled parts of society in the mid-twentieth century. Timothy Weston shows that for decades (between 1950 and 1987) under the press ban, when it came to the subject of China, the newspapers on Taiwan produced nothing but Nationalist propaganda against the Communists. Taiwanese interest in the mainland was keen, however, in those years. Two young reporters of the Independent Evening Post (Zili wanbao 自立晚報) jumped on Taipei’s loosened control of travel to China in 1987 and surfaced on the streets of Beijing that September with PRC visas obtained in Tokyo. They made news all across Asia for having crossed the borders. Major newspapers of the island—United Daily (Lianhe bao 聯合報) and China Times (Zhongguo shibao 中國時報) —followed suit by setting up in-house units dedicated to China reporting. Taiwan’s opening up to China and the island’s democratization, as it happened, went hand in hand. The DPP strongly demanded that the Nationalist Party, the government, and the military withdraw from the media enterprise. Taiwan media’s China interest, sustained by privately owned newspapers with deep connections to the Central Committee of the Nationalist Party, was soon overwhelmed by the island’s domestic politics of democratization. In the early 1990s the lifting of the press ban and liberalization of the broadcasting administration on Taiwan opened up the public space. Over a brief span of two years (1987–89), the total number of newspapers registered with the proper authorities jumped from 31 to 125. It is particularly impressive, as Weston shows, how the flow of information across the Strait has contributed, even if only momentarily, to the richness and sophistication of public reporting in Taiwan on the Chinese mainland. For a while, it seemed that with the free press and no language barrier, Taiwan would set the standard for respected and impartial political reporting in the Chinese world. Freedom of the press, unfortunately, too often came with cutthroat competition, especially in an overcrowded media market with a partisan readership. Taiwan’s newspaper market witnessed, in the early 2000s, the demise of the Central Daily News (Zhongyang ribao 中央日報), the Nationalist Party organ; the inroads of Apple Daily (Pinguo ribao 蘋果日報), a Hong Kong tabloid; the rise of Liberty Times (Ziyou shibao 自由時報), a pro-DPP paper; and the split of the rest of the market between United Daily and China Times, two commercially oriented pro-KMT enterprises. The print journals of Taiwan, like those in the rest of the world, faced meanwhile the challenges of digital media. In-depth reporting of China news in the

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Taiwanese press during the 2000s no longer attracted valuable advertising dollars, as the island’s readership oriented itself to the ins and outs of domestic political rivalries. When China reporting returned to Taiwan in the late 2000s, it came in the form of a daily under the corporate management of the Want Want Group, a business group under Taiwanese ownership that depended upon the China market for the bulk of its fortune. The group, led by the foodstuffs producer Tsai Eng-meng 蔡衍明, in November 2008 acquired management control of the financially struggling China Times Group, Taiwan’s largest media conglomerate, which owned several newspapers and television stations. In addition to its control of China Times Daily, the Want Want Group launched a tabloid-style Want Daily (Wang bao 旺報) that covers China news with a focus on business. Weston’s assessment of the paper’s usefulness as a source of impartial reporting on China is bleak. Altogether, the public on Taiwan, between bouts of ignorance and indifference, had been served, on the subject of the post-1949 PRC, either the anti-Communist propaganda of the Nationalist Party or the pro-Beijing advertisements produced by a Taiwanese business interest in China. In short, the democratization of Taiwan and the liberalization of its press have paradoxically drawn attention to the inward-looking nature of the island’s democratic culture and the public’s inability, despite an abundance of resources and talent, to become informed about the world beyond its self-imposed boundaries. At the center of a living culture are inevitably the daily practices of a living language. For decades, Mandarin Chinese has been the shared and acknowledged official language of the Chinese people across the Strait. The democratization of Taiwan has propelled to the center of public space the use of the Minnan 閩南 dialect. Minnan challenges Mandarin as the mother tongue of the democratic people on Taiwan. Meanwhile, Taiwan has retained the use of the traditional form—referred to as the “orthodox” or “proper” form—of the Chinese written script, while the mainland devised and adopted as a new national standard, during the Mao years, the simplified script. The politics of language and the wars between the scripts, with all their sidebars and offshoots, are too complicated to present here. When faced with such a changing landscape, what does a young American student do when setting out to learn Chinese language and culture and embarking upon a career to become, someday, a China expert in the United States? Thomas Gold, drawing on his experience as the director of the Berkeley Inter-University Program (IUP) at Tsinghua, describes how, with the relocation of the program from Taipei to Beijing, a whole generation of

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America’s future China specialists are learning their Chinese language and culture exclusively from the mainland rather than Taiwan. The shift is significant. Until the late 1970s, most American experts on China acquired their field training on Taiwan. At the Stanford Center on the campus of National Taiwan University, young Americans not only took in the politics of language and culture of Nationalist construction but also made friends with teachers and neighbors and empathized with their biographies and history. From the 1980s onward, American students joined their European, Australian, and Japanese classmates in Chinese classrooms on the Chinese mainland. The Stanford Center closed down in the early 1990s, due largely to changes stemming from the Taiwan side. Gold argues that Taiwan, in its cross-Strait competition with the Chinese mainland, lost out in a major way when it came to the exercise of soft power in the arenas of education and culture. It represents but a feeble effort, in the overall scheme of things, that the IUP in Beijing has created a “Taiwan familiarization program” to enrich the exposure of American students to “the other China”— even if sometimes the result is simply that the students become aware that Taiwan prefers not to be a part of China. This dilemma—of Taiwan’s assertion of its Taiwanese identity, and this assertion working to isolate rather than connect the island democracy in the international community—finds expression in many other disciplines in the broader field of China studies, including the study of history. The democratic movement of Taiwan traces its origin to the writing of a new kind of history, one that places the political history of the island at the center of the narrative and spells out its ramifications. In my essay, I examine the writing of the history of Taiwan since the mid-twentieth century and take up the issue at three levels. First, I offer a description of the writing of Taiwan’s history as practiced under the Nationalist government and compare it with a new historiography that has been taking shape in the context of Taiwan’s democratic movement. Whether in the hands of the Nationalists or their democratic detractors, the construction of a history of Taiwan is an integral component in the advancement of a political agenda and a cultural ideology. At the center of the contested historical representations is the issue of the placement of Taiwan on the map: whether it is to be narrated as a frontier province on the margins of continental China or as the center of a history and culture of its own, with a maritime reach beyond the boundaries of China. An acceptance of Taiwan’s place in the Chinese world in history, in its most politicized articulation, would imply an acceptance not only of Taiwan’s domination by the Nationalists in the mid-twentieth century but also probable acceptance of a hierarchical form of political connection with China. A

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rejection of that history, conversely, speaks not only of Taiwan’s democratic emancipation from the Nationalist regime, tainted by the memories of the February 28th Incident and the White Terror, but also of its full independence from China. Energized by pressing debates of contemporary relevance, the field of Taiwanese history blossomed in the 1990s. A whole generation of Taiwan’s scholars, with doctoral degrees from Tokyo, Harvard, Stanford, and elsewhere, turned their attention to the study of Taiwan. Academics rather than propagandists, these individuals were too scrupulous intellectually to be content with the simple use of history for political purposes. They did not pass up an opportunity to break down conceptual barriers and launch innovative projects. The result is a rich and dynamic field of Taiwan studies that involves the use of multiple languages (Japanese, Dutch, English, Chinese), the systematic opening up of previously closed archives, and the methodical application of disciplinary tools from all fields of humanities and social sciences. How the new historical projects are adding up to a new history of Taiwan, with its many findings and debates, is summarized in the second part of my paper. Not all the historical projects are designed to steer political debates to conclusions directly in favor of either the island’s eventual unification with or its independence from China. Historical research concerning Chinese migrations to Taiwan in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example, shed new light on the broader historical processes of Han migrations under the Qing, whether internally into China’s southwest and northeast or externally into Southeast Asia and North America. Research findings on the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945) shed new light on the wider questions concerning the nature of Japan’s maritime empire and Taiwan’s global connections through the mediation of colonial modernity. The various projects in Taiwan studies on Taiwan, in short, facilitate the rise of a non-Sinocentric cultural ideology about place and identity. This brings us to the third part of my paper, which argues that on the mainland side of the Strait, Chinese scholarly works on Taiwan tend to be informed, in contrast, by a cultural ideology that emphasize the unity of “China” and the uniformity of “Chineseness” over time. Chinese scholarly works treat migrations in late imperial and modern times as the creation of an amalgamated “Chinese” people out of the processes of ethnic interactions. They also view migration as a critical instrument that would bring new land under the influence of Chinese civilization. In this line of analysis, ancestry and genealogy are determinant factors that guaranteed the reproduction of the Chinese people and the transmission of the Chinese norms. To write the history of migrations across the Taiwan Strait is to write about

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the bloodlines and the inseparable ties that bind the people of Taiwan to the motherland. On Taiwan and with the deepening of the process of democratization, Taiwanese scholars come to view the culture of a people as their shared consciousness stemming from collective actions. They also read the history of a people as their becoming a political subject in opposition to prescribed or imposed norms. The two sides of the Strait have thus diverged in recent years not only in their constructions of culture but also in their taste for history. For American students seeking to learn about Chinese history, Taiwan has lost its attractiveness as a research destination precisely at a moment when it offers an enhanced openness of archival collections and a sophisticated approach to its scholarly enterprises. Meanwhile, the study of Taiwan as a field of its own has yet to establish a presence in research centers beyond those on Taiwan. In Conclusion For decades in the mid-twentieth century, tension across the Taiwan Strait was one of the most explosive issues that could lead to an open war. The danger has been held in check in recent years despite the “Third Taiwan Strait Crisis” referred to by Henry Kissinger, when in March 1996, the Chinese military set off missile tests “bracketing” Taiwan at points just off key port cities in the island’s northeast and southwest, and, in response, the United States sent two aircraft carrier battle groups with the carrier Nimitz through the Taiwan Strait, on the pretext of avoiding “bad weather.”21 Cross-Strait issues remain current and urgent, potentially threatening the peace and security of the region even as the people of the two sides form ever-tightening bonds. For much of the past decade, the policy world, in response to the agitations of the DPP administration in Taipei and the unyielding insistence of the PRC in Beijing, has framed cross-Strait issues as a stark choice between unification and independence, in the foreseeable or indefinite future, and between peace and war. The relationship between the two sides came across as a zero-sum game. The fierce competition between Taipei and Beijing in diplomatic maneuvering pulled the United States one way or the other. Taipei has expended an enormous amount of resources and energy to maintain formal diplomatic relationships with about two score member states of the United Nations. Thanks to the obstruction of Beijing, Taiwan’s participation in international issues and events ranging from health and sports to films and women’s associations has touched off controversies about such topics as the naming of the Taiwanese 21 

Kissinger, On China, 476–477.

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delegations and produced an enormous amount of frustration in Taipei, which in turn soured feelings toward Beijing. Beijing, for its part, has been repeatedly irked when the United States has proceeded with its arms sales to Taiwan. Even from the perspective of political analysis, it is evident that a single-minded focus on the choice between unification and independence is too narrow to fully take into account the political issues and is unlikely to be persuasive. The modern state is also a mechanism of multiple dimensions of complexity. With their regional diversities and many layers of governing structures, neither China nor Taiwan is completely “coherent” and “whole” internally. Furthermore, vast amounts of contact and entanglement occur across the Strait, both at interpersonal levels and in ways that go far beyond policy. A state-centric perspective devoid of a deeper understanding of the economy, culture, and society within which the state takes its actions is likely to limit the knowledge of even its most dedicated observers. The first conclusion that one may draw through the investigations in this volume is that an intensification of interaction across the Strait does not necessarily enhance the prospects for political integration. Taiwan in the nineteenth century was a prefecture under the province of Fujian. Migration, language, worship, and customs had built across the Strait a regional community of shared cultural and religious practices. These were among the first ties to reconnect when tension had relaxed and the Jinmen boy sent by his mother on a shopping errand to Xiamen on the eve of the 1949 division had finally, as a middle-aged man, reached home. Many others had their moments of home-coming. Nationalist veterans went searching for boyhood homes after long years of sojourning. Temple communities on the island made pilgrimages to ancestral temples on the mainland. And southern Fujianese fishermen hired themselves out to Taiwanese ship captains based on connections of kin and accent rather than protections of the law or the state. The reconnections of such regional ties have functioned powerfully to increase communication across the Strait. Business investments and charitable acts followed the revitalization of a community of worship. Such ties resonate strongly with cross-Strait connections of premodern days: family enterprises straddling the Strait and migrant lineages tracing their ancestral roots before the crossing. However, precisely because so many of these links originated before the formation of the states, their reinvigoration speaks to societal reconnections. They do not address the modernday issues of nation building and state formation. The second conclusion one may draw is that in the arena of economic interactions, there has been a comparable trend toward a much higher

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degree of interdependency across the Strait. Yet it is misleading to think that such economic interactions might lay the foundation of political integration. As Kirby has pointed out, the creation of a unified Germany in the nineteenth century was the result of a deliberate act of political will rather than the natural outcome of fiscal integration. There is a long way to go, for instance, from joining a monetary union to giving up national sovereignty. The capacity of a modern multinational corporation such as TSMC to push for integration across the Strait was dwarfed by the state’s capacity to impede the integrated internal operation of a company. Finally, one may draw a third conclusion in the arena of culture, in which the two sides show their growing divergence despite their vastly enhanced capability to better communicate with each other. It is a matter of kinship ties and childhood memories when a Taiwanese visitor to Xiamen or Fuzhou 福州 finds affinity and grasps local practices. It is a matter of pragmatic considerations and global thinking when a multitude of Taiwanese businessmen decide to invest in China. Those connections, which take place daily, appeal either to the sentimental or the calculating sides of the individual minds. But it will take a change of collective heart and an exercise of public will for the two sides to ever bridge the chasm culturally and politically.

ONE

What Drives the Cross-Strait Rapprochement? Political Competition, Globalization, and the Strategic Triangle

YU-SHAN WU AND LOWELL DITTMER

The rapprochement between Taiwan and mainland China since the inauguration of President Ma Ying-jeou has its roots in three driving forces: domestic political competition in the three countries most directly affected by the cross-Strait relationship, globalization and economic imperatives, and the strategic triangle. These forces have converged to push Taipei and Beijing to moderate their cross-Strait policies. However, the three forces also impose constraints on further improvement of ties. The following discussion will deal with these three forces sequentially. Domestic Politics China

Beijing’s Taiwan policy under Jiang Zemin veered sharply from the early period of optimism and faith in the political efficacy of mutually profitable economic exchanges and political dialogue in the early 1990s to a coercive strategy after the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1995–1996. This strategy was marked by the withdrawal of the “1992 consensus” in favor of an uncompromising “one China principle” as a prerequisite for further negotiation, a vigorous (and often successful) campaign to solicit recognition from the nearly thirty states that then recognized Taipei rather than Beijing diplomatically, the strengthening of offensive forces along the Fujian coast (notably a continuing buildup of short-range missiles targeting the island), and the periodic public announcement of threats to use force if Taiwan did not enter into negotiations by some vaguely defined deadline.

