The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers

by Richard Mcgregor

  The opinion poll results are striking when set against the deep economic and people-to-people ties developed between the two countries. Since the late eighties, millions of Taiwanese have gone to China to do business, rediscover relatives or for sightseeing. At one point, an estimated 600,000 Taiwanese were living in Shanghai alone. Scores of Taiwan’s high-tech companies shifted their entire manufacturing operations to the mainland to cut costs, making China by far Taiwan’s most important economic partner. But over the same period, when Taiwanese witnessed up close China’s astounding development, only a handful warmed to the idea of reunification. ‘One-party rule is the problem,’ said Andrew Yang. ‘People here can tell the difference.’

  Taiwan’s boisterous elections are the most obvious manifestation of how different the island’s political culture has become from China. But small things can be just as meaningful. After finishing my session with Joseph Wu at his university office, he ushered me downstairs to meet George Tsai, another former government adviser and academic, but firmly in the KMT camp, who also had an office on campus. In Taiwanese political parlance, Wu was ‘dark green’, the colour ascribed to the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party. Tsai was ‘dark blue’. Wu nonetheless graciously introduced me to Tsai, his avowed political enemy. For someone living in Beijing, where there is no formal political competition, the pair’s polite exchange of pleasantries was arresting, the kind of ordinary democratic gesture absent from life in China.

  Tsai himself was deeply committed to reunification. In a perpetual flurry of cross-straits activity, he had three trips to China planned for the following couple of months. His Chinese interlocutors in the past had whisked him away to different parts of the country for seminars–in Inner Mongolia, Dunhuang, site of famous Buddhist frescoes, and Jiangganshan, where Mao had hunkered down with the PLA in the civil war with the Nationalists. On these trips, Tsai would huddle for days with his Chinese interlocutors, discussing the Taiwan issue from every conceivable angle.

  In the week before I met him, he said, he had received an urgent phone call from military intelligence in Beijing. Was the address by Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan’s president, delivered to a think-tank in Taipei, to be taken by Beijing as a definitive reply to a recent speech on the island by Hu Jintao? Tsai got on the phone to Taiwan’s National Security Council and other parts of the government, before calling Beijing back, to tell them not to read the speech that way. Beijing clearly trusted Tsai. There were few people on the island as active and supportive of reunification as he was. But Tsai had his own bottom line as well. ‘I am for reunification but I am not going to accept communist rule,’ he said. ‘I hate that.’

  Since late in the nineteenth century, Taiwan has been a Japanese colony, a Chinese province and, after the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek set up there in 1949, a rival outpost of the central government of China. From the perspective of the Party, the return of Taiwan would be the final glorious act in the restoration of a China humiliatingly carved up by aggressive foreign powers. Any alternatives to the official narrative have been strictly forbidden since the communists came to power. Over time, China has forced the same framework on its bilateral relations with just about every country in the world. Anyone invited to China, no matter how lowly, is required to acquiesce in the one-China policy, which recognizes Beijing’s sovereignty over Taiwan. To do otherwise instantly renders an individual persona non grata. Foreign political leaders who fail to toe the one-China line put diplomatic ties at risk and invite commercial retribution for their companies. The policy has always been policed with a breathtaking exactitude, in which no transgression of the basic rule–that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China–is allowed to pass.

  At home, the Chinese media also has to navigate linguistic traps to stay within the rules. A Shanghai newspaper reporting on the construction of a new semi-conductor plant in the city in 2002 hailed it as ‘the largest in China’. It was only the following morning that someone pointed out the grievous error in this formulation. The world’s biggest semi-conductor plants were in Taiwan, which was, of course, part of China as well. The editor was forced to make an old-style self-criticism and take a temporary pay-cut to atone for his mistake.

