When China Rules the World

by Martin Jacques

  The second example concerns the relationship between China and Chinese citizens abroad. In autumn 2005 it was alleged that a Chinese female tourist in Malaysia had been strip-searched and subjected to violent assault by Malaysian officials. The issue was first reported by the China Press, a Malaysian Chinese-language newspaper, and was subsequently taken up with such vehemence by the Chinese media that the Malaysian prime minister ordered an independent investigation, as well as instructing his home affairs minister to make a special trip to Beijing in order to explain and apologize. [959] An editorial in the China Daily, the official government newspaper, exclaimed: ‘All sensible minds cannot but be shocked by the images showing a female compatriot of ours being forced to perform “ear-squats” naked by a Malaysian policewoman in uniform. No excuse can justify brutality of such magnitude.’ [960] The editorial exercised little restraint or circumspection. Yet soon afterwards it was discovered that the woman in question was not a Chinese citizen, or even Chinese for that matter, but a Malay. [961] The Chinese response to the incident was, from the outset, both disproportionate and belligerent, and based on false information culled from the Chinese-Malaysian press. It would be wrong to draw too many conclusions from one isolated incident, but the Chinese reaction, under the circumstances, was overbearing and intemperate. The Chinese treated the Malaysian government with scant respect. They didn’t even have the courtesy to check the facts first. They behaved in an imperial fashion towards what they seemed to regard, in tone at least, as a lesser state. Meanwhile, the Malaysian government, for its part, acted in the manner of a suitably humble and deferential tributary state. As Chinese tourism in the region grows apace, the incident suggests that the protection afforded to Chinese citizens abroad will be attentive and proactive at best, invasive and aggressive at worst.

  The final example concerns the response of the Chinese to the riots against the local Chinese in Indonesia in 1997. In the event, the Chinese government displayed considerable restraint, seeking to discourage the kind of demonstrations staged by the overseas Chinese in Hong Kong, Taiwan, New York, South-East Asia and Australia. [962] Nonetheless, to judge by postings on the internet, the reaction of many Chinese was one of considerable anger. The following post is one such example:

  My mother country, do you hear the crying? Your children abroad are crying out. Help them. I do not understand politics and do not dare talk about politics. I do not know what it means to say ‘we have no long-term friends or enemies, only long-term interests’, and I do not know what these interests are… I only know that my own compatriots are being barbarously slaughtered, they need help, and not just moral expressions of understanding and concern. My motherland, they are your children. The blood that flows from their bodies is the blood of the Han race. Their sincerity and goodwill also come from your nourishment. Help them… [963]

  Notwithstanding these sentiments, the Chinese government acted with caution and moderation; but as Chinese power in the region grows, the relationship between the China and the overseas Chinese — who wield exceptional economic power in virtually every ASEAN country, [964] and whose self-confidence, status and position will be greatly enhanced by China ’s rise — will become a growing factor in these countries. [965] Emboldened by the rise of China, the local Chinese may seek to take advantage of their improved bargaining position in order to enhance their power, while governments in these countries are likely to be increasingly cautious about the way they handle their Chinese minorities for fear of upsetting Beijing. The historian Wang Gungwu argues that the overseas Chinese share many characteristics with other ethnic minorities: ‘But where the “Chinese” are totally different is [that] their “mother country” is near Southeast Asia, very large and populous, potentially powerful and traditionally contemptuous of the peoples and cultures of the region.’ [966]

  TAIWAN — THE GREAT NON-NEGOTIABLE

  There have been two great exceptions to the new turn in China ’s regional policy. One is China ’s most important ‘lost territory’, namely Taiwan, and the other her regional colonizer and greatest adversary, Japan. While China has pursued a strategy of engagement, accommodation and compromise with virtually every other country in the region since the turn of the century, that cannot be said of its attitude towards Japan or, at least until recently, Taiwan. [967]