26

Yu-shan Wu and Lowell Dittmer

Taipei’s response, aside from a 1998 visit by Straits Exchange Foundation Chair Koo Chen-fu, ranged from noncommittal to stubbornly combative. China’s efforts to dissuade the Taiwanese from pursuing an independent political course reached a crescendo toward the end of the 1990s. Following Lee Teng-hui’s “two states theory” (liang guo lun) in 1999 and leading up to the three-way race among Lien Chan (Kuomintang [KMT]), Chen Shui-bian (Democratic Progressive Party [DPP]), and James Soong (People First Party [PFP]), China published its February 22 White Paper on Taiwan,1 and Zhu Rongji televised a pointed warning to the Taiwanese electorate three days before the election.2 Yet despite all this bluster, Chen Shui-bian’s victory incurred the worst possible electoral outcome from Beijing’s perspective. Beijing gradually began to reassess its Taiwan policy, for two reasons. First, it had become clear even in Beijing not only that coercive diplomacy could whip up an electoral backlash but also that Beijing could escalate the level of its threats no further without carrying them out, or lose credibility. That might mean war with the United States, which was manifestly not in Beijing’s interest. Second, by the turn of the millennium Beijing had become increasingly concerned about the spread of a “China threat theory,” with potentially troublesome implications for its “peace and development” foreign policy. Despite Beijing’s efforts to isolate Taiwan policy from foreign policy, its tough Taiwan position inadvertently symbolized China’s continuing threat to world peace, particularly to the world’s sole superpower. Thus Beijing began to consider how to bring Taiwan policy more into line with “peace and development.” Following the summer 2000 Beidaihe meetings, Beijing adopted a more liberal construction of the “one China principle” (still deemed a prerequisite for talks) and even opened the way to cross-Strait negotiation of “three direct links” in post, transportation, and trade without prior acceptance of the “one China principle.”3 The rise of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao at the Six1 

This White Paper on Taiwan threatened the use of force if, inter alia, unification was put off sine die (“The One-China Principle and the Taiwan Issue,” People’s Daily, February 22, 2000, available at http://www.globalsecurity.org/wmd/library/news/china/2000/000222prc-t3.htm [accessed August 4, 2010]). 2  Beginning with a disclaimer of any intention to interfere in a “local election,” Zhu went on to say that “whoever continues Taiwan Independence will not end up well,” and more pointedly observed that “if the pro-Independence force comes into power, it may trigger a war between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait and undermine peace in the region”; thus, he would “advise all people in Taiwan not to act on this impulse since this juncture will decide the future on both sides of the Strait” (Chinese Government’s Official Web Portal, “Premier Zhu Rongji Takes Questions about China’s Focal Issues,” March 15, 2000, available at http:// www.gov.cn/english//official/2005-07/25/content_17144.htm [accessed August 4, 2010]). 3  Prior to 2000 the PRC position had been that “one China” referred to the PRC and that Taiwan was hence part of it, but Qian Qichen in the summer of 2000 introduced the formu-

Political Competition, Globalization, and the Strategic Triangle

27

teenth Party Congress in September 2002 marked the introduction of more conciliatory foreign policy rhetoric (China’s “peaceful rise,” later China’s “peaceful development” in a “harmonious world”), consistent with this more flexible Taiwan policy. During the 2004 election campaign in Taiwan, Beijing tried to avoid making threats in the face of the DPP’s sponsorship of two “defensive referendums” critiquing its cross-Strait missile buildup, relying instead on Washington to keep Chen in line. Following his narrow reelection in March 2004, Beijing revised its blanket no-contact policy, a holdover from the Jiang administration, in favor of a more nuanced policy mixing carrots and sticks. On the one hand, Beijing softened its rhetoric in relation to Taiwan and pursued contact with apolitical, or politically non-independence-leaning, groups in Taiwan. Hu Jintao, in his May 17 Statement in 2004, made overtures to Taipei about resuming negotiations for the “three direct links,” reducing misunderstandings, and increasing consultation. On the other hand, still suspicious of the Chen administration for its open advocacy of Taiwan independence, Beijing continued its no-contact policy toward Chen himself, silently rebuffing his overtures to meet with the Chinese leadership. Beijing also continued its military buildup against Taiwan, along with a vigorous policy of isolating Taiwan diplomatically. In March 2005, the National People’s Congress passed the Anti-Secession Law, formalizing “nonpeaceful means” as a legal option in response to a declaration of independence by Taiwan. Yet the law also for the first time authoritatively committed Beijing to negotiations on the basis of equal status between the two sides, and furthermore the government refrained from imposing the “one China policy” as a precondition for talks. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) then quickly increased contacts on a party-to-party basis with the KMT, appealing to their checkered history of “united fronts,” when the two parties twice cooperated in the Northern Expedition and in the war against Japan. These increased contacts culminated in the 2005 Pan-Blue visits to mainland China, including meetings between Hu and then KMT chairman Lien Chan in April 2005 and subsequent meetings with PFP chair James Soong. By thus lowering the temperature of cross-Strait relations and depriving the DPP of an obvious mainland threat to inveigh against, Beijing contributed to the KMT’s landslide electoral victory in both legislative and presidential elections in 2008 (though new electoral arrangements also contributed). lation that “there is only one China in the world, both the mainland and Taiwan belong to one China, and China’s sovereignty cannot be split” (“Mainland and Taiwan Belong to One China, Inclusiveness Very Large,” Zhongguo shibao, September 11, 2000, cited in Chen-Yuan Tung, “An Assessment of China’s Taiwan Policy under Third Generation Leadership,” Asian Survey 45, no. 3 [2005]: 343–361).

28

Yu-shan Wu and Lowell Dittmer

The 2005 cross-Strait visits were the direct precursor of the more conciliatory cross-Strait policy introduced by Ma upon his election in March 2008, not only establishing a diplomatic precedent but also negotiating on a party-to-party level many of the agreements later formalized when the KMT resumed power. It was also a prized vindication of a high-risk foreign policy innovation by the Hu leadership. Jiang had since 1995 made a tough Taiwan stance a hallmark of his foreign policy, building a strong institutional base for it in the People’s Liberation Army (which had lobbied for the 1995–96 episode of coercive diplomacy) and the Central Military Commission. Thus it seems safe to assume that Hu introduced his more conciliatory Taiwan approach against a skeptical backdrop, and he must have been greatly encouraged by Ma’s victory. Then he was prepared to go further than any predecessor since Deng Xiaoping in cultivating his Taiwanese counterpart with the requisite political concessions to ensure his political viability—particularly at the time of the Seventeenth Party Congress in late 2007, when Hu was most vulnerable to the hawks. A series of meetings between the two sides followed. On April 12, 2008, Hu held a meeting with vice-president-elect Vincent Siew, then chairman of the Cross-Strait Common Market Foundation during the Boao Forum for Asia. On May 28, 2008, Hu met with then KMT chairman Wu Po-hsiung, the first meeting between the heads of the CCP and the KMT as ruling parties, during which both agreed to recommence semiofficial dialogue under the 1992 consensus.4 Wu committed the KMT not to seek Taiwanese independence, but he also stressed that a “Taiwan identity” was not equivalent to “Taiwanese independence.” Hu committed his government to address the concerns of the Taiwanese people in regard to security, dignity, and “international living space,” with priority given to discussing Taiwan’s wish to participate in the World Health Organization. Beijing seems to have also tacitly agreed to a diplomatic “truce.” A number of bilateral agreements have been reached in subsequent talks between Taiwan’s Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and China’s Association for Relations across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS), culminating in the realization of the “three direct links” across the strait in December 2008. Taiwan

The KMT went through a soul search after losing two consecutive presidential races in 2000 and 2004. A critical decision was made by Ma Yingjeou, the party chairman since 2005 and its presidential candidate for the 4  On March 26, 2008, Hu Jintao held a telephone conference with U.S. President George W. Bush in which he explained that the “1992 Consensus” means “both sides recognize there is only one China, but agree to differ on its definition.”

Political Competition, Globalization, and the Strategic Triangle

29

2008 race, that the KMT would no longer duel with the DPP over identity issues, and that the time was ripe to focus on the economy. With Taiwan’s economic malaise and growing fatigue over the DPP’s mobilization of Taiwanese identity, the KMT’s grand shift of strategy brought about considerable changes in political competition. In order to better grasp this momentum, we need a brief overview of Taiwan’s political development in terms of the core issue that defines the competition. There have been three stages of Taiwan’s domestic political development. Initially the defining cleavage was between the KMT and the Tangwai (i.e., non-KMT opposition), turned DPP in the course of democratization. The KMT attempted to maintain the neo-Leninist system originally established in the 1920s, while the Tang-wai/DPP led in the struggle for full democracy. This stage ended with the path-breaking changes of the 1987–92 period, when martial law was lifted, the extraordinary constitutional clauses were removed, and the National Assembly and the Legislative Yuan were reelected. During the 1990s, the focus of contention shifted to national identity and the future of the nation, that is, unification vs. independence, with the KMT (later the Blue camp) and the DPP (later the Green camp) holding diametrically opposite positions. When Lee Tenghui was president, the KMT was able to marginalize the radicals in the Green camp and pose as a moderate center-right (i.e., prounification) force by identifying Taiwan with the Republic of China (ROC) as established in 1912. After Chen Shui-bian won the presidential race in 2000, however, the balance of power shifted to favor the Green side. The KMT fought an uphill battle against the DPP, which held the administrative advantage from the executive branch and advocated “rectification” of the country’s name and constitution and formal Taiwan independence. Only tremendous international pressure brought to bear on Chen was able to thwart the movement. The third stage of Taiwan’s political contestation began with the KMT adopting a new strategy to challenge the DPP. Knowing that it had little chance to retake the ground lost on the identity front, where popular identification with “Taiwan” rather than “China” has continued to escalate, the KMT under Ma Ying-jeou sought to halt that battle and shift popular attention to the economic performance of the government (see figure 1.1). This was different from the traditional KMT position; it had always cast itself as the guardian of the ROC and Chinese nationalism. Ma’s new course emphasized the material needs of the population and toed a middle line between the Blues and the Greens on the ideological spectrum. Ma himself, though of mainland parentage, struggled to speak Taiwanese in public and maintained his identity as a “new Taiwanese.” Instead of talking about “ultimate unification,” which burned him at the initial stage of the

30

Yu-shan Wu and Lowell Dittmer Figure 1.1: T h e Changing Pattern of Taiwan’s National Identity

60%

50%

40%

30%

20%

10%

0%

Time

Both

Taiwanese

Chinese

Source: Election Study National Chengchi University, Taiwan (ROC), Figure 1.1: TheCenter, Changing Pattern of Taiwan’s National Identity. Source: Election http://esc.nccu.edu.tw/modules/tinyd2/content/TaiwanChineseID.htm, October 6, Study Center, National Chengchi University, Taiwan (ROC),accessed http://esc.nccu.edu. 2010. tw/modules/tinyd2/content/TaiwanChineseID.htm, accessed October 6, 2010.

presidential campaign, Ma advocated the “status quo” that most people in Taiwan favored on the unification-independence spectrum (see figure 1.2). Ma’s grand strategy was to avoid the ideological battle, court the median voter who cared less about the name of the country than about concrete performance, and count on support from the Blues as captives who could vote only for him. In this way, Ma and his strategists attempted to redefine Taiwan’s politics by shifting the main dividing issue from identity to economy. Because the DPP government’s performance in managing the economy left much to be desired, Ma calculated that he would win the 2008 presidential election, and he was right. The corruption case against Chen was a late-breaking windfall for the KMT that underscored their claim of DPP managerial incompetence with credible allegations of highlevel corruption. Through the three stages, Taiwan’s focus of political contestation shifted from democratization to identity, and then to the economy. The grand shift from the second to the third stage has not been completed. The parliamentary and presidential elections in tandem in early 2008 were the first elections where there was significant economic voting, although traces of identity voting were still evident. Stage two features unification vs. independence, and dual identity (both Chinese and Taiwanese) vs. exclusive Taiwanese identity. Stage three shifts to the conflict between those who benefit from closer economic ties with mainland China and those

Political Competition, Globalization, and the Strategic Triangle

31

70

Uolfic.otlon ......,..

60

Milotlloshlllsquo---

Independence

---a--

30

20

10

Year

Figure 1.2: Future for Nation Preference. Source: Election Study Center, National Chengchi University, Taiwan (ROC), http:/ /esc.nccu.edu.tw /modules/tinyd2/ content/tonduiD.htm, accessed October 6, 2010.

Table 1.1: Crisscrossing Cleavages and Support for Cross-Strait Rapprochement

Wmners from cross-Strait rapprochement Losers from cross-Strait rapprochement

Greens

Blues

Reluctant Supporters

Fundamentalist Supporters

Fundamentalist Opponents

Conditional Opponents

who stand to lose. The two cleavages crisscross each other, as shown in table 1.1. Economy is in command in the third stage, compared with the second stage, when identity was in command. Taiwan is right now in the transition phase between the two stages. Whether Taiwan will remain in the third stage, with economy replacing identity or with identity and economy equally dominant remains to be seen. Suffice it to say that concern over the economy had grown to such an extent that people were susceptible to the argument that cross-Strait relations should be viewed primarily in terms

32

Yu-shan Wu and Lowell Dittmer

of their impact on the economy, instead of identity. Advocating a moderate and cooperative cross-Strait policy, Ma and his campaign team sought to capitalize on the material concern and identity fatigue of Taiwan’s voters in the presidential race. His landslide victory over his DPP rival Frank Hsieh testified to the changing mood of the electorate. However, the “economy in command” mentality can work both ways. It can facilitate cross-Strait relations but also backfire, depending on how people perceive the relationship between closer economic ties with the mainland and the performance of the Taiwan economy. They can express their perspective through their votes. Here one can delve into the hairsplitting typologies of economic voting—prospective vs. retrospective, and sociotropic vs. pocketbook—and test which combination is more prominent. The main issue, however, is clear: Taiwan’s voters have adopted a more realistic and materialistic approach to cross-Strait relations and become susceptible to arguments that such relations should be based on economic grounds. Domestic political change and the KMT’s shift of strategy have thus provided momentum to cross-Strait rapprochement. The KMT’s shift to a more economic focus was followed by the DPP under its new chairwoman, Tsai Ing-wen. After the electoral debacles in 2008, the DPP made a surprising comeback under Dr. Tsai’s able leadership. She is a scholar turned politician with an international perspective, like Ma. She repositioned the DPP toward the ideological center and emphasized the primacy of the economy, again like Ma. The electoral lot of the two parties in 2008 left a deep imprint on both: the KMT was encouraged to deepen its commitment to the economy, and the DPP was urged to follow suit. Right after the 2008 elections, the trends began to shift. As the Green voters were infuriated by Ma’s rapprochement with China and saw in Tsai a genuine hope for the DPP to recapture power, they offered solid support for her. The middle voters originally had inflated expectations of Ma, but found his administration deficient in dealing with natural calamities (most notably the 2009 Typhoon Morakot that caused more than seven hundred deaths) and delivering on its economic promises amid the international financial tsunami. The Blue camp sensed Ma’s government was not interested in espousing traditional values of the Republic of China (i.e., one China in principle, contingent on the mainland’s democratization for its ultimate realization) and was somewhat demoralized. As a result, the DPP’s approval rate rose while the KMT’s sank. In the mayoral elections for the five special municipalities at the end of 2010, although the KMT was able to secure its seats in Taipei, Xinbei City, and Greater Taichung, the total vote count was in the DPP’s favor, as it won more than 400,000 votes. Counting all votes cast in the mayor and county magistrate elections in 2009 and the municipal mayoral elections, the KMT trailed the

Political Competition, Globalization, and the Strategic Triangle

33

DPP. This was in sharp contrast with the 2008 parliamentary and presidential elections, in which the KMT beat the DPP by huge margins, 15 percent and 17 percent, respectively. As the DPP’s electoral lot improved, Tsai’s popularity among Green voters surged. In 2011 she won the DPP’s primary and became the party’s presidential candidate. She then led the DPP to challenge the KMT in the presidential cum parliamentary elections of January 2012. Under Tsai’s leadership, the party took a moderate, middle-of-the-road strategy. It downplayed the DPP’s traditional identity platform and accepted the ROC as legitimate, equating it to Taiwan while severing its legal ties to the mainland. After Taiwan’s SEF signed a landmark Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with its mainland counterpart ARATS premised on the 1992 consensus that upheld one China, the DPP did not campaign for its abolition or reprise the identity issue, though it refused to accept the 1992 consensus, holding out for a mysterious “Taiwan consensus.” It merely pointed out the costs of economic integration with the Chinese mainland, presenting itself as attending to the concrete, material needs of the people. The 2012 elections thus witnessed the duel of two economic policies, not competing identities. It was widely described as the most civilized among Taiwan’s presidential elections. Tsai lost to Ma in the presidential race by 6 percent, and the KMT managed to hold its majority in the Legislative Yuan, although with a greatly reduced margin. What lesson the DPP learns from this defeat is critical in determining the future course of political competition in Taiwan. It needs to decide whether to continue following Ma’s platform of “frozen identity” and “economy in command,” which served to revive the DPP from its historic low but failed to dislodge the KMT from power, or to revive its identity appeal to the Green base. Leaving aside the identity controversy may be only a temporary solution, though, as the status of the state is left unresolved. Because Ma simply froze the status quo, society remains in the mind-set it had when the DPP left the governing position: “Taiwan” and “China” are opposing concepts, and the ROC has not been fully integrated with Taiwan. In strengthening cross-Strait commercial relations, Ma proposed “three no’s”—no unification during his term in office, no pursuit of de jure independence, and no use of force to resolve differences across the Strait. However, this did not ease public concern regarding Taiwan’s future, and DPP criticism is only to be expected. For the Blue camp, the middle path reflected in Ma’s policy lacks idealism and foresight. Effectively, the policy does not reflect the core values behind the Republic of China, nor does it inspire enthusiasm among the KMT’s supporters, who were goaded to the polling stations more by the fear of Tsai winning the election than by

34

Yu-shan Wu and Lowell Dittmer

any passion to support Ma. Although the thinking of independent middle voters is hard to grasp, they are generally more critical of the governing parties, particularly during an economic downturn, giving momentum to the pendulum effect. In short, even though Ma and the KMT induced the DPP to shift from identity to economy and won the 2012 elections, the continuation of Ma’s new course is in doubt: it does not have a solid electoral base and the DPP may at any time revert to old identity politics. The U.S. Factor