  The reality of Taiwan is very different from the picture Beijing force-feeds to its Chinese citizens. Far from considering themselves part of ‘one family’, as Hu Jintao says, few Taiwanese feel an instinctive connection to a country which has been commandeered by the Party. Lee Teng-hui, the KMT leader who became the first elected president of Taiwan in 1996 and who propelled the push for Taipei to shrug off the mainland, was reviled in Beijing as a traitor to the Chinese nation, a ‘sinner of ten thousand years’. In fact, Lee embodied many of the quirks of the island’s history. Raised under Japanese colonialism, he spoke flawless Japanese and poorly accented Mandarin Chinese. Lee struggled to generate an emotional connection to the motherland for obvious reasons, because he had never been to China in his life.

  The rise of Taiwan’s democracy movement under Lee Teng-hui in the nineties triggered a crisis in cross-straits ties that lasted for more than a decade. It was this period that also transformed Jiang into a hawk and aligned him more closely to hardliners within the military establishment. Inside China, Taiwan had always been a test of political virility, in which even the hint of weakness can be exploited by political opponents. Jiang’s first proposal for reunification, issued in early 1995 at a time when he was still consolidating his influence over the PLA, had fallen flat with the military, with not a single senior general offering support. Jiang soon found excuses to toughen up.

  When Lee Teng-hui was granted a visa to visit the US a few months later, in June 1995, Jiang succumbed to pressure from the top brass for an aggressive response, agreeing to a PLA recommendation for missiles to be fired into the sea north of Taiwan. The following year, ahead of Taiwan’s first presidential election, Jiang approved another large military exercise to express Beijing’s displeasure, including the firing of more missiles. Once again, Jiang struggled to maintain control over the military’s conduct of the exercise, with the general in charge demanding to manage the drill free of supervision from the Politburo. The final humiliation was the dispatch of a US aircraft carrier group by President Clinton to patrol the seas around Taiwan, a show of force that Jiang could not match.

  The crises of 1995 and 1996 were the moments when Jiang decided he would never again be caught short by the hawks in claiming the high ground on reunification. Chinese leaders had been rattled by the virtuosic display of high-tech US firepower in the first Gulf war in 1991. Five years on from this conflict, at a moment when China’s swelling trade made it more reliant on the US than ever before, Jiang was shocked to find that the PLA was still ill-prepared to mount a military campaign against Taiwan. Jiang’s hard line made the Taiwan issue a more powerful lever than ever for the PLA in internal budgetary battles. ‘The military itself believes they are not ready yet,’ said Andrew Yang, in Taipei. ‘They say–don’t do anything to force us to act today. Just give us more resources.’

  Throughout his second term, from 1997 onwards, Jiang cosied up to the hardliners in the system by raising the stakes on Taiwan, setting time-sensitive benchmarks for reunification safe in the knowledge his impending retirement meant he would not have to see the policy through. Jiang said that for Taiwan even to refuse to engage in a dialogue about reunification could be grounds for China to act against it. Although the military’s voice was largely absent from the public debate, numerous accounts of this period have the PLA egging Jiang on. At what used to be the leadership’s annual summer retreat at the seaside town of Beidaihe in 1999, according to diplomat-turned-academic, Susan Shirk, ‘the generals argued emotionally that national honour was at stake in Taiwan’, and that China had to take action to demonstrate its resolve.

  When he became party secretary in 2002, Hu inherited an expanding economy and a Communist Party solidly in control of the government and ascendant over the armed forces.
On Taiwan, however, Jiang handed his successor a veritable time-bomb. China has commissioned dozens of new submarines, built domestic naval destroyers, deployed anti-ship missiles which can be launched from submarines, and readied thousands of missiles along the coast a few hundred kilometres across from Taiwan, with the single aim of retaking the island. Hu was left to pick his way through a dangerous domestic political minefield, to find a way to take Taiwan off the agenda and restore absolute primacy to the economy, without alienating the PLA at the same time.

  Hu’s answer, when it arrived in 2004, proved to be a masterful piece of politicking. He presented the docile legislature, the National People’s Congress, with an anti-secession law for passage in its annual session. At first glance, as a number of commentators noticed, it was not obvious why China needed an anti-secession law to authorize military force should Taiwan declare independence. Legislation has never prevented Beijing from silencing independence advocates in regions such as Xinjiang or Tibet. The law prompted initial outrage in Taiwan, and harsh criticism from Europe and the US. But its passage allowed Hu to strike out from a position of strength. Soon after, China invited the first of what would become a stream of visitors from the KMT in Taiwan to resume party-to-party dialogue with the communists.