  China’s attitude towards Taiwan is fraught not only because it regards the island as one of its lost territories, and therefore as historically part of China; there is an extra charge because Taiwan became a bone of contention after the civil war between the Chinese Communist Party and the nationalist Kuomintang, with the flight of Chiang Kai-shek and his forces to the island and the declaration that it was now the Republic of China, claiming sovereignty over the whole of China. As a consequence, Taiwan represents unfinished business, the only incomplete item on the Party’s civil war agenda. This is why the return of Taiwan to Chinese sovereignty is the ultimate non-negotiable for the present regime and, given the strength of Chinese public opinion on the issue, probably for any other regime one could imagine as well. [968] The road since 1949 has been tortuous, from the pariah status bestowed upon China by the West and its recognition of Taiwan rather than the People’s Republic of China as the true China, to the American volte-face after the Nixon-Mao rapprochement, and then the steady international isolation of Taiwan over the last four decades. But China ’s ultimate objective, namely reunification, has proved beyond reach because the Taiwanese themselves have remained firmly opposed to it, with the tacit support of the Americans.

  Indeed, China ’s hopes were to be thwarted by a most unexpected development, a growing sense of Taiwanese identity culminating in the electoral defeat of the Kuomintang (KMT), which, in principle at least, had always supported a one-China policy, and the victory of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). After the election of the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian as president in 2000, Taiwan pursued a policy of desinicization and increasingly assertive nationalism. This happened to coincide with growing economic interdependence between China and Taiwan, which, though resisted for a period by Chen and his predecessor as president, Lee Teng-hui, [969] has accelerated to the point where, by 2003, half of the top 1,000 Taiwanese firms, including all the major computer companies, had invested in the mainland, usually in manufacturing subsidiaries. Around three-quarters of Taiwanese foreign direct investment presently goes to China, and there are hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese living and working in the Shanghai region and Guangdong province. The Chinese market now accounts for around 40 per cent of Taiwanese exports, a huge increase on just a few years ago. [970] Will growing economic interdependence mean that the two countries are drawn irresistibly closer together, resulting in some kind of political arrangement between them? Or will the sense of difference that clearly informs Taiwanese consciousness close off that option and lead to a growing desire for de jure, and not just de facto, independence?

  A key question here concerns the nature of Taiwanese identity. To what extent is it constituted as different from and in opposition to Chinese identity? And is a sense of Taiwanese identity positively correlated with support for Taiwanese nationalism and ultimately independence? As can be seen from Figure 29, between 1992 and 2006 the proportion of Taiwanese who thought of themselves simply as Chinese has been steadily declining, while those who felt themselves to be Taiwanese has been commensurately rising. However, the group that consider themselves to be both Taiwanese and Chinese has been consistently large — by a narrow margin, in fact, the biggest of all — accounting for almost half the electorate. The picture is, therefore, rather complex. The fact that the largest group consider themselves to be both Taiwanese and Chinese suggests that the two identities, far from being mutually exclusive, are seen by almost half the population as complementary. Many, in fact, recognize that their Taiwanese identity, based on a shared sense of history, culture, place and customs, exists within and alongside their sense of being Chinese. [971] This would suggest that there
is not necessarily a strong correlation between a sense of Taiwanese identity and support for independence. This is rather borne out in Figure 30. The largest group supports the status quo, with any decision on the island’s status to be postponed until later, or what might be described as a ‘wait and see’ position. The second largest group (which enjoys half the support of the former) favours the status quo now and independence later, but this is more or less matched by those who prefer the status quo indefinitely. And not far behind this group in terms of support are those who favour the status quo and unification with China later; there is minimal backing, though, for immediate unification. Only a small minority support immediate independence, and this group combined with those who favour the status quo and independence later comprise less than a quarter of the population. Furthermore, the combined support for these two positions peaked in 1999 and has subsequently levelled off or even declined slightly.

  Figure 29. Changing Taiwanese attitudes towards Taiwanese/Chinese identity.