The United States, as will become clear in the discussion of triangular strategy, is the ultimate guarantor of Taiwan’s security and hence the most decisive exogenous factor affecting cross-Strait relations. U.S. policy toward Taiwan’s status has, since the Nixon opening to China in 1972, been ambiguous: in effect recognizing Beijing’s claim that Taiwan is part of China, but insisting that any attempt at reunification be peaceful and by mutual consent. Although initially Washington seemed to welcome such a resolution, the Tiananmen crackdown and the subsequent disintegration of the communist bloc gave birth to an ideological revival targeting Beijing and commensurately favoring Taipei. Bill Clinton crusaded against the “butchers of Beijing” in the 1992 presidential campaign, an epithet from which George H. W. Bush’s sale of 150 F-16s to Taiwan did not adequately immunize him. Yet the cleavage over Taiwan policy was not identifiably partisan, but split the “ins” from the “outs,” as the incumbents usually leaned to the Chinese side for strategic utility and diplomatic convenience while the opposition rallied to the support of tiny democratic Taiwan, mobilizing residual ideological suspicions of the PRC. Thus in 2000, Republican George W. Bush ridiculed talk of a Sino-American “strategic partnership” and characterized the relationship as “strategic competition,” whereas in the afterglow of his presidential-race victory the U.S.-Taiwan relationship was deemed to be at its best since Nixon. As in the case of Taiwan, domestic electoral competition played a role in shaping Washington’s China policy. The 2008 election was the first since China’s opening in which the incumbent administration did not come under polemical assault for abandoning Taiwan and capitulating to China. True, Barack Obama made a comment during the campaign threatening to define China as a currency manipulator, which Treasury Secretary Geithner first repeated and then disavowed soon after the election. But for the most part, both Obama and John McCain sought to be equally conciliatory toward both China and Taiwan, marking in effect a relative decline in U.S. support for Taiwan. Though partly attributable to simultaneous U.S. preoccupation with two wars in the Middle East and a global financial crisis, the decline in political

Political Competition, Globalization, and the Strategic Triangle

35

sympathy for Taiwan, perceptible on both sides of the aisle, owed much to Beijing’s low-key courtship of Washington since 9/11 and even more to Chen Shui-bian’s determination at certain critical junctures to ignore U.S. interests and advice in favor of a public commitment to an independent foreign policy course aiming toward formal independence. Whereas the incoming administration made quite clear that it was “back” in Asia and in that context gave a rising China pride of place, the reaction in China to the ascent of Obama was notably cooler than in Europe or Africa. And Beijing’s subsequent foreign policies not only ignored Washington’s appeals for cooperation but also were sharply critical on points of disagreement, such as arms sales to Taiwan. Amid a series of disputes over global warming, currency manipulation, Internet censorship, and sweeping maritime territorial claims—not to mention ongoing commitments to two wars and a protracted economic recession—it is easy to see why Washington welcomed cross-Strait rapprochement. The danger from Taipei’s perspective is possible premature U.S. abandonment— that is, if cross-Strait relations are thriving and cordial, why keep selling Taiwan weapons? Taipei thus continued to appeal for a promised sale of sixty-six new F-16sC/Ds, only to be disappointed when the administration in November 2011 opted instead to help refurbish Taiwan’s existing fleet. Aside from the military merits of the decision, this was a signal of American support for Taipei-Beijing rapprochement that was further underscored by clear administration support for Ma over Tsai in the January election. Taiwan and Globalization The root cause of the shift in Taiwan’s political issue definition since 2000 is the deterioration of the island’s economy. Hailed as an economic miracle and one of the four “small dragons,” Taiwan successfully built up its capabilities and sustained repeated diplomatic shocks in the 1970s and 1980s. Its growth gradually slowed in the 1990s. Then came the election of 2000. From 2001 to 2008, Taiwan’s economic growth averaged 3.8%, compared with 6.2% in the previous decade, when the KMT was in power. The unemployment rate more than doubled from an average of 2.1% in the 1990s to 4.4% from 2001 through 2008. As clearly shown in figure 1.3, 2001, the first year of full DPP governance, was a watershed. Economic growth dove to an unprecedented low of –1.65%, while unemployment soared to a record high of 4.57%. This dismal situation was partly alleviated in the following years, but Taiwan’s economy has never fully recovered. Though perhaps not so bad in comparative perspective, those post-2000 figures amount to Taiwan’s worst economic performance in decades, especially

36

Yu-shan Wu and Lowell Dittmer

10

GDP Growth Rate (%)

Unemployment Rate (%)

8

Percentage

6 4 2 0 -2

07

06

05

04

08 20

20

20

20

9 19 9

03

8 19 9

20

7 19 9

02

6 19 9

20

5 19 9

01

4 19 9

20

3 19 9

20

2 19 9

00

1 19 9

20

0 19 9

-4

Year

Figure 1.3: GDP Growth and Unemployment, 1990–2008. Source: DirectorateGeneral Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan, Taiwan (ROC), http://www.dgbas.gov.tw/ct.asp?xItem=13213&CtNode=3504&mp=1, accessed June 7, 2009.

compared with the rapid growth of the East Asian region as a whole. As shown in table 1.2, Taiwan was overtaken by South Korea in 2004 in per capita gross domestic product (GDP). That was a change from Taiwan’s quite considerable lead over Korea in 1999, when the latter was still struggling to recover from the Asian financial crisis. Taiwan’s lag behind both Hong Kong and Singapore widened further during the 1999–2009 decade. In this atmosphere of economic insecurity, Taiwan has been keenly aware of the rise of China. At the outset of the policy of reform and opening, Taiwan’s GDP was more than half that of the PRC. By 2009, Taiwan had been overtaken by no fewer than three provinces on the mainland in economic size.5 Although Taiwan continues to enjoy greater economic prosperity in per capita terms, this is not necessarily true in various Taiwanese enclaves in urban China, where Taiwanese can enjoy higher living standards than at home. All these developments damage Taiwan’s self-esteem. For a long time Korea was considered less developed than 5 

Taiwan’s GDP fell behind that of Guangdong in 2007, the first time Taiwan was not at the top of China’s “national” list. In 2008, Shandong and Jiangsu also surpassed Taiwan. Taiwan’s economic size was a third that of mainland China as a whole in 1992, a quarter in 2000, and one seventh in 2008.

Political Competition, Globalization, and the Strategic Triangle

37

Table 1.2: Per Capita GDP of Former Tigers and China (USD)

1999

Taiwan

South Korea

Singapore

Hong Kong

13,535

9,906

21,073

24,600

Mainland China 861

2000

14,641

11,347

22,791

25,199

946

2001

13,108

10,655

21,001

24,753

1,038

2002

13,370

12,094

22,028

24,351

1,132

2003

13,748

13,451

23,029

23,443

1,270

2004

14,986

15,029

26,419

24,403

1,486

2005

16,023

17,551

28,498

25,999

1,726

2006

16,451

19,676

31,763

27,509

2,064

2007

17,122

21,590

36,695

29,847

2,645

2008

17,372

19,028

38,087

30,926

3,404

2009

16,330

16,959

36,567

29,917

3,740

2010

18,572

20,540

43,865

31,786

4,423

2011

20,083

22,424

43,271

34,259

5,417

Source: World Economic Outlook Database, International Monetary Fund (IMF), http:// www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2012/02/weodata/weoselgr.aspx, accessed October 23, 2012.

Taiwan. Hong Kong was thought of as suffering under the “one country, two systems” formula. Finally, China was regarded as underdeveloped, a country where Taiwan’s sunset industries would migrate for cheap labor. All this changed dramatically from 1999 to 2009. Taiwan’s relative position dropped precipitously against the other three economies and also in the region (see table 1.2). Exacerbating the dismal growth situation is deteriorating income distribution, as liberalization of the economy further enriches property and capital owners at the expense of fixed-wage earners. Unlike in the past, when the development of the economy could be more or less taken for granted, Taiwan in the late 2000s found itself struggling to keep pace with its rapidly growing neighbors and unsure of its economic future. Confidence waned. Two issues stand out. One is sluggish investment, both domestic and international. The other is the danger of being locked out of international markets. The investment problem has to do with the deterioration of Taiwan’s business environment, including rising labor costs, appreciation of the NT dollar, and local protest and legislation for environment protection.

38

Yu-shan Wu and Lowell Dittmer

The most important factor is political: with cross-Strait relations in chronic danger of eruption, long-term investment has not been forthcoming. Potential investors, both foreign and local, would rather invest in a country that may be launching missiles than a country that may be their target. Market accession is also of great importance. Taiwanese too preferred to invest in China, so the island’s main security threat became one of the few bright spots on Taiwan’s economic horizon—and both trade and investment ironically continued to mount unabated throughout Chen’s presidency.6 As bilateral free-trade agreements (FTAs) in Asia proliferate, Taiwan finds itself in an unenviable situation: potential economic allies refuse to discuss FTA arrangements with Taipei because of Beijing’s claim on the island and their reluctance to offend Beijing. Without market access, Taiwan’s exports will be hard hit and its growth potential further thwarted. The ASEAN+1 agreement, which officially took effect on January 1, 2010, eliminates all formal tariff barriers within the world’s largest multilateral FTA while imposing a uniform tariff of around 9 percent for all nonmembers. The Cross-Strait Common Market vigorously advocated by Ma and Vice-President Vincent Siew, and later the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA), are in a sense logical responses of Taiwan to the ASEAN+3 at the cost of appearing to concede on nominal sovereignty.7 In short, economic globalization requires Taiwan to improve relations with the mainland, which acts as a “gatekeeper” that can lock Taiwan out of the international marketplace. And Taipei has been prompt to walk through this gate, initiating talks for an Economic Partnership Agreement with Singapore (Taiwan’s sixth largest trade partner) in January 2011 while looking forward to similar talks with the Philippines (neither partner would consider such an agreement without Beijing’s approval). Taiwan and the Strategic Triangle The third reason for Taiwan to reach rapprochement with mainland China is strategic. Taiwan, China, and the United States have been interacting at least since the early 1970s in a strategic triangle. There are different roles to play, the most enviable of which is the pivot, where a player enjoys good 6  In the decade from 1998 to 2008, annual trade rose by 7.9%, 21%, –10.9%, 34.3%, 23.8%, 33.1%, 16.2%, 15.4%, 16.1%, and 3.1%; investment (dollar amount) increased by –17.5%, 108.8%, 7%, 38.58%, 19%, 51.1%, –13.5%, 27.2%, 30.5%, and –1.3% (Mainland Affairs Council, Information Center, available at http://www.mac.gov.tw/np.asp?ctNode=5892&mp=3 [accessed January 29, 2010]). Taiwan’s statistics are probably an underestimate. 7  An analysis by the Global Trade Analysis Project in 2001 demonstrated that ASEAN+3 would reduce Taiwan’s GDP by at least 1.1%. See Robert Scollay and John P. Gilbert, New Regional Trading Arrangements in the Asian Pacific? (Washington, D.C.: Peterson Institute, 2001), 68–69.

Political Competition, Globalization, and the Strategic Triangle

39

relations with both “wings” while the two wings compete with each other. The worst role is outcast, shunned by the other two players, who form a partnership. If there is a power disparity among players, then the cost of being the outcast becomes prohibitive for the weakest player. It should do whatever is necessary to extricate itself from that role. From 2003 to 2008, with Chen’s brinkmanship on Taiwan independence, cross-Strait relations were severely strained, implicitly challenging the United States to rescue Taiwan from Beijing’s threats. Because the overstretched United States feared open conflict with China over the Taiwan issue, Chen’s provocative policy significantly weakened U.S.-Taiwan ties. As the United States found more and more strategic and economic value in cooperation from Beijing, U.S.-PRC relations steadily improved. In the strategic triangle, all three relationships were moving against Taiwan’s interest. Furthermore, the power gap between Taiwan and mainland China had been widening rapidly. Whereas at the beginning of the 1990s, mainland China’s national capabilities (calculated in terms of GDP and military expenditures with equal weight) were 1.91 times that of Taiwan, in 2008 the ratio had risen to 8.96:1. On the U.S.-Taiwan side, the asymmetry was even more disproportional: 42.78:1 in 1990 and 49.84:1 in 2008. The increasing power gap between Taiwan and the other two players suggests any negative relationship the island had with either of them, let alone both, would be amplified tremendously. In short, Taiwan simply could not afford to continue playing the role of the outcast, weakest of the trio. Ma and his strategists yearn for a return to the early 1990s, when Taiwan maintained good relations with both the United States and the PRC. That they consider the apex (dianfeng shiqi 顛峰時期) of Taiwan’s development,8 for “cross-Strait economic and cultural exchanges progressed rapidly, military confrontation attenuated, and diplomatic competition moderated,” and “because of the improvement of cross-Strait relations, the Republic of China [could] ‘stand up and walk out’ (zhan qilai zou chuqu 站起來走 出去), increasing our military procurements, democratizing our politics, and rapidly growing our economy.”9 Of course circumstances were quite different at that time—China was still under a cloud in much of the world in the wake of the Tiananmen crackdown, while Taiwan’s democracy was still fresh and its economy booming. Ma recognizes that both threat and 8  Su Chi, “Guoji, liang’an zongti qingshi yu guojia anquan” [The overall international and cross-Strait situation and national security], in Ma zongtong zhizheng hou de liang’an xinju: Lun liang’an guanxi xin luxiang [The new cross-Strait situation after the inauguration of President Ma Ying-jeou: On the new orientation of cross-Strait relations], ed. Tsai Chao-ming (Taipei: Prospect Foundation, 2009), 4. 9  Su Chi, Weixian bianyuan: Cong liangguo lun dao yibian yiguo [Brinkmanship: From twostates theory to one-country-on-each-side] (Taipei: Commonwealth, 2003), 37.

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opportunities exist in this new environment and strongly advocates a rapprochement with the mainland to maximize the opportunities and minimize the threat.10 In short, the rise of mainland China makes it very costly in both economic and strategic terms for Taiwan to take a confrontational attitude toward Beijing. Rapprochement is deemed a must. Yet while Beijing insists on reading Taipei’s forthcoming movement as growing political accommodation to the “one China principle,” the Ma administration maintains a calculated silence about its ultimate destination, creating the possibility of serious misunderstanding between Beijing and Taipei at some future point. To improve relations with Beijing it is necessary for Taipei to mend fences with Washington. When Chen pursued a radical independence line designed to mobilize support in domestic political competition, Taipei’s role in the strategic triangle began to deteriorate rapidly. In December 2003, Bush considered Chen’s referenda proposal such a gratuitous provocation that he criticized him in front of visiting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (having already fruitlessly criticized his proposals more discreetly through diplomatic channels). In the following five years, Chen’s precarious proindependence moves kept Washington on constant alert, for such adventurism might involve the United States in an unwanted military showdown with the People’s Liberation Army, at a time when the U.S. military was spread thin around the world. Except for different perspectives toward Beijing, however, there was little disagreement between Taipei and Washington, so a moderation of Taiwan’s mainland policy could go a long way toward improving ties with the United States. In this way, Taiwan could kill two birds with one stone: rapprochement with mainland China would improve relations with Beijing and Washington simultaneously, for the two relations are intricately linked, a typical situation in a strategic triangle. “Dual amity” was the essence of Taiwan’s position in the early 1990s, a period considered by Ma as the best time for the island. The KMT’s new course of rapprochement with the mainland was designed to bring back the early 1990s for Taiwan. Obviously there is one major difference now: the relationship between the United States and the PRC is much better than in the aftermath of the Tiananmen Incident—the row over Beijing’s posture in the South China Sea and Diaoyu Islands and differences over the increased U.S. military presence 10 

Ma Ying-jeou, “Zhonghua Minguo di shierren zongtong Ma Ying-jeou xiansheng jiuzhi yanshuo” [The inaugural address of the twelfth president of the Republic of China Ma Ying-jeou], and “Zongtong zhuchi Zhonghua Minguo jiushiba nian kaiguo jinian dianli ji yuandan tuanbai zhici” [Presidential address at the founding of the nation ceremony in the ninety-eighth year of the Republic of China], Office of the President, ROC, both available at http://www.president.gov.tw/ [accessed September 20, 2009].