  By talking tough at home, and defying critics abroad, Hu had managed to take the issue out of the hands of the hardliners and reframe the Taiwan issue on his own terms. Jiang’s timetables disappeared from view in the process. Instead, Hu pursued high-profile talks with friendly Taiwanese politicians, and soft-pedalled on the bellicose rhetoric that had so alienated voters on the island. ‘Hu does not want to talk about a timetable for reunification, because it would work against his own interests,’ said Alex Huang, of Taipei’s Centre for Strategic and International Studies. ‘Hu advances his position by advancing the economy. The Taiwan issue was not so urgent.’

  When the KMT’s Ma Ying-jeou was elected president in 2008, ending eight years of rule by Chen Shui-bian and the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party, China was thrilled. ‘After the election, a mainland official said: “We spent as much as the KMT on this!” ’ according to George Tsai. Whether the Party had spent real money or just political capital, Tsai’s interlocutors did not say. Cross-straits relations warmed to levels not seen for a decade and a half. Bilateral political visits became regular events and direct transport links, held up in fruitless negotiation for years, were approved.

  Tsai was not alone in ascribing Beijing’s learning curve on Taiwan to a more sophisticated understanding of the island’s politics. ‘They have got used to democracy and have started to understand how our domestic politics works,’ he said. ‘If Taiwan is stable and democratic, it will cause no trouble for China.’ Here was the success of Taiwanese democracy, and the crowning irony as well. In order to seduce the island’s voters, the Party had had to adjust not just to Taiwan’s democracy. Beijing’s policies had become locked into the island’s electoral cycle as well.

  The official media in China naturally celebrated the new warmth in cross-straits ties, without spelling out the heretical bargain that lay behind it. In return for Taiwan taking formal independence off the table, Hu had effectively pushed timetables for reunification off into an indeterminate future. For those hardliners in the system who recognized the deal for what it was, it was a bitter pill to swallow.

  After years of predicting, and indeed urging China to go to war over Taiwan, Yan Xuetong posted an unusual statement on the website of the Global Times, a highly nationalistic paper, in mid-2008. It was an apology, he said, for his consistently wrong forecasts from about 2000 onwards that war with Taiwan was inevitable. Far from taking pleasure in his revised prediction of peace, however, the renowned professor was plunged into a state of despair at the lack of a resolution of the Taiwan issue. ‘There is no more reunification,’ he told me later. ‘No more one-China principle. No more effort to get this island back.’

  Even in a political and media establishment hard-wired to adopt a tough, nationalist stand on Taiwan, few had dared to talk as toughly in public as Yan. ‘Personally, I think the earlier this military conflict takes place, the easier it would be for it to be a controlled, local and limited war,’ he said in 2004. In interview after interview, and in the articles he penned for the press, Yan’s attitude to war with Taiwan was like George W. Bush’s fateful early taunt to the Iraqi insurgents–‘Bring it on!’

  Once the pro-independence Chen Shui-bian was elected as Taiwan president in 2000, Yan believed that Beijing was in a race against time to stop the island being lost to Beijing for ever. He did more than dismiss arguments that war would damage the Chinese economy. He said the economic issue was irrelevant, because the pride of the nation was at stake. ‘A strong country can benefit all of its people while a rich country cannot,’ he said in a later article. ‘A rich state does not mean a rich people. You can still have a rich country with poor people. In comparison, a strong country could give all of her people safety and dignity.’

  Yan maintained that avoiding war risked greater damage than fighting one. Look what happened when the Soviet Union lost the three Baltic States. The country disintegrated. ‘With the end of the Soviet Union, the average life expectancy of the Russians fell by five years, infant mortality rate increased and the total population decreased by 5 million between 1992 and 2001,’ he said in a 2005 blog entry. ‘The cost of the disintegration of the state that Russia paid amounted to a large-scale total war.’ Any casualties China might suffer wouldn’t be a big deal anyway, he said. After all, China’s pre-eminent international relations specialist asserted, the country lost about 100,000 people each year in industrial accidents.