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in the Korean peninsula notwithstanding. This naturally causes Taiwan concern but proves beyond its ability to influence. Given U.S.-PRC amity (and increasingly so with the world in financial crisis), the best triangular position Taiwan could possibly achieve is as a friend in a ménage à trois, not as a pivot as in the early 1990s. Failing to reach rapprochement with Beijing may result in becoming an outcast. Thus U.S.-PRC amity means there is more reason for Taiwan to reach rapprochement with the Chinese mainland. As the United States is still the strongest actor, its policy calculations have also of course played a role in the triangle’s evolution. During the Cold War, the Taipei-Beijing-Washington triangle was subordinate to and a function of the “great” strategic triangle involving Washington, Beijing, and Moscow, but with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s the Taiwan triangle became autonomous, evolving according to the power relations among its three participants. Washington usually occupied the pivot position, by dint of its economic and military superiority as well as its attempt to cultivate simultaneous positive relations with both Beijing and Taipei, whose relations were always complicated by the sovereignty dispute. PRC analysts have suspected the United States of using the Taiwan issue to manipulate Beijing, but although there was always a relationship between cross-Strait relations and Sino-U.S. relations in the sense that the United States tended to be more supportive of Taiwan when Sino-U.S. relations soured and to neglect Taiwan when they improved, from Washington’s perspective the shifts in its policy were usually motivated by changing assessments of Beijing’s behavior (as the larger and more strategically important of the two “wings”) rather than Taipei’s. These assessments typically involved a combination of economic and residual ideological factors; since Deng Xiaoping had abandoned the export of revolution to the Third World and there were few direct conflicts of interest between China and the United States, strategic competition played a remarkably small role. Only the defense of Taiwan remained of strategic concern, as the Taiwan Relations Act became a functional substitute for the Sino-American alliance (abrogated in 1979). Since the 1990s Washington’s China assessment has changed along three dimensions. First, as noted previously, the PRC’s phenomenal growth rate has made it a much more economically weighty actor, both as a leading trade partner and host of U.S. multinational investment and as the largest holder of American debt. Second, particularly since the turn of the millennium, Beijing has adopted a more conciliatory foreign policy line (“peaceful development,” etc.), including a less threatening posture toward Taiwan. This has made it much easier for Washington to look benignly upon improving cross-Strait relations. There are still implicit conflicts of interest

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between the two, however, notably the temporarily muted but unpredictable ideological factor. China’s economic rise has hitherto been a source of admiration to the Americans, but according to power transition theory, the real test will come when China’s GDP approaches that of the United States.11 Depending mainly on the temperature of the Sino-U.S. relationship, Washington could come to see cross-Strait rapprochement as a strategic liability, even a threat to its own national interests—particularly when (and if) a transition point is reached between economic integration and formal unification. Third, the PRC’s economic growth has been paralleled by even more rapid growth of its military budget, much of which has been aimed at developing the capability to prevail in a conflict over the Strait. These preparations fit two contingencies. One is the capability to coerce Taiwan, such as the growing number of increasingly precise short-range missiles (now well over one thousand) and the (slower) development of amphibious capabilities and aircraft to gain local air superiority. The second is area-denial capabilities (e.g., antiship ballistic missiles, ASBMs), to deter U.S. aircraft carriers from protecting Taiwan in case of a mainland invasion or blockade. Beijing’s view of the relationship is ambivalent. On the one hand, Beijing would in principle not view the relationship in triangular terms, execrating the very notion as a treacherous and cynical American “card” game to block China’s rise and prevent “one China” from realizing its full geopolitical and economic potential. On the other hand, in its very efforts to checkmate the United States, Beijing implicitly recognizes Taipei’s de facto ability to seek diplomatic recognition from other states and even to purchase weapons with which to resist coercive reunification. Thus Beijing implicitly acknowledges the triangular power realities and attempts to play that game without forfeiting the legal and moral advantages of denying triangularity and pretending Taiwan is already part of China. From a triangular perspective Beijing has moved through four stages. From 1949 to 1978, Beijing viewed the Washington-Taipei axis as an unholy marriage, an ethno-national betrayal consolidated by capitalist-imperialist ideology, to be redeemed only by revolutionary violence. From 1978 to 2000, following abrogation of the alliance and Washington’s switch of diplomatic recognition from Taipei to Beijing under its “one-China policy,” Beijing viewed the relationship as one of fraternal intimacy with Taiwanese compatriots (tongbao), according them special investment privileges on the 11  According to the traditional power transition theory as espoused by A. F. K. Organski, the real test would come when the rising power’s GDP had grown to 80 percent that of the dominant state’s. Parity would be reached then, and the challenger and the dominant power would have to work out their relationship under the mounting pressure inherent in this power structure. See A. F. K. Organski, World Politics (New York: Knopf, 1958).

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mainland and tolerating a big negative trade balance while at the same time refusing to disavow its sovereign right to use force should it deem this necessary. From a legal perspective, the relationship was a strictly domestic matter in which U.S. involvement was outrageous interference in Chinese sovereignty. From 2000 to 2008, Beijing tacitly shifted to quasiostracism of DPP-led Taiwan and quasi-alliance with the United States, whose pressure on Taipei was deemed more likely to be persuasive and did not entail an antimainland electoral backlash. From 2008 to the present, with the second cross-Strait thaw, Beijing seems to have shifted back to the 1978–2000 pattern of quasi-marriage with Taipei and intensified resentment of U.S. interference (hence the 2010 cancellation of militaryto-military relations following U.S. arms sales to Taiwan). This pattern of course foreshadows the triangular configuration should economic integration eventuate in formal reunification. Looking into the Future The effects of the three forces that caused Taipei’s initial tilt toward Beijing may not point in the same direction over time. In terms of domestic politics, Ma’s desire to appeal to the median voter with concrete economic performance may make him think twice about his mainland policy if Taiwan’s economy fails to grow rapidly and in a sustainable manner, as he has promised, or if the Green camp succeeds in persuading the electorate that deepening ties with the mainland seriously jeopardizes Taiwan’s economic well-being. In the aftermath of the 2008–09 international financial crisis, Taiwan managed to register quite impressive economic recovery, with a growth rate for 2010 at 10.82%, the highest since 1989, followed by a decent 4.03% for 2011. And yet the growth prospect for 2012 is quite bleak, hovering around 2% and below most of Taiwan’s Asian neighbors. Moreover, unemployment (linked not directly to outsourcing but to declining international demand for Taiwan’s exports) hovered high at 5.21% for 2010, and 4.39% for 2011. What is particularly worrying is the effect of the massive inflow of capital from the mainland on price inflation and increasing income stratification. It is estimated that in 2010 the richest 20 percent of households in Taiwan had a disposable income 6.34 times that of the poorest 20 percent, compared with 6.05 times in 2008. Income polarization appears to be widening and is generally attributed to deeper economic ties with the Chinese mainland. Less competitive sectors in the economy, such as traditional manufacturing and agriculture, are also threatened by further integration with the mainland. Economic stratification and sector vulnerability may play a significant role in dampening the KMT’s prospects in future elections. Thus even if the main focus of

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political contestation in Taiwan has shifted from identity to economics, Ma may still apply the brakes on rapprochement and integration with the mainland if the economic issue fails to deliver electorally. If the identity issue again becomes politically salient, expressed either in anxiety over the tacit ceding of sovereignty or in more blatant ethnic forms, this may persuade Ma that he should slow down on cross-Strait relations in order to reduce domestic controversy, especially when elections are near. This would follow the pattern of the KMT presidential candidates to shy away from ideological confrontation over national identity in campaigns, an issue that exposes their vulnerability. In short, domestic politics is not necessarily favorable to the continuation and deepening of the cross-Strait rapprochement and integration that has thus far progressed by leaps and bounds. On the economic and globalization front, the litmus tests are market expansion, investment rate, and access to international markets, the three checkpoints that now thwart Taiwan’s economic growth. The results of the tests need to buttress Ma’s claim that deepening cross-Strait ties is good for Taiwan’s economy. The Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Framework Arrangement has become the focal point in this regard, epitomizing deeper economic relations with China and promising economic revitalization for Taiwan. The signing of the ECFA at the end of June 2010 and its passage in the Legislative Yuan in mid-August, over strong DPP opposition, aroused great controversy, but the KMT was able to fulfill its promise to deliver on this single most important and symbolic measure. The ECFA is not yet an FTA agreement but is a framework under which such an agreement, with its trade and investment protection components, can be negotiated in an institutionalized setting. A bilateral Cross-Strait Economic Cooperation Committee was set up for that purpose. The ECFA also contains an early harvest list of products that Taiwan and mainland China agree to exempt from customs duty in their mutual trade prior to entering into a full fledged FTA.12 The two sides further agreed to open up various service sectors for investment, including finance. After the ECFA gained parliamentary approval and Taiwan exchanged notes with the mainland, the ECFA took effect on September 1, although the list and customs concessions had to wait until January 2011. The KMT government expected to raise competitiveness for Taiwan’s exports on the Chinese market with the help of customs concessions that have proven extremely useful in enlarging the market share for ASEAN countries. A large num12  In the list, Taiwan received customs concessions on 539 products, while mainland China received the same benefits on 267 of its products. The existing duties on all the items were to be completely phased out over a three-year period.

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ber of buy-Taiwan procurement missions led by China’s provincial governors added to the momentum of Taiwan’s export drive to the mainland market. As a result, Taiwan products’ market share in China rose to 8.58% in the first half of 2010, the only gain in market share among China’s main trading partners in this period. The ECFA has proved a decided advantage in Taiwan’s competition with South Korea, while also enhancing the island’s attractiveness to Japanese businesses as an economic headquarters for dealings with the mainland. Even with this improvement, whether the goal of market expansion can be sufficiently realized in a sustainable way remains to be seen. The Chinese market already absorbs some 42 percent of Taiwan’s exports, constituting its largest outlet. Further expansion in this direction would certainly further increase Taiwan’s dependence on the Chinese market. Ma has been hoping that integration with China and the opening up of all convenient channels would make it unnecessary for Taiwan businesspeople to invest on the mainland, so many of them would come back to Taiwan. Furthermore, the greatly improved atmosphere across the Taiwan Strait would attract foreign and overseas investment that had been deterred by fear of conflict between Taiwan and mainland China. There have been complaints from Korea that this is occurring, but without sufficient data this cannot be confirmed. Finally, Ma has begun courting mainland investment in Taiwan’s stock market. The high expectations in this area have yet to materialize. The absolute volume of Taiwan’s investment in China has fluctuated widely under the impact of the international financial crisis, plummeting to record lows in the first quarter of 2009 but bouncing back with a vengeance after the third quarter (see figure 1.4). A more accurate indicator is the share of mainland investment in proportion to Taiwan’s overall outbound investment. That number has remained high and rising since 2008, reaching 82.34% in January through September 2010. This trend was partly encouraged by the Ma administration’s loosening of investment constraints, a move strongly demanded by the business community. In foreign and overseas Chinese investment in Taiwan, there has been a consistent downward trend since 2008, with negative growth of –46.38%, –41.75%, and –20.56% for 2008, 2009, and 2010, respectively. The much trumpeted mainland investment in Taiwan’s stock market and industries has been slow to arrive.13 With Taiwan businesspeople increasing their investment on the mainland and with foreign investment in Taiwan dwindling, the Ma government’s expectations have thus far failed to materialize. 13 

The total amount of the mainland’s investment in Taiwan totaled a mere US$132 million in 2009 and 2010 combined.

Yu-shan Wu and Lowell Dittmer

46

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Concerning access to the international market, one of the major arguments for the ECFA was that it could facilitate Taiwan's PTA negotiation with other countries. Because Taiwan has been suffering from international isolation in both diplomatic and economic terms, signing an PTA with any significant country would be considered not only an economic gain but also a major political breakthrough. Whether this actually can be achieved has become the focus of debate in Taiwan. On August 5, 2010, Taiwan and Singapore announced the commencement of economic partnership (EPA) negotiations under the World Trade Organization (WTO) framework. This showed a major advancement toward international market accession and the valuable collateral effect of the ECFA. Singapore in effect sought permission from Beijing before commencing negotiations, and Beijing gave tepid assent. Undoubtedly Taipei will seek to expand its PTA framework with the blessing of the ECFA, and tentative discussion was initiated for EPA talks with the Philippines following those with Singapore. In all, even with some encouraging signs, whether rapprochement with the mainland would really be able to deliver on export expansion, investment promotion, and access to international markets remains to be seen. Finally, the logic of the strategic triangle dictates that Taipei's tilt toward Beijing is balanced by assurance and "countertilt" toward Washington, for

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otherwise Taiwan might plant suspicion in the United States, creating an impression that it would become a “Finland” or even “Hong Kong” in the long term, and that the United States would have no interest in sustaining balance in the Taiwan Strait and come to Taiwan’s rescue if push came to shove.14 It was exactly based on this strategic thinking that the National Security Council (NSC) and its General Secretary Su Chi pushed Taipei’s decision to lift the partial ban on U.S. beef (dating from the “mad cow disease” scare of the late 1990s), a move that caused great controversy and handed the DPP a valuable gift that it used successfully against the KMT in the year-end local elections in 2009. The public (not to mention the local livestock industry) was outraged by the insensitivity of Ma’s administration to the health risk involved in lifting the beef ban. Obviously the inept handling of this controversy was a big reason for the government’s dropping popularity rating, but the cause of the NSC’s intervention into this trade and health issue was to be found in the strategic triangle and Taipei’s perceived need to make a countertilt toward Washington.15 However, if the relation between Washington and Beijing turns sour, whether Taipei would keep committed to dual amities with the two countries, and whether it would be able to do so if it wishes, is not without doubt. Given that the link among the three main forces—political, economic, and strategic—and rapprochement with Beijing is not intrinsic but “instrumental,” that is, that the impact of the forces on cross-Strait relations may shift in a diametrically opposite direction, there is no assurance that the current rapprochement will continue, and this is only taking into consideration forces on the Taiwan side. Whether Taipei and Beijing can keep up the momentum of rapprochement and bring about the desired outcome for both sides remains to be seen.

14  On the prospect of “Finlandization” for Taiwan, see Bruce Gilley, “Not So Dire Straits: How the Finlandization of Taiwan Benefits U.S. Security,” Foreign Affairs 89, no. 1 (Jan./Feb. 2010): 44–60, available at http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/65901/bruce-gilley/notso-dire-straits [accessed January 26, 2010]. 15  For a critique of Su Chi’s role in the beef controversy, see “Analysis: In Beef Debacle, Su Chi Emerges as Main Villain,” Taipei Times, January 9, 2010, available at http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2010/01/09/2003463063 [accessed January 25, 2010].

TWO

Redefining “China” From the China Inside to the China Outside

SHELLEY RIGGER In early 2011, Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou hosted a tea party for officials of his government. At the party Ma made a perplexing request: he asked the officials not to refer to the People’s Republic of China as “China” (Zhongguo 中國). Instead, he said, they should call it “the other side” (dui’an 對岸), “the mainland” (dalu 大陸), or “mainland China” (Zhongguo dalu 中國大陸). Even more surprising was the reaction to his remark. Ma’s political opponents lambasted his lexical nit-picking as an attack on Taiwan’s sovereignty. A Liberty Times editorial claimed the president’s words exposed him as a closet extremist: “Ma Ying-jeou catered to mainstream voters before the election, but he’s now revealed his true colors!”1 And the head of Taiwan’s main opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), scolded Ma for neglecting his duty to “protect our sovereignty, not engage in self-diminishment.”2 Taiwan has no shortage of teapots or tempests, but this particular tempest at a tea party is singularly difficult for outsiders to fathom. Why in the world would President Ma ask his subordinates not to call China, China? And how is “Please say ‘mainland China’” a violation of Taiwan’s national sovereignty? People not steeped in the minutiae of Taiwanese politics can be forgiven for wondering what the fuss was all about. For those who are schooled in the island’s esoteric political debates, it is hard not to see Ma’s tea party gaffe as a case of too little, too late. If anything, the effort to differentiate between “the PRC” and “China” 1 

“Ma Ying-jeou Gives Away Taiwan’s Sovereignty to China!” [Taiwan zhuquan yi bei Ma Yingjiu fengsong Zhongguo le!], Liberty Times online, February 9, 2011, available at http:// www.libertytimes.com.tw/2011/new/feb/9/today-s1.htm. 2  “Calling the Other Side ‘Mainland’: Tsai Ying-wen Says the President’s Not the MAC Chair” [Cheng duian wei dalu: Cai Yingwen: Zongtong fei luweihu zhuxi], Newtalk.tw, February 8, 2011, available at http://newtalk.tw/news_read.php?oid=11875.

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underscored just how completely the PRC has come to define “China.” Even in Taiwan, even to Taiwanese government officials, “China” means the PRC. But it has not always been so. Into the 1980s, when Taiwanese said “China,” they meant the Republic of China. “ROC” referred to a state that was headquartered in Taipei, exercised jurisdiction over Taiwan and its offshore islands, and claimed sovereignty over all the territory ruled by the Qing empire—the area Ma would have us call “the other side,” plus a few odds and ends around its edges. Ma’s request reflects a continuing effort by some Taiwanese politicians to keep alive the idea that Taiwan too has a claim to the label “China,” even today, as the seat of government of the ROC. It is common to see or hear Taiwan’s international situation described as the “Taiwan issue,” or even the “Taiwan problem.” But for Taiwanese, the discourse is inverted. If Washington and Beijing have a “Taiwan problem,” Taipei has a China problem. It is an economic and military problem, but also a problem of definition and identity. In this chapter, I will trace the process through which the PRC has come to define “China” for most Taiwanese. I argue that the definition of “China” has shifted from an understanding of China as primarily internal to Taiwan to a notion of China as primarily external to Taiwan. The China inside Taiwan is the ROC state, dominated by the Nationalist Party (or Kuomintang [KMT]) and disproportionately reflecting the identities and interests of one ethnic group, the mainlander (waishengren 外省人) minority. The China outside Taiwan refers to the People’s Republic of China, located on the Asian mainland, a state whose capital is in Beijing and whose ruling party and ideology are communist. I do not claim that this shift has been experienced identically by all Taiwan residents—after all, the president himself tried to resist the new definition of “China” as the PRC. Instead, I argue that the center of gravity in islanders’ collective understanding of “China” has moved gradually from internal to external, until today, “China” means “PRC” even on Taiwan. Historical events and forces in both Taiwan and the mainland contributed to the change in Taiwan people’s ideas about what “China” means. In the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s, the KMT-led government commanded Taiwanese to think of themselves as Chinese citizens of the ROC and backed up that injunction with propaganda and repression. In the 1970s, the Hometown movement in art and literature gave voice to a previously dormant sense of Taiwanese identity as distinct from Chinese identity. It encouraged islanders to ponder the meaning of “China” in the context of their own society, and how the categories “China” and “Chinese” might diverge from the categories “Taiwan” and “Taiwanese.” These questions had a political dimension too, as advocates of democratization increasingly pressured their government to provide representation for all Taiwan’s people within state

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institutions designed to govern a much larger China. The reformed political institutions and behaviors brought into being by Taiwan’s successful democratic movement reinforced the identities awakened by Hometown literature and art. Under democracy, the state lost the ability to impose its own monolithic definition of Chinese identity, and Taiwan appeared on the verge of divorcing “China.” Then, in the mid-1990s, Taiwan found itself facing a new “China problem” that originated on the mainland. Beijing’s hostile response to the changes democratization had wrought in Taiwan’s domestic politics injected a new variable into the island’s political calculus. Missile tests, military exercises, and harsh rhetoric forced Taiwanese to acknowledge Beijing’s determination to impose its own notion of Chinese identity on Taiwan—a conception that subordinated Taiwan both politically and discursively to the People’s Republic. At the same time, the PRC’s rapidly rising global profile and assertive Chinese nationalism brought home just how completely it had come to dominate the world’s consciousness of China. “China” had come to mean “People’s Republic of China,” internationally, on the mainland, and within Taiwan. Little wonder, then, that President Ma’s attempt to roll back the trend fell flat. The China Inside People have been moving to Taiwan from the Chinese mainland since the 1500s. The land the early settlers found was inhabited already by Austronesian peoples (Taiwan, yuanzhumin 台灣住民), but the early Chinese arrivals carved out living space on the island by alternately assimilating, exterminating, and relocating those residents. By the time Spanish and Dutch colonialists were building forts at the major northern and southern harbors in the early 1600s, settlers from the mainland were spread throughout the island’s western coastal plain. While few likely thought of themselves as Chinese—“national” identity had little relevance at the time—they were subjects, at least on the mainland, of the Ming dynasty. When the Manchu-led Qing empire replaced the Ming in 1644, it was unable to bring Taiwan and its residents under its rule for more than two decades, thanks to the island’s Ming-loyalist warlords’ reluctance to be governed by “foreigners.” From the late seventeenth to the late nineteenth centuries, the Qing incorporated Taiwan (rather desultorily) into an empire whose bona fides as a Chinese state were shaky, as anti-Manchu Chinese nationalist movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were eager to point out. In 1895, the Qing handed Taiwan over to the Japanese empire in the Treaty of Shimonoseki—a sacrifice made necessary by an imminent threat to the Qing capital.

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I tell this story to demonstrate that although Taiwan’s status as a longstanding Chinese political entity is debatable, there is little doubt that the island’s non-Austronesian residents understood themselves to be Han people. In other words, from the earliest days of Han settlement on Taiwan, most settlers recognized their ethnic identity as Chinese; their ancestors’ bones, as they might have put it, were buried on the mainland. Political identity, by contrast, was unfixed and contested. Taiwanese lived under a series of governments originating in a number of different geographic locations that managed Taiwan with widely varying degrees of competence and attention. When the Qing empire ceded Taiwan to Japan, the Qing governor Tang Jingsong, a Han, briefly set up an independent Republic of Taiwan in the hope that foreign nations would support a non-Japanese state on the island. Recent scholarship suggests that many local gentry backed this effort.3 In the end, though, Tang was unable to stop the Japanese from taking what the Manchus had given them, and, before long, Taiwanese accepted their position as Japanese subjects just as they had accepted other subject positions in the past.4 As Andrew Morris writes, “The colonial manner of the Qing modernizers and well-connected merchant elites and the violence of [Tang’s] wild and unaccountable Yue troops left the alienated settler population without any means, or indeed, any desire to resist the invading Japanese.”5 Despite the colonial government’s (again, rather desultory) efforts to assimilate Taiwanese into the Japanese mainstream, the Han residents of Taiwan still were in little doubt as to where their ancestors’ bones lay. Thus, when the Japanese empire closed up shop at the end of World War II and Japanese administrators and residents cleared out, they left Taiwan to the “Chinese.” Thanks to agreements reached among the Allied powers during the war, the “China” to which Taiwan was handed over was Chiang Kai-shek’s ROC. As soon as the ROC’s representatives began arriving to take control of Taiwan’s government, the inadequacy of language revealed itself. A single category could not contain both the Han residents of Japanese-ruled Taiwan and the newly arrived soldiers and administrators coming to claim the island for the Republic of China. Vocabulary for differentiating these two groups of Chinese quickly appeared. The prewar Han residents came 3 

Andrew Morris, “The Taiwan Republic of 1895,” in Memories of the Future: National Identity Issues and the Search for a New Taiwan, ed. Stephane Corcuff (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 2002), 7. 4  Harry J. Lamley, “The 1895 Taiwan Republic: A Significant Episode in Modern Chinese History,” The Journal of Asian Studies 27, no. 4 (Aug. 1968): 741. 5  Morris, “The Taiwan Republic of 1895,” 20.

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to be called benshengren (本省人; people of this province), while those who arrived between 1945 and 1949 were called waishengren (people from outside provinces). Although waishengren came from many different mainland provinces, their status as (literal) outsiders made the catchall category meaningful and coherent in Taiwan’s postwar social environment. The exact origins of the terminology are obscure, but as Stephane Corcuff explains, this is a good example of a designation of otherness through exteriorization (wai 外). This fundamental “Other” for the Taiwanese came from “outside.” Such a definition of otherness through reference to exteriority was based in the beginning on a simple geographical criterion. But identifying the Other by an outsider status as flagrant as that imposed by Taiwan’s insularity has fostered the construction of the otherness of Chinese migrants by the Taiwanese, the Nationalist government, and the waishengren themselves. The definition of such outsiderness within a Taiwan-centered perspective has been produced in a context in which Taiwan, from 1895 on, gradually felt a distance, indeed isolation, with respect to China. The events of February 1947, which led to the bloody crackdown against the Taiwanese elite by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops, only served to intensify this feeling.6 The events to which Corcuff alludes constitute a first chapter in Taiwan’s postwar history; a second chapter began in 1949. Over the course of that year, the Chinese Communist Party’s Red Army gradually expelled troops loyal to the Republic of China from the Chinese mainland until at last the ROC government itself—President Chiang Kai-shek, his cabinet, as many members of the national representative bodies and bureaucratic agencies as could manage the journey—had no choice but to pull up stakes and move to Taipei, the city Tokyo had designated as Taiwan’s seat of government. In five years’ time, Taiwan’s population of approximately ten million absorbed almost two million refugees from the mainland. With the Kuomintang’s defeat on the mainland, Taiwan found itself transformed from a single province of the ROC—a small, marginal, and politically fishy one at that—into the sole remaining territory of the Republic of China. Desultory government was no longer an option; the survival of a non-Communist China rested on the KMT’s ability to cultivate Taiwan as a temporary home for the ROC and a staging ground for its mission of recovering the mainland. The waishengren understood themselves to be sojourners preparing to fight their way back home. Accomplishing that goal would require the full cooperation and enthusiastic support of the much larger benshengren community. To that end, the Nationalist 6 

Stephane Corcuff, “Taiwan’s ‘Mainlanders,’ New Taiwanese?” in Corcuff, ed., Memories of the Future, 165.

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government began constructing a China in Taiwan that would be supported by four pillars: military might, economic prosperity, political conformity, and Chinese nationalism. The ROC came to Taiwan with an oversized army left over from the civil war on the mainland. Even with its ambitious goal of fighting back to victory there, putting all those soldiers to work was a difficult task. In addition to training and preparing for an assault on the mainland, the ROC’s armed forces were deployed in construction and other economic tasks. The ROC government also put its bureaucracy to work to build the economy. It mobilized energy and resources from across Taiwan’s society to generate high-speed development, first in agriculture, then in light manufacturing, then in heavy manufacturing. By the 1970s, Taiwan was recognized as a major center for making and exporting consumer goods, and its position in the global economy has continued to strengthen in the decades since. Meanwhile, the KMT-led ROC government used both carrots and sticks to inculcate political conformity in Taiwan. It brutally repressed most forms of political opposition and dissidence. Under “Temporary Provisions in Effect during the Period of Mobilization for the Suppression of Communist Rebellion,” enacted in 1942, the government suspended many of the democratic and liberal elements in the ROC Constitution. These provisions authorized limits on speech, the press, and political participation, including the formation of new political parties. Those limitations, along with martial law, imposed in 1949, provided the framework under which the KMT-led state controlled political activity for more than four decades. They also had the effect of sharply limiting the ways Taiwanese could engage one another in discussions about identity. The government saved its heaviest sticks—long prison sentences, physical abuse, forced exile, execution, and extrajudicial killing—for two kinds of transgressions: flirting with communism and challenging the KMT’s definition of Taiwan as a Chinese province. The ROC state used sticks to fend off challenges from society, and it also used walls to keep citizens at bay. Under the state of emergency invoked in response to the Communist victory on the mainland, most democratic provisions in the ROC Constitution were suspended, including national elections. Because their districts were under Communist control, members of the ROC’s representative bodies elected on the mainland in the 1940s were allowed to retain their seats for more than four decades. No new members were elected to the Legislative Yuan and National Assembly between 1949 and 1968. A handful of “supplementary” members were elected by Taiwanese voters between 1969 and 1990, but it was only in 1991 and 1992, respectively, that the National Assembly and Legislative

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Yuan were renewed in comprehensive elections. Meanwhile, quotas for provincial representation guaranteed that Taiwanese would be underrepresented in the ROC’s bureaucratic agencies. On the carrot side of the equation, the ROC government used education, mass media, and propaganda to inculcate Chinese identity and unificationist zeal in Taiwan’s population. It forced Taiwanese to learn and use Mandarin, the official language of the ROC and the spoken dialect of many waishengren, instead of their mother tongues, even though more than three-quarters of Taiwanese shared a common dialect that was not mutually intelligible with Mandarin. The state limited radio (and later television) programming in local dialects to a few hours a day, steadily increasing the proportion of Mandarin programming. Schools too used Mandarin, giving waishengren who spoke the language at home a huge advantage. Primary school became a sink-or-swim immersion in a strange language, and not all children were able to learn Mandarin fast enough to keep up. Many Taiwanese have bitter memories of struggling to understand their early lessons and of being fined for using “dialect” (their mother tongues) on the school playground. Students memorized countless geographical and historical facts about China, but they learned next to nothing about the island on which their families had lived for centuries. Other aspects of the KMT’s cultural policy were similar to its language policy. As the last bastion of Chinese civilization (the KMT viewed communism as a European import actively hostile to Chinese tradition), Taiwan was made over into a greenhouse in which the best of Chinese culture was to be cultivated, preserved, and perfected. The government spent a fortune storing and displaying the treasures of China’s imperial past at the National Palace Museum in Taipei. It promoted Confucianism and Christianity, elite-centered ideologies unfamiliar to most Taiwanese, and denigrated the mainstream benshengren religious preference for a mixture of local cults, Buddhist orthodoxy, and Taoist mysticism as low-class superstition unworthy of a modern Chinese nation. ROC leaders hoped to mold Taiwanese into the kind of Chinese they imagined themselves to be: modern, rational, cosmopolitan, and patriotic. But by defining “Chineseness” in a way that marginalized Taiwan’s indigenous lifestyles and beliefs, the ROC’s cultural policies had the perverse effect of making many Taiwanese doubt that they were, in fact, Chinese. Unifying the spoken language and cultural practices was supposed to promote a shared identity for all Taiwanese people, but the effort to “convert” the vast majority to a new language and culture instead reinforced the sense of difference between benshengren and waishengren. In the 1970s, a handful of Taiwanese writers and artists began articulating a Taiwanese identity that they explicitly contrasted with the monolithic

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version of Chinese identity imposed by the ROC state. In highlighting and claiming particular aspects of life and culture as specifically and uniquely Taiwanese, these artists and writers drew a line between identities that had previously been defined as superior and inferior variants of a single identity. That line soon broadened into a wedge that drove the categories of “Taiwanese” and “Chinese” even farther apart. In novels and short stories, Taiwanese authors inspired by the Hometown Literature (xiangtu wenxue 鄉土文學) movement explored the everyday life of the island’s benshengren majority. Instead of translating their thoughts into Mandarin, these authors used Chinese characters to render local dialects. The stories and moods captured in their works were uniquely Taiwanese; they could not be separated from the island’s physical and social landscapes. As Rosemary Haddon observes, “the celebration of humble, rural characters and the sense of nostalgia over the loss of the rural world . . . inform the central motifs of Taiwan’s post-war xiangtu literature.”7 Hometown Literature rarely attacks the idea of Chinese nationalism or Chinese identity directly; its overt political messages typically address the alienation and estrangement attending Taiwan’s rapid industrialization. Nonetheless, the creation of a literary genre tuned to the specific frequency of Taiwanese life gave islanders a new vocabulary for speaking about the differences between “Taiwan” and “China.” One of the most interesting cultural figures in contemporary Taiwan is the choreographer Lin Hwai-min. Lin strives to create art that can speak to global audiences in a universally intelligible aesthetic language while at the same time reflecting the specific experiences of Taiwanese living in and through the island’s history. His efforts to balance art and politics reveal the strong desire among Taiwanese for cultural products that not only articulate an identity for Taiwan but also locate that identity within the island’s history of oppression and marginalization. After studying dance in the United States in the early 1970s, Lin returned to Taiwan and founded the Cloud Gate Dance Theater. The company held its premier performance in Lin’s rural home county of Chiayi, in the middle of Taiwan’s western plain. Lin’s stated reason was to honor Chiayi as the location of the first Chinese settlements on the island, but the real reason, he later admitted, was to avoid trouble. The title of that first performance was Legacy, and its theme was Taiwan’s history. Lin has said Jimmy Carter made him famous, because on the day Legacy premiered the U.S. president announced his decision to cut diplomatic ties with the 7  Rosemary Haddon, “Taiwan Xiangtu Wenxue: The Sojourner-Narrator,” The B. C. Asian Review (1990), 227–260, available at http://www.cic.sfu.ca/nacrp/articles/haddon1990/haddon text.html.