  Yan’s hawkish statements made him notorious in Taiwan and highly quotable for foreign journalists on the occasions he was in the mood to take their calls. When Hu Jintao started his policy of cross-straits détente around 2005, however, Yan’s outspokenness became embarrassing and discordant. The propaganda department ordered that one of his newspaper columns be dropped and his media appearances declined. For all his diplomatic boorishness, however, Yan touched on a deeply sensitive issue, that of a weak China unable to stand up to the west to protect its sovereignty.

  Like Yan, the 2009 best-seller, Unhappy China, rages against the party establishment for consistently responding in a weak and shallow manner to the threats China still faced from foreign imperialist powers. ‘Whenever they open their mouths, arty-farty nonsense comes out,’ said Song Xiaojun. ‘These people endlessly deride the weakness and incompetence of old China in the military area. But once you mention the idea of “martial spirits” and “strengthening national defence” to them, they jump out and swear “fascist” at you.’ Chinese diplomats often ruefully joked how they received calcium tablets in the mail, sent by angry citizens who wanted their representatives to stiffen their backbones in dealing with foreigners. Like diplomats in many countries, the ministry in Beijing is often painted as limp in its dealings with foreigners. But for a Party whose legitimacy is based on liberating a hitherto feeble China from foreign domination, being painted as weak was altogether more dangerous.

  Yan Xuetong and Song Xiaojun both disparaged the Party and the government for their feeble diplomatic policy, talking about it as though it were a form of recurring national disease. Where they differed was in their assessment of how people might eventually respond. Song earnestly believed Unhappy China was articulating a new wave of tough-minded patriotism in Chinese society. Yan, by contrast, was scornful of the Party and disillusioned with the citizenry.

  Yan was still apologizing for his wrong forecasts of war when I saw him in mid-2009, but not for the reasoning on which they were based. His big mistake, he said, had been to misjudge the Chinese people. He had thought they would rise up at the prospect of reunification with Taiwan being pushed off the agenda. But in the end, people didn’t care. ‘Chinese people are not that nationalistic,’ he said. ‘They are very money oriented. The dominating ideolog
y is money worship. As long as the situation in Taiwan is favourable to making money, we don’t care if [the island] becomes independent.’

  For the same reason, he argued, the urban middle classes in China and the students at his university had no interest in politics and democracy, because fighting for these ideals could only disturb their increasingly comfortable lives. On the twentieth anniversary of 4 June just days before our meeting, Yan’s faculty members involved in the protests two decades before had been discussing how different they had been as undergraduates from their students. Today’s students had little interest in what had happened in 1989, and even less in engaging in similar protests. ‘If tomorrow the Chinese government says, we hate Americans and anyone who damages the American embassy and McDonald’s is safe, the students will flock there, throwing stones. But if the central government says, anyone who dares to throw stones at McDonald’s will be punished, not a single person will do it,’ Yan said. ‘As long as society is fully engulfed by money worship, you will have a lot of social crimes, but no political violence. People may kill and rob banks and do a lot of illegal things. They might risk their lives to steal money, but they will not do it to attend a political demonstration.’

  Yan omitted to mention that students had long been warned that their careers would suffer if they got involved in anti-party politics. But he was making a broader point about the values of the entire society. ‘The government does not care how you become rich, no matter by prostitution, drug-trafficking, smuggling, corruption, bribery or even if you sell the territory to others,’ he said. ‘That’s why, on Taiwan and issues of sovereignty, the government gets people’s support. The government tells you, we do not insist on sovereignty in the east China Sea [with Japan], because that brings favourable economic development. We do not protest against the Philippines [in a territorial dispute in the South China Sea], because that favours economic development. We allow Taiwan to have sovereignty, in favour of our own economic development.