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ROC and normalize relations with Beijing. The revelation was a massive blow to Taiwanese, giving Cloud Gate’s performance of Taiwanese history special resonance. The dance unleashed a flood of grief, fear, anger, and defiance. As Lin describes it, “the performance turned into a rally.”8 From that very first performance, the Taiwanese people took possession of Lin and his art. Ever since, his work has been entwined with the movement for Taiwanese identity and freedom, even though Lin himself resists narrow definitions, insisting, “I never label myself as a Taiwanese choreographer; my works deal with humanity.” A moment later he adds, “I am a Taiwanese artist. I live and work here. If you want a label, that is my birthright. My work grows out from this land. But of course I am a gypsy too.” The Hometown movement in art and literature awakened a feeling of pride among Taiwanese in their indigenous traditions and ways of life. While the art and literature were not explicitly political—direct challenges to the KMT still were met with repression in those decades—their implicit message was clear: Taiwan was not—as many social scientists tried to argue—a subset or case study within China. It was its own place, and the experience of living there, of being Taiwanese, was unique and valuable. That message reinforced the feeling of difference evoked by cultural policies that demanded Taiwanese change their language, religion, culture, and lifestyles to conform to the KMT’s idea of “Chineseness.” Hometown art may not have been explicitly political (and many of its practitioners resisted its politicization), but asserting a separate identity for Taiwan and Taiwanese inevitably called into question the KMT’s political claim that because Taiwan is a Chinese place and Taiwanese are Chinese people, they share the waishengren mission of “recovering the mainland.” Taiwanese began to ask: If we are not Chinese, why are we locked into a political arrangement that privileges China and its unification over Taiwan’s own destiny? While Taiwanese were beginning to question the KMT’s definition of Taiwan as a Chinese entity destined to “reunify” with the “rest of China,” a much more overtly political movement also was brewing. In the 1960s and ’70s, both benshengren and waishengren began making increasingly bold challenges to the KMT’s authoritarian mode of governance. The first open challenge came from the magazine Free China Fortnightly and its editor, the waishengren journalist Lei Chen. Lei was an important figure in the KMT—his magazine was funded by the state, and its publisher was the ROC’s leading intellectual, Hu Shih—but he raised eyebrows in 1957 8 

Lin Hwai-min quotations are from an unpublished interview with the journalist David Boraks, conducted in autumn 2005.

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when he published an editorial advocating that the regime set aside the goal of recovering the mainland—which he said was unrealistic—in favor of building a better society on Taiwan. In the late 1950s, Lei began working with benshengren politicians to use local elections as a venue for promoting democratic reform. Despite its authoritarian approach to governing at the national level, the KMT allowed and even encouraged competitive elections for local offices. Those elections helped the KMT maintain its status as “Free China.” They also helped the party build a base within the local society. Rather than imposing local officials from above—which would likely have provoked resentment and resistance—the ROC government allowed communities to elect their leaders. Those leaders were then co-opted into the KMT through a combination of incentives and intimidation. Local politicians who cooperated with the KMT-led state could prosper both politically and economically; those who resisted “guidance” from the ruling party would find themselves cut off from the rewards of local office holding. The elections themselves were far from perfect. They tended to be personality contests rather than contests of ideas, and the state was not above interfering with ballot boxes to ensure a favorable result. Perhaps the biggest limitation was the martial law provision forbidding Taiwanese from forming new political parties, which forced all candidates to compete either as KMT members or as independents. Without the KMT’s vast financial and organizational resources, independents faced an uphill battle, so the pressure to join the ruling party was intense. Despite these obstacles, however, a number of independent politicians were able to carve niches for themselves in local politics. In 1957, several of these independents joined forces to compete under the name Dangwai 黨外 (Outside-the-Party) Candidates’ Alliance. In addition to recommending candidates, the alliance held public meetings at which they criticized the KMT’s undemocratic practices. After six members won seats in the Provincial Assembly, at the time Taiwan’s highest elected body, staffers from Free China Fortnightly met with the group’s leaders to discuss ways they might collaborate to advance their shared interest in democratic reform. The idea that popular, electable benshengren politicians would join forces with waishengren reformers struck fear in the hearts of KMT leaders. They had Lei Chen arrested and sentenced to a tenyear prison term; his benshengren collaborators were harassed into silence. This early attempt at democratization ultimately failed, but it demonstrated the potential for a unified reform movement that would bring together democracy activists across the ethnic divide. It also gave the activists a name for their group: the Dangwai. In the 1970s, a new generation of politicians and activists—including some from the Dangwai’s earlier

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incarnation—picked up its torch. The opportunity to revive the movement for democratic reform arose from many factors, including international pressure, a looming succession crisis, economic malaise, and the rising sense that Taiwan’s interests should not be permanently subordinated to those of “China.” In 1975 the ROC’s longtime leader, Chiang Kai-shek, died and the reins of government passed to his son, Chiang Ching-kuo (also known as CCK). But CCK was a different kind of leader from his father. He was acutely aware of the ROC’s deteriorating international position, and he responded to the pressure from opposition activists within Taiwan with a mixture of concessions and repression. He named a benshengren, Lee Teng-hui, as his vice president and likely successor. When the Dangwai declared itself a political party—the DPP—in 1986, CCK allowed that technically illegal act to go unpunished. In 1987 he lifted martial law. When he died in 1988, Lee succeeded him. President Lee developed a tacit collaboration with the DPP aimed at deepening the reforms his predecessor had started. Taking on the mantle of “reformer” gave Lee the grassroots support he needed to push back challenges from conservatives in his own party. The DPP was vital to those efforts because its activism demonstrated the need for reform and gave credibility to Lee’s moderate reputation. The opposition movement continually moved the goalposts in these years—as soon as the government implemented one reform, the Democratic Progressives and their allies escalated their demands. The termination of martial law sparked a series of demonstrations aimed at eliminating the national security law that replaced it; the first fully elected crop of National Assembly members barely had time to take their seats before the opposition launched a campaign to eliminate the assembly altogether. President Lee’s moves to open Taiwan’s political institutions did not satisfy the opposition, because they did not address what progressives saw as a fundamental flaw: the privileged status “China” enjoyed in the ROC’s institutions and ideology. The DPP focused on dismantling the structures that reinforced that privilege. Between 1990 and 1992, the most popular target for opposition protests was the overrepresentation of mainland-elected “senior representatives” (a.k.a. “old bandits”) in Taiwan’s national representative bodies. The opposition also showed its resistance to the “China inside” when it accused the KMT of attaining its dominant position through illegitimate means. The DPP’s regular commemorations of the 2/28 Incident and growing emphasis on political corruption were part of that effort, as were frequent attempts to call attention to the KMT’s military connections. When Lee appointed General Hau Pei-tsun as premier in 1990, the opposition launched a series of demonstrations to protest the military’s role

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in domestic politics (fan junren ganzheng protests 反軍人干政). The following year, that same impulse emerged in protests against the military parade on the ROC’s National Day, October 10 (the fan yuebing 反閱兵 protests).9 While the opposition was pushing President Lee to remake Taiwan’s political institutions on a less Sinocentric blueprint, democratization was effecting ideological changes in Taiwanese society. Ending restrictions on free speech eroded the KMT’s capacity to enforce monolithic definitions of critical concepts, including “Taiwan” and “China.” After CCK lifted martial law, there were no longer any enforceable restrictions on what could be said or published. The move unleashed an avalanche of new publications aimed at promoting Taiwanese identity and questioning the relationship between Taiwan and China. By 1990, hundreds of books about Taiwan had been published; entire bookstores were devoted to selling works on Taiwan history, Taiwanese culture, and Taiwanese arts and literature. Restaurants selling traditional Taiwanese foods opened in tony neighborhoods in Taipei and Kaohsiung. For the first time, Taiwan was fashionable. New technologies, including underground radio and cable television, fed the craze for all things Taiwanese. The ideological awakening went beyond fashion and culture; lifting martial law also opened the door to political discourses and viewpoints that had previously been forbidden. At first the opposition was tentative; after all, for decades, the mere mention of Taiwan independence had been enough to put people in prison. But when activists tested the regime’s tolerance, they met little resistance, and, before long, politicians were openly discussing Taiwan independence as an option islanders should consider. In 1991, the ROC government ended its policy of blacklisting overseas independence activists. One after another, many of the island’s most prominent political exiles returned to Taiwan, eager to promote the independence cause. For the DPP, these developments represented an opportunity to build on the party’s early successes. Its identification with democracy made it popular, but its inexperience in economic management and international affairs, combined with many voters’ long-standing ties to the KMT, hindered its growth. The political scientist Peng Huai-en summarized this dilemma in a 1989 book. He noted that before 1986 the opposition was not very ideological or idealistic, but focused on winning power through elections; its most effective slogans—“majority rule” and “self-determination”—referenced 9  Data on opposition activism come from a two-volume pictorial history of the opposition movement published in 2005 by a collective of Green historians: Chang Fu-chung and Chiu Wan-hsing, eds., Lüse niandai: Taiwan minzhu yundong 25 nian [Green era: Twenty-five years of Taiwan’s democratic movement] (Taipei: Lüse luxing wenjiao jijinhui, 2005). The books include a detailed month-by-month record of the opposition’s activities.

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democratization, not the “China issue.” As his colleague Huang Teh-fu put it, “Denying the legitimacy of the political authority and stressing the tactic of mobilizing popular opposition to the system eventually become the opposition movement’s sole option.”10 But by the early 1990s, Peng observed, the democratization agenda was losing momentum: As the KMT sets aside the restraints on democratic politics one by one— lifting martial law, opening to political organizations, renovating the national elected bodies, institutionalizing local self-government, legalizing the Dangwai—what ideals will the Dangwai be able to use to summon the people? What platforms, what positions will draw people’s identification with the Dangwai? This is something that deserves the Dangwai leaders’ careful consideration.11

There is no doubt DPP leaders did give “careful consideration” to developing new positions and platforms. Between the party’s founding and the first direct presidential election in 1996, the opposition sponsored scores of meetings and demonstrations addressing a wide range of domestic social and political problems. In 1988 alone, opposition groups held ten demonstrations about economic issues, including actions and even strikes by farmers and laborers; multiple protests opposing nuclear power and promoting Aboriginal, Hakka Chinese, and student concerns; half a dozen demonstrations demanding direct election of the National Assembly, Legislative Yuan, and provincial governor; and several events related to the justice system, the blacklist, political prisoners, and human rights. Two incidents targeted the issue of national identity: a demonstration protesting the KMT’s revolutionary “mythology” and a walk for Taiwan independence undertaken by several famous opposition personalities. Despite the DPP’s energetic embrace of all these issues, its membership and vote share grew slowly in the late 1980s. By 1990, many Democratic Progressives were frustrated. They wanted an issue that would propel their party into the majority. The democratic reforms they had championed were being implemented, but it seemed Lee was getting most of the credit. Economic issues tended to divide their base, which included business, labor, and postmaterialist constituencies such as feminists, environmentalists, and human rights activists. Identity issues, however, appealed to nearly all the DPP’s supporters. The challenge was to formulate a position on national identity that would emphasize the DPP’s determination 10 

Huang Teh-fu, Minjindang yu Taiwan diqu zhengzhi minzhuhua [The DPP and the democratization of the Taiwan area] (Sheying chuban she, 1992), 106. 11  Peng Huai-en, Taiwan zhizheng tixi de fenxi, 1950–1986 [An analysis of Taiwan’s governing system, 1950–1986] (Taipei: Dongcha chuban she, 1989), 100.

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to be a party of and for Taiwanese, while avoiding the dangerous (and unpopular) third rail: directly advocating Taiwan independence. Taiwan independence was dangerous because through the 1980s, police still were arresting and prosecuting independence activists. In 1991 four young people were arrested on charges of conspiring with the exiled activist Shih Ming to create a branch of his “Independent Taiwan Society” in Taiwan. The laws under which they were detained were on the verge of repeal, the case against them was thin, and they were soon released. Still, their ordeal shows that openly advocating Taiwan independence in the early 1990s was a strong and risky reproach to a KMT-led government that regarded independence activists as criminals. Most Taiwanese were reluctant to touch the issue. It is not surprising, then, that in 1988, when Yao Chia-wen proposed a Taiwan independence plank for the DPP platform, a cautious counterproposal offered by Chen Shui-bian defeated Yao’s suggestion. The exiles who returned to Taiwan in 1991 did not share the Taiwanbased activists’ caution. Many of them had been openly promoting Taiwan independence overseas for years, and they were eager to bring the message home. In November 1990, Tsai Tong-jung (Trong Chai) and other activists formed the Movement to Decide Taiwan’s Future by Plebiscite. In exile in the United States, Tsai had developed the idea of using a referendum process to declare Taiwan an independent state. After he returned to Taiwan, the concept took a new, somewhat toned-down form that emphasized the process (plebiscite) over the result (independence)—but Tsai’s goal was never in doubt. In 1991 a group of Taiwanese politicians met in Manila to endorse the idea of seeking Taiwan independence through the promulgation of a new constitution. The proindependence returnees believed independence would excite voters the way democratization had done and inspire a surge in DPP popularity. In 1991, persuaded by their logic and inspired by their idealism, the party added a plank calling for independence to its platform. It read: In accordance with Taiwan’s actual sovereignty, an independent country should be established and a new constitution promulgated in order to create a legal and political system appropriate to the realities of Taiwan society, and to return to international society in accordance with principles of international law. . . . Based on the principle of popular sovereignty, the establishment of a sovereign, independent, and self-governing Republic of Taiwan and promulgation of a new constitution should be carried out by all residents of Taiwan through a national referendum.12

12 

Resolution of the DPP, National Party Congress, October 13, 1991.

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The decision was controversial, in part because many Democratic Progressives worried that stating their goal so boldly would backfire at the ballot box. The KMT had spent decades indoctrinating Taiwanese in the ideology of the ROC, and not everyone was ready to set those ideas aside. Even Taiwanese who questioned the KMT’s ideology would not necessarily want to associate themselves with a cause for which so many had been persecuted for so long. Also, declaring independence was one thing; getting other governments—including the PRC—to recognize an independent Taiwan was another. Many Taiwanese voters found the DPP’s new position unrealistic, even reckless. They had lived for decades under a regime that demanded fidelity to two principles: anti-Communism and opposition to Taiwan independence. Many found it impossible to support a political party that openly violated one of those principles—a reality that was starkly evident in election returns. In response, DPP Chairman Shih Ming-teh developed a compromise. In 1993 he put forward the thesis that the DPP did not need to declare independence because Taiwan already had independence, albeit under the name ROC. Eventually, Shih’s compromise became the party’s de facto position—but not before the independence faction took one final run, in the 1996 presidential election. The debate over how far the DPP should go toward endorsing independence was, fundamentally, a debate about domestic politics. Initially it centered on finding ways to underscore the DPP’s Taiwancentric focus without provoking a crackdown. Even when it became clear the regime would not overreact, many DPP activists balked at advocating independence because they thought it would hurt their party’s electoral chances. What Beijing might think of their positions was a secondary concern. We can see evidence for this in the ways the DPP articulated its positions in the early to mid–1990s. For example, an April 1995 demonstration called for separating Taiwan from China by eliminating the National Unification Council (NUC), entering the United Nations, and writing a new constitution. The target of the action was the China inside, symbolized by the KMT-supported NUC and the ROC constitution, not the China outside— the PRC. The China Outside While Taiwanese were debating what role the China inside should play in their future, the island’s relationship with the China outside was changing rapidly. In 1987 CCK lifted the ban on travel to the mainland. The decision transformed islanders’ perceptions of the PRC. Since the beginning of the Japanese colonial era, the mainland had been a distant, abstract presence

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with little day-to-day relevance for Taiwanese people. Now, for the first time in nearly a century, the mainland was real. Within a few months of the opening, Taiwanese began pouring into China. Many were tourists eager to see the places they had learned about in Taiwan’s Sinocentric schools, but the visitors also included entrepreneurs who quickly recognized the mainland’s potential as an investment target. China’s low wages and flexible regulations offered a perfect environment in which to revitalize Taiwan’s sunset industries. Rising wages had squeezed profits in traditional manufacturing; moving those industries to the mainland promised to give business owners a second chance. As China’s economy prospered, other industries—including high-tech manufacturers—followed the first wave of firms to the mainland. While Taiwanese citizens were exploring the mainland for its social, cultural, and economic possibilities, the ROC government was considering options for dialogue with Beijing. When Lee Teng-hui assumed the presidency in 1988, he inherited Chiang Ching-kuo’s approach: pursuing talks with the CCP while holding up unification as the ultimate goal. Lacking CCK’s visceral enmity toward the Communists allowed Lee to be more open to cross-Strait economic cooperation. Waves of “China Fever” swept over Taiwan, driving rapid increases in cross-Strait travel and investment. In 1991 Lee called an end to the “Period of National Mobilization for the Suppression of Communist Rebellion,” a designation that had kept Taiwan on a war footing. In doing so, he gave tacit recognition to the PRC government’s jurisdiction on the mainland and unilaterally declared an end to the Chinese Civil War. Each side formed a quasi-governmental organization to conduct negotiations, Taipei’s Straits Exchange Foundation (SEF) and Beijing’s Association for Relations across the Taiwan Strait (ARATS). Representatives from SEF and ARATS began meeting regularly to resolve technical problems and construct a modus vivendi for further negotiations. Even as Taiwanese investors flooded into the mainland and the ROC government ramped up its diplomatic outreach to Beijing, a growing number of Taiwanese were voicing skepticism regarding unification. The rising opposition reflected the state’s declining ability to control political and social discourse in Taiwan, but it also reflected the people’s increased exposure to the China outside: the more Taiwanese learned about the PRC, from its poverty to its repressiveness, the less they believed Taiwan had to gain from unification. The presidential campaigns in 1996 exposed the full range of positions on the independence/unification issue. At one end of the spectrum stood two strongly prounification candidates. At the other end stood the DPP

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candidate, P’eng Ming-min, who defied the advice of party strategists and ran a stridently proindependence campaign. The fourth candidate was Lee Teng-hui. His position was more subtle than the others’. Although he had led the effort to achieve rapprochement with the mainland earlier in the decade, Lee faced opposition from his KMT copartisans precisely because his commitment to the unificationist cause seemed to be wavering. Lee had sponsored negotiations between the two sides in 1992 and ’93 but as the talks progressed, he began to worry that the process might not protect Taiwan’s interests. His team was hoping to engage the mainland in a win-win relationship that would reduce tension in the Strait and buy time for the PRC to evolve into a more suitable partner for unification, but Beijing was impatient. Lee saw little evidence of convergence, yet his Beijing counterparts seemed eager to move the talks toward unification. Lee recognized that a weak, isolated Taiwan could not resist China’s pressure, so he launched a new foreign policy strategy he called pragmatic diplomacy. The idea was to win international support by setting aside the old Chiang-era insistence that states formally recognize the Republic of China and building unofficial relationships with other countries. After two decades of relative quiet on the international front, Taiwan began reaching out to governmental and nongovernmental actors around the world. The most important target was the United States. In 1995, Lee’s overtures to Washington bore fruit: he was granted a visa to travel to the United States and give a speech at Cornell University. Chinese leaders saw the move as a betrayal by both Lee and the United States, which had promised to keep relations with Taiwan unofficial. Lee visited Cornell in June; in July the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) launched a series of military exercises aimed at Taiwan, including missile and live ammunition tests near Taiwanese territory, amphibious landing practice, and naval maneuvers. As the presidential election approached, the PLA continued to carry out tests and exercises designed to intimidate Taiwanese. In January, Chinese Premier Li Peng said Beijing “cannot promise to give up the use of force” to unify the country, and in the first two months of 1996, one hundred thousand PLA troops were gathered in Fujian, the province opposite Taiwan. In March the PLA announced more missile and live-fire tests, this time close enough to Taiwan’s shores to disrupt shipping in the island’s two major ports. Beijing accompanied the military exercises with increasingly heated verbal attacks on “separatists” in Taiwan, a category in which they included Lee. One Chinese official warned Taiwan’s people to “rein in” separatists, whom he said had reached “the brink of the precipice.” Premier Li Peng said the military exercises were a warning to “foreign forces” scheming to realize Taiwan independence. As election day neared, the warnings

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became even more hysterical. The defense minister told a group of Chinese officials, “We have more troops stationed in Fujian because we are facing a grim situation, in which Lee Teng-hui and his gang are vainly attempting to split China.”13 A major editorial in China’s official newspaper accused Lee of promoting independence and promised to stop at nothing to thwart him. The editorial injected an ominous note: “We mean what we say.” If Beijing’s goal was to defeat Lee at the ballot box, its strategy failed. If anything, its fury increased Lee’s appeal. To Taiwanese, Lee was not at all extreme, and he was not someone they associated with the independence cause. P’eng was a bona fide independence activist, and many voters saw him as an extremist, but Lee had a long record of promoting unification. He had initiated Taiwan-China communication, ended the formal hostilities—even stood behind the Koo-Wang talks. In Taiwanese ears, Beijing’s accusations sounded absurd. In the end, Lee walked away with 54 percent of the vote in the four-way race. China’s military intimidation in 1995 and ’96 did not defeat Lee or convince Taiwanese that they should hurry up and unify with the mainland, but it was not a useless gesture. The period between 1987 and 1995 was an era of unprecedentedly amicable relations between Beijing and Taipei. After decades of civil war, the two sides were negotiating. For the first time since the 1890s, Taiwanese were traveling to the mainland regularly, setting up businesses and investing huge sums. Beijing’s military intimidation burst into this happy scene like a SWAT team at a fraternity party. It showed Taiwanese that the newfound friendship between the two sides was shallow and fragile and forced them to face a painful reality: the PRC was serious about unification. For Lee the events of 1995 and 1996 were a stark lesson. Lee had won the fight within the KMT. He had defeated the Chinese nationalists in his own party and become the clear choice of a majority of Taiwanese voters. But defeating the China inside was not enough to secure a democratic selfgovernment for Taiwan. The China outside was demanding veto power over Taiwan’s future—and it was ready to use force to get its way. Those events also changed the DPP’s outlook. The Democratic Progressives did not abandon their efforts to build a Taiwanese identity as a counter to the China inside—far from it. But the events of the mid-1990s forced them to recognize that defeating the China inside was not a panacea; to attain their goals, they would have to find a way around the China outside too. That new awareness was evident in the activities of the DPP and other 13 

Quotations are from Robert Ross, “The 1995–1996 Taiwan Strait Confrontation: Coercion, Credibility, and Use of Force,” International Security 25, no. 2 (Fall 2000): 87–123.

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independence-leaning activists in the 1990s. After 1996, opposition activism shifted discernibly from challenging the China inside—the ROC—to challenging the PRC. The number and frequency of anti-PRC activities increased, even as the confidence with which the DPP embraced its proindependence positions faded. China’s first round of missile tests took place in July 1995. Within weeks, activists were holding anti-PRC demonstrations in Taipei. AntiPRC feeling pervaded P’eng’s presidential campaign. His supporters carried effigies of PRC leaders at rallies and defaced PRC flags. When Beijing resumed its missile tests in March 1996, the DPP ramped up its anti-PRC activity even more. On March 16, the DPP and other groups held a rally to “oppose unification, oppose occupation.” The following year, Democratic Progressives greeted Hong Kong’s return to PRC sovereignty with antiPRC rallies aimed at rejecting “annexation.” The DPP institutionalized its new focus on the China outside in 1997, when it opened the China Affairs Department within the party headquarters. The purpose was to research the PRC and craft policies for the party on issues related to mainland China. In past years, DPP politicians had showed little interest in this. Studying mainland China was something mainlanders did—benshengren studied Taiwan. Creating a department staffed by China experts and dedicated to the study of mainland China reflected a significant change in party leaders’ priorities. The independence movement did not disappear after 1996, but the debate changed in a fundamental way. Before 1996, independence was a largely domestic matter: Do we Taiwanese want to be independent, or do we aspire to unify with the mainland? The obstacle to independence was the KMT, the China inside, so DPP activists assumed removing that obstacle would free Taiwan’s people to make their own decision. After 1996, it was clear that to achieve formal independence, Taiwanese would have to defeat not only the KMT but also the Chinese Communist Party—and the PLA. Fixating on the China outside is a characteristic both major parties have shared since 1996; it is one dimension of the convergence between them that Gunter Schubert described in his 2004 article, “Taiwan’s Political Parties and National Identity: The Rise of an Overarching Consensus.”14 The fierce political combat that rages between the parties and the noisy protests of independence and unification stalwarts at the political margins tend to obscure this consensus. But since the late 1990s the KMT and DPP have been battling over two things: political power and how best to 14 

Gunter Schubert, “Taiwan’s Political Parties and National Identity: The Rise of an Overarching Consensus,” Asian Survey 44, no. 4 (2004): 534–554.

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secure Taiwan’s de facto independence against Beijing’s pressure for unification. The ideological gulf that divided them in the early 1990s, between a prounification KMT and a proindependence DPP, closed in 1995 and ’96 when PRC leaders revealed their determination to crush any move toward de jure independence. Public opinion polls reveal a corresponding change in the attitudes of ordinary Taiwanese. Through the early 1990s, many supported unification—after decades of indoctrination, they were slow to abandon it—and the great majority identified themselves as “Chinese” or “both Chinese and Taiwanese.” Very few embraced the label “Taiwanese only.” China’s military intimidation coincided with a rise in support for independence (from 11 percent in 1994 to over 17 percent in 1997) and a sharp rise in identification as Taiwanese (from 20 percent in 1994 to 34 percent in 1997), trends that continued in subsequent years.15 Lee used his landslide victory in 1996 to break down the idea of a “China inside.” He recognized that securing Taiwan’s democracy would require reconstituting the society as a unified community devoted to freedom, democracy, and prosperity. To advance this concept, he introduced the notion of the “New Taiwanese.” According to Lee, everyone living on Taiwan, regardless of when they or their ancestors had arrived, was part of a single “community of shared fate.” It was their job to work together to protect Taiwan and all it represented. In effect, the New Taiwanese concept naturalized waishengren and offered them full membership in Taiwan society. Lee’s insistence that “we’re all Taiwanese” helped to refocus Taiwanese on the China outside as the obstacle to pursuing their collective destiny. At the same time, Lee tried (with little success) to slow the flow of Taiwanese business to the mainland, urging businesses to explore Southeast Asian markets instead. He also ramped up pragmatic diplomacy. He adopted the DPP’s long-standing idea of seeking United Nations membership for Taiwan as his own and spent vast resources selling foreign audiences on the notion that Taiwan deserved to be in the world body. During a 1999 interview with the German radio network Deutsche Welle, Lee described the connection between the ROC and the PRC as “a special stateto-state relationship.” The remark infuriated Chinese officials, who said it proved Lee was a splittist. The vitriol aimed at Lee reached stratospheric

15 

Data from the Election Studies Center at National Chengchi University, “Trends in Core Political Attitudes Among Taiwanese,” available at http://esc.nccu.edu.tw/english/modules/tinyd2/index.php?id=6. “Support for independence” figures combine “independence as soon as possible” and “maintain status quo, move toward independence.”

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heights; one PLA major general called Lee an “abnormal ‘test-tube baby’ bred by international anti-China forces in their political lab.”16 For Beijing, acknowledging ROC sovereignty was impossible. The PRC had staked its right to represent China internationally on the idea that the Republic disappeared in 1949. It maintains, “Since the KMT ruling clique retreated to Taiwan, although its regime has continued to use the designations ‘Republic of China’ and ‘government of the Republic of China,’ it has long since completely forfeited its right to exercise state sovereignty on behalf of China and, in reality, has always remained only a local authority in Chinese territory.”17 By insisting on a position at odds with the lived reality on Taiwan, Beijing painted itself into a corner: as much as PRC leaders hated to admit it, the ROC stands between Taiwan and independence. Nonetheless, rather than acknowledging that reality and engaging the ROC on equal terms, PRC leaders demonized Lee, a move that alienated and confused Taiwanese, for whom the existence of the ROC state was an unassailable fact. Lee’s efforts to unite Taiwanese behind a shared vision of an ROC that would be friendly with the PRC while retaining its own sovereignty did not entirely succeed. On one side, prounification conservatives shared Beijing’s perception that Lee was a closet independista. On the other, a powerful enthusiasm for Taiwanese identity swept the island, undercutting Lee’s efforts to persuade islanders to accept the ROC as Taiwan. Even Taiwanese who did not support formal independence wanted to participate in the Taiwanese cultural renaissance. Taiwanese nationalism, for all its limitations, was an important and positive stage in Taiwan’s selfdiscovery—it allowed Taiwanese to liberate themselves from the Chinese nationalist orthodoxy that cut them off from their history, denigrated their culture, and justified an undemocratic political system. But that liberation did not—as the inward-looking discourse of earlier years had anticipated—bring about Taiwan’s formal independence. The PRC (and the PLA) saw to that. The 2000 presidential election revealed the extent to which Taiwan’s maneuvering room had contracted since the previous election. In 1996, voters had clear choices regarding Taiwan’s future. P’eng was a Taiwanese nationalist who sought formal independence as a way of purging the China inside. Two other candidates were Chinese nationalists who defined Taiwan as part of a Chinese nation that should include Taiwan and the mainland. Lee defined the ROC in political, not ethnic, terms, and while 16  Quoted in Alan Wachman, Why Taiwan: Geostrategic Rationales for China’s Territorial Integrity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2007), 14. 17  “White Paper on the One China Principle” (2000).

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he believed in putting Taiwan first, his pragmatism led him to prefer a policy that eschewed both independence and unification. By 2000, both concepts were out of the running. All three candidates offered variations on Lee’s approach. Even though the DPP technically still endorsed independence in its party platform, its candidate, Chen Shui-bian, downplayed this in his campaign—and throughout his presidency. He did so not because his party had lost its desire for independence, but because after 1996 there was no denying that the KMT was not the only obstacle standing between Taiwan and independence. There was another barrier—one far more potent and powerful—that would have to be overcome: the PRC. Rather than challenge Beijing, Chen and his party feinted to the side. A 1999 party resolution codified Shih Ming-teh’s 1993 formulation that Taiwan is independent under the name “Republic of China”: “Taiwan is a sovereign and independent country.  .  .  . Taiwan, although named the Republic of China under its current constitution, is not subject to the jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China.”18 It put the DPP on record as supporting, for the time being at least, a de facto independent Taiwan-as-ROC. The resolution represented a significant retreat from the proindependence platform plank the party had adopted in 1991. When it came to economic engagement with the PRC, Chen was the most enthusiastic of the candidates. His stump speeches made a strong case for increasing economic ties with the mainland. If Chen’s DPP predecessor had made a virtue of his own radicalism, Chen did precisely the opposite, emphasizing at every opportunity his pragmatism and reasonableness. His opponents too shied away from ideological claims. All three candidates sang a different tune when they were with their core supporters, but in their public presentations, each tried to “out-moderate” the others. President Chen was eager to show Taiwan’s voters that electing him would not endanger the island’s interests, and he hoped to intensify Taiwan’s economic relationship with the mainland. His inaugural address made clear that he was prepared to set aside ideology to stabilize and even improve cross-Strait ties. The speech included five “no”s: no declaration of independence, no revision of the name “Republic of China,” no attempt to insert Lee’s “special state-to-state relationship” idea into the constitution, no abandonment of the National Unification Guidelines, and no referendum on the question of independence or unification. At the end of the year Chen went even further when he said, “The integration of our economies, trade, and culture can be a starting point for gradually 18 

Resolution of the DPP, National Congress, May 8, 1999.

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building faith and confidence in each other. This, in turn, can be the basis for a new framework of permanent peace and political integration. Eventually, there will be unlimited possibilities for benefiting the people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait in the twenty-first century.”19 The five “no”s were meant to reassure PRC leaders that Chen was not the unrepentant independista they believed him to be and to reassure listeners in Taiwan that he would not provoke Beijing. In four short years, then, the DPP’s discourse had changed from demanding that the ROC step aside for an independent Taiwan to seeking above all to persuade Beijing that Taiwan’s new leaders posed no threat to its interests. But Chen’s friendly words fell on deaf ears. Instead of welcoming his overtures, Chinese leaders insisted he was masking his splittist agenda behind pretty words and refused to engage him. While the China outside was cold-shouldering Chen, the China inside seemed to be doing much the same thing. The relentless opposition from the KMT and its allies pushed Chen into a corner and heightened his supporters’ feeling of embattlement. His second term began amid the worst political turbulence Taiwan had seen since 1947. Chen used his inaugural address to calm the nation’s fears and bridge its divisions. He addressed the postelection upheaval with a bluntness rarely seen in politics, admitting that his victory was narrow and political trust was damaged. He said, “The ultimate challenge of this past election lies not as much in garnering a mandate as in the postelection hurdle of how to scale the wall of antagonism, and in finding ways to reconcile the deep divide caused by distrust. We must not allow the narrow margin of victory to become a source of greater conflict in society.”20 President Chen also used the occasion to speak to his people about the long-term factors that were weakening their society, especially their divergent heritages and histories. He chastised those in his own camp who had indulged in anti-waishengren agitation. He observed that all Taiwanese had been victimized by authoritarianism; the persecution of dissidents and other political abuses were acts of a few leaders, not “historical representations of subjugation by ethnic groups.” Therefore, he argued, “no single ethnic group alone should undeservingly bear the burden of history.” Benshengren must not hold waishengren as a group responsible for the tragic events that occurred under the authoritarian regime, even if that regime was disproportionately peopled by members of the waishengren 19  “President Chen’s Cross-Century Remarks,” December 31, 2000. Available on the website of the ROC Office of the President (http://english.president.gov.tw/). 20  Quotations are from President Chen’s inaugural speech, “Paving the Way for a Sustainable Taiwan,” May 24, 2004. Available on the website of the ROC Government Information Office.

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minority. In fact, the president said, waishengren suffered too under the old regime. President Chen’s speech echoed President Lee’s rhetoric from the early 1990s, as he claimed a common destiny for all residents of the Republic of China. Exactly what that destiny might be, he did not say. Instead, Chen described what unified Taiwanese despite their differences: “the deep conviction held by the people of Taiwan to strive for democracy, to love peace, to pursue their dreams free from threat, and to embrace progress.” Whereas the bulk of the speech was aimed at bridging Taiwan’s internal divisions, Chen also addressed the China outside when he said, “We can understand why the government on the other side of the Strait, in light of historical complexities and ethnic sentiments, cannot relinquish the insistence on the ‘One China Principle’.” That statement showed Chen’s realism and his respect for the PRC’s aspirations. He reinforced the message when he said, “We can seek to establish relations in any form whatsoever. We would not exclude any possibility, so long as there is the consent of the 23 million people of Taiwan.” Defining a policy that would embody the DPP’s ideology and aspirations within the strictures imposed by its interdependence with a newly powerful PRC posed severe challenges. The party had long since retreated from its once-robust proindependence position and had accepted the inevitability of economic intertwinement with the mainland. As the DPP hunkered down defensively, its position on economic relations with the mainland evolved. In the 1990s, the DPP adopted the slogan “Go west boldly!” During Chen’s first term, the party moderated its position to emphasize the importance of managing the relationship. That policy was captured neatly in a new slogan: “Active opening, effective management.” In the second term, the slogan changed again, to “Effective opening, active management.” The new arrangement of adjectives shifted the focus from opening up to controlling the process. The changing economic slogans reflected the Democratic Progressives’ central dilemma: they recognized that economic integration could not be reversed and that, barring an extreme event, attaining formal independence was impossible, but they were still skeptical of Beijing’s intentions. They worried that living under KMT leadership—including educational and cultural institutions aimed at inculcating Chinese nationalism and identity—was sapping Taiwanese people’s will to resist unification. As interactions between the two sides became routine, they feared, Taiwanese would forget that they were different and let their short-term interest in making money or living a more luxurious lifestyle blind them to the longterm dangers of getting too close to the PRC. By the middle of Chen’s presidency, most DPP politicians were resigned that there was little they could do to influence the situation on

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the mainland. Therefore, DPP strategists reasoned, they needed to change Taiwan internally by guiding public opinion in a more Taiwancentric direction. The Chen administration redoubled its efforts to nurture Taiwanese consciousness. The plan was to strengthen Taiwan’s determination to resist unification and lay the groundwork for independence should an opportunity arise. The campaign was not so much a new initiative as the intensification of long-standing DPP efforts—with the added power of the president’s bully pulpit. President Chen proclaimed this new direction in his 2006 New Year’s address when he said, “Taiwan consciousness breaks the shackles of historical bondage and political dogma, and is founded upon the 23 million people of Taiwan’s own self-recognition, devotion to the land, and understanding of their shared destiny.”21 This new emphasis included a variety of strategies. Many were aimed at affirming Taiwanese identity, but others sought to downplay Chinese elements in Taiwan, both institutional and cultural. The president stepped up efforts to reform Taiwan’s educational system by reducing the attention given to mainland history, geography, and literature and devoting more resources to the study of Taiwan, including Hokkien, Hakka, and Austronesian languages. He elevated the status of officials and institutions responsible for Hakka and Austronesian affairs. Cultural bureaus were encouraged to support Taiwanese folk arts and practices and downplay Chinese “high culture.” These efforts met with resistance from the usual suspects—and from some unexpected quarters. That the PRC government (and many KMT politicians) decried the policy, which they labeled “desinification,” was no surprise. What was surprising was the resistance from many islanders—and not only waishengren. Many parents opposed devoting class time to “soft” subjects like Hokkien. In their view, the intense competition Taiwanese youth faced from China and other Asian nations demanded precisely the opposite: more resources invested in the “hard” subjects that would secure their economic future. Some critics also accused the DPP of a cynical effort to politicize something that already had become mainstream and therefore apolitical. The pop music impresario Landy Chang pointed out this change in a 2002 interview when he explained to Gavin Phipps of the Taipei Times why the craze for politically themed, Taiwancentric music had evaporated: “With the DPP in power and martial law lifted, there is little call for Taiwaneseness.”22 The Chen administration’s campaign to promote Taiwan consciousness was aimed at minimizing the influence of the China inside in order to 21  “President Chen’s New Year Message,” January 1, 2006. Available on the website of the ROC Government Information Office. 22  Taipei Times, June 29, 2002, 16.

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counter the rising influence of the China outside, but the mainland’s influence continued to increase. In 2005 the KMT’s presidential candidate from the previous year, Lien Chan, and his running mate, Soong Chu-yu, made trips to China. Their visits drew positive responses from both Taiwanese and mainland Chinese and marked the beginning of a warming trend in cross-Strait relations—although not a trend in which Chen and his party would be allowed to participate. The 2008 presidential election was a replay of the 2000 race, as both candidates sought to project a moderate image on cross-Strait relations. KMT candidate Ma Ying-jeou built his candidacy around a promise to improve economic and political relations with the PRC while preserving Taiwan’s fundamental interests—including its status as an independent and sovereign state called the Republic of China. The DPP nominee, Hsieh Changting, was at pains to distance himself from Chen and the DPP’s strong proindependence reputation. Although sharing the view that Taiwan should cultivate better relations with the mainland, the candidates disagreed on exactly how to achieve that goal. Ma’s position was aggressively proengagement while Hsieh supported a more cautious approach, but the two candidates’ positions shared a bottom line: neither independence nor unification was a realistic option in the near term. Ma won the 2008 election by a large margin. Given two candidates who agreed that neither unification nor independence was a good near-term option, Taiwan’s voters chose the one whose claim to moderation seemed more credible. They repeated that choice in 2012, when they elected Ma for a second term. That outcome reveals something important: despite the deep disagreements over strategy and tactics that remain, Taiwanese have reached consensus on two critical points. They feel themselves to be citizens of a sovereign, independent state (the name of which they are still debating), and they believe they alone have the right to change that status. This consensus came into being so gradually and organically that many islanders do not recognize it as a consensus—it seems simply the natural state of things. But compared to the 1990s, when advocates of formal independence and proponents of full unification did not even recognize one another as fellow citizens, it is a profound transformation. After decades spent debating how to reconcile Taiwan with the China inside, islanders have turned their attention to the China outside, and the threats and opportunities it holds. It is that China—the People’s Republic—that Taiwanese recognize as “China.” Their home, they agree, is Taiwan.

THREE

Shifting Frontiers Cross-Strait Relations in the Context of Local Society

MICHAEL SZONYI The phrase “mobile horizons” in the title of this book is intended to convey the sense that the very limits or frontiers of what is possible in cross-Strait relations are changing. “Mobile horizons” also suggests one consequence of this shifting of frontiers: places that were once enormously distant from one another, far away over the horizon, suddenly seem very close. Nowhere is this more true than in the small island archipelago of Kinmen (also known as Jinmen or Quemoy 金門).1 Although at present the island is governed by the Republic of China (ROC), Kinmen is geographically much closer to the mainland than to Taiwan (map 3.1). From the beaches of Kinmen one can easily see the skyscrapers of the mainland city of Xiamen; Taiwan is more than a hundred miles distant. But for much of the last sixty years, despite the physical proximity of Kinmen and Xiamen, the two places were for all intents and purposes worlds apart, impossibly distant in political, ideological, and practical terms. To give just one example, on October 17, 1949, a young Kinmen man named Wu Caisang was sent by his mother to Xiamen on what should have been a routine errand to buy cooking oil. By the time he had completed his task that afternoon, ferry service had been cut off. Stranded in Xiamen, he was unable to communicate with Kinmen even by letter or phone for decades. It was more than forty years before he was able to return home from his errand, and then only via a roundabout route through Hong Kong and Taipei.2 Of course, For comments on earlier drafts of this paper, I am grateful to Jiang Bowei, Nathan Batto, and the participants in the Mobile Horizons workshops. I thank Wang Xiaoxuan for providing research assistance for this paper. 1 In keeping with current usage by the county government, I use “Kinmen” when referring to the island. I use the proper pinyin romanization, “Jinmen,” when transliterating the name from Chinese sources. 2  Yang Shuqing, Jinmen daoyu bianyuan [Kinmen island margins] (Taipei: Daotian, 2001), 5.

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N

China W

E

Dadeng S

Xiamen Little Kinmen

Greater Kinmen

IW

A

N

R ST

A

IT AREA OF ENLARGEMENT

0

5

10

Miles 20

Mazu Tabei

China

TA

TA

Dadan

0

100

IW

A

N

ST

RA

Taiwan

IT

Penghu Gaoxiong Miles 200

Map 3.1: Kinmen and Vicinity. Source: Szonyi, Cold War Island, p. xvi.

the physical distance between Kinmen and Xiamen has not changed in the last six decades. But Kinmen and Xiamen were very close before 1949. They became very far apart for the fifty years after 1949. Today they have become closer once again. Whereas Wu Caisang spent most of his lifetime waiting to get home, thousands of people and dozens of ferries now routinely travel directly between Kinmen and Xiamen every day. Since direct travel between Kinmen and Xiamen resumed a decade ago, cross-Strait interaction has become part of the daily life of the ninety thousand residents of Kinmen. A running joke on the island is that when older folk greet one another in the local dialect, they no longer ask “Have you eaten yet?” but “Have you been to Xiamen lately?” Many residents work, trade, invest, shop, play, marry, and worship on the mainland. Every day they make choices about their own participation in cross-Strait activities. The interjection of cross-Strait interaction into the daily lives of Kinmen people presents them with opportunities, risks, and choices. To better understand the future of the cross-Strait relationship, we must of course pay attention to official political negotiations and to large-scale surveys about people’s sense of identity and their preferences for the overall political arrangement. But we should also try to understand the

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more immediate and concrete choices ordinary people face as their frontiers shift around them. In this chapter, I look at how the people of Kinmen have been influenced by and have themselves influenced the larger political and economic context of cross-Strait relations. I look first at how the larger cross-Strait relationship has affected Kinmen local society historically, describing three phases of interaction since 1949: a first phase of hostility lasting from 1949 to the 1980s; a second phase of liberalization from the 1980s to the end of the 1990s; and a third phase of deepening cross-Strait activity lasting to the present. Because the first two phases are discussed in more detail in my book Cold War Island, I devote most of my attention to the last phase. The number of actors involved in cross-Strait relations has grown considerably since the era of open hostility. Today the relevant participants or actors are not only the two national governments in Beijing and Taipei but also local governments at various levels and a wide range of individuals and groups whose concerns are often more practical, immediate, local, and intimate. There are many points of tension and contradiction among their multiple agendas. The main body of this chapter explores the articulation of these agendas by discussing several debates about Kinmen’s future economic development. Since each has to do with the appropriate form and extent of Kinmen’s integration with coastal Fujian on the mainland, they are actually also debates about the future of cross-Strait relations. I try to show that the specific forms of interaction and entanglement, both current and desired, are locally structured, locally contingent, and locally nuanced. In a word, cross-Strait interaction is messy. It cuts across existing political categories and identity groupings in Kinmen, destabilizing them in the process. William Kirby’s chapter offers a number of examples in which growing economic integration does not lead automatically to ultimate political unification. This chapter offers a possible explanation. Many forms of cross-Strait activity today are in fact tied to particular agendas, which often favor cross-Strait relations taking a specific form, reaching a certain point, and going no further. Individual agendas typically favor freezing the larger relationship at a certain moment. For the purposes of the argument, it is useful to distinguish among several dimensions of the relationship between the two polities across the Taiwan Strait. “Cross-Strait relations” refers to the political framework established by the two governments of the PRC (People’s Republic of China) and the ROC. It is fixed neither discursively nor historically: the two sides disagree about the framework to which they both subscribe, and their understanding of the framework has changed over time. “CrossStrait interaction” or “activities” refers to actual behavior by individuals

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or groups that involves movement or flows—of money, people, goods, ideas—from one side of the Strait to the other. The smugglers in Micah Muscolino’s chapter, the pilgrims in Robert Weller’s, and the businesspeople in William Kirby’s are straightforward examples of individuals engaged in cross-Strait activities. People can be affected by cross-Strait interaction even if they do not participate directly. For example, the changes to Taiwan’s marriage market caused by the arrival of large numbers of mainland spouses, discussed in Sara Friedman’s chapter, affect men and women in Taiwan even if they do not marry people from the mainland. The term “cross-Strait entanglement” conveys the notion that such interaction or activity tends to lead to new ties between people on either side of the Strait, and such ties are often durable. Finally, “cross-Strait integration” is both a description of a situation where the costs of cross-Strait activities go down and the level of such activities rises and a normative argument that such activities will eventually pass a threshold beyond which political unification becomes more likely. My two basic arguments can be restated as follows: cross-Strait activities need to be distinguished from cross-Strait relations, and increased cross-Strait activities and entanglement need not necessarily lead to cross-Straits integration. The patterns of cross-Strait interaction on Kinmen cannot be applied uncritically to all of Taiwan. There is much about Kinmen that is distinctive. Small in size, part of the Republic of China but not part of Taiwan, it is trivial to the national politics of both PRC and ROC (though this has not always been so). Because of its physical distance from Taiwan, its proximity to the mainland, and the relatively long history of direct transport and communication links to the mainland, its interaction with the PRC and the resulting entanglement and complication of interests manifested themselves earlier, more transparently, and more urgently than on Taiwan. But Kinmen may have some value as a comparative case. For just as on Kinmen, existing political categories and identity groups on Taiwan are being destabilized by rising levels of interaction across the Strait. Everyone’s interests on Taiwan are becoming more complex because of the changes in cross-Strait relations and activities. Familiar categories such as Blue vs. Green or native Taiwanese vs. mainlander are not adequate to explain these complicated interests. This in turn must complicate our predictions about how groups see deepening integration. The complication of interests, in other words, has ambiguous implications for any ultimate political settlement across the Taiwan Strait. More broadly, Kinmen is emblematic of communities that find themselves located squarely on shifting geopolitical frontiers. Berlin during the Cold War and after, Hong Kong and Macao in the years before and after

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retrocession, and border towns along the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea have all faced similar sets of challenges and opportunities as geopolitical contexts have shifted around them. Phase I: Cold War Island Kinmen’s distinctive status was determined almost by historical accident. In one of the ROC army’s few military successes in the waning months of the Chinese Civil War, Chiang Kai-shek’s forces turned back a People’s Liberation Army (PLA) attack on the island in October 1949. Wu Caisang, the young man who went to buy cooking oil, had the bad luck to travel just as the two sides were preparing for this confrontation. In its aftermath, Kinmen was utterly cut off from the nearby mainland, while Taiwan, previously a distant frontier, suddenly became central to local life. At the same time, Kinmen became one of the most highly militarized societies in world history. To protect it from an expected subsequent assault and, at least in the early years, to enable it to serve as a staging point for a planned reconquest of the mainland, Chiang stationed a huge garrison on the island. The number of soldiers on Kinmen soon came to exceed the civilian population (see table 3.1). But even the distinction between soldier and civilian resident became blurred. A universal militia conscripted civilians young and old, male and female, to provide logistical support for the troops. Militia members were subject to long periods of training and forced labor. During the two Taiwan Strait Crises of 1954–1955 and 1958, the island was devastated by fierce artillery barrages by the PLA. There is a huge and contentious scholarly literature on the causes of these crises, but the scholarship agrees that the PRC’s goal in launching the attacks was not simply to take control of Kinmen. In other words, Kinmen’s role was as a tool of the larger geopolitical agendas of the PRC and the other states involved. From 1949 to the 1980s, Kinmen was the frontline of cross-Strait confrontation. Life on the island became entangled with cross-Strait relations as part of the global Cold War. The dominant factor shaping local politics was an external actor—the government, and in particular the military—of the Republic of China. Even after giving up hope of reclaiming the mainland, the ROC leadership was committed to retaining Kinmen because it was one of only two remaining footholds near the mainland and therefore gave at least some legitimacy to ROC claims to continued sovereignty over all of China. A concrete expression of this subordination of local interests to geopolitical concerns was the disbanding of the civilian county government after 1949. In its place, political authority was vested in the senior military commander. Though a nominal civilian county government was

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Table 3.1: Kinmen Civilian Population and Garrison Size (selected years) Year 1945

Civilian Population 50,865

1949

9 divisions

1954 1956

Garrison Troops

42,000 (+ 6,000 guerrillas) 45,347

1958

approx. 90,000

1959

41,014

1961

47,528

1966

56,842

1970

61,008

1975

59,668

1980

51,883

1985

48,846

1990

42,754

1993

45,807

30,979

1997

51,080

15,974

2000

53,832

2004

64,456

2007

81,547

2008

84,570

2009

93,804

2010

97, 364

80–100,000 (?)

60–80,000 (?)

10,709