  Figure 30. Taiwanese support for unification and for independence.

  This suggests that Taiwanese identity is a diverse and malleable concept which means different things to different people. It does not appear to have a strong political content, otherwise there would be a closer correlation between Taiwanese identity and support for independence. [972] Rather than seeing the direction of Taiwan as predetermined, the situation is, in fact, fluid and open-ended. Taiwanese opinion is open to influence according to the way in which China behaves and the exigencies of Taiwanese politics, together with deeper underlying trends, including how China evolves economically and politically in the longer run, what happens to the Taiwanese economy, and the impact of economic integration between China and Taiwan.

  While there is nothing inevitable about the political effects of growing economic integration, the sheer speed and extent of the process over the last few years has had a major impact on Taiwanese politics. Fear of its consequences persuaded former president Lee Teng-hui to impose restrictions on investment in China by Taiwanese companies and to hasten the process of Taiwanization in order to take advantage of what Lee saw as a window of opportunity before the dynamic of economic integration began to close down options. [973] Chen followed suit, though he was forced to bow to pressure from Taiwanese companies and ease some of the restrictions. The growing dependence of Taiwanese companies both on the Chinese market and on their manufacturing operations in China has become an influential consideration in the minds of both Taiwanese business and the Taiwanese electorate. Whereas once the country was largely dependent on the American market, this has been supplanted in importance by the Chinese market in a manner similar to China ’s other neighbours. In Taiwan’s case, though, this process has happened even more quickly and gone a lot further — primarily, no doubt, because of shared Chinese customs, culture and language, though other factors like geographical proximity are also significant. Any calculation concerning Taiwan ’s economic future, or the prospects for living standards, must inevitably place China at the centre of the equation. It is hardly surprising that in a 2005 survey almost twice as many Taiwanese were in favour of strengthening economic ties between China and Taiwan as compared with those in favour of downgrading them. [974] And China has recently sought to use these growing connections to build links with different sections of the Taiwanese population in order to influence the political climate and place political pressure on the Taiwanese government. [975]

  The manifest volatility of Taiwanese public opinion has underlined the need for China to court and influence it, yet this is a matter to which the Chinese government has historically attached relatively little importance. There are three reasons for this. First, the Chinese concept of the ‘lost territories’ means that Taiwan, as in the case of Hong Kong, is seen in terms of an historic claim rather than popular sovereignty: in other words, legitimacy is regarded as a matter of history rather than the present. As a consequence of this attitude, the Hong Kong people were not represented in the talks about the handover, which were conducted exclusively between the Chinese and the British. [976] This differed from what has normally happened in negotiations over decolonization, with those seeking independence from the colonial power generally represented at the conference table. Second, the Chinese attitude towards both Hong Kong and Taiwan demonstrates the overriding importance attached to state sovereignty and the absence of any tradition of popular sovereignty, a subject I discussed in Chapter 7. Third, the Chinese view of Taiwan involves a particular concept of Chineseness, which conceives of it in essentialist terms, as immutable, timeless and fixed in history, something that is inherited at birth, whether one likes it or not. This is directly related to the discussion in the last chapter about the nature of the Han Chinese, who are seen by the Chinese government as homogeneous, even though in reality the Han are a very diverse group. It follows, therefore, that the notion of a Taiwanese identity that serves to supersede or elide one’s Chinese belonging is given little or no credence. [977]

  As a consequence the Chinese government, at least until recently, has made little attempt to woo Taiwanese opinion. Indeed, it has often acted in a way that served to inflame, alienate, intimidate and antagonize the Taiwanese — issuing thinly veiled threats, refusing to countenance their views, and resorting to coercive action, most notably the firing of missiles into the Taiwan Strait during the 1996 presidential election campaign. [978] Recently, however, China has been more prepared to engage with the situation in Taiwan as it actually is and thereby take Taiwanese opinion more seriously. [979] This was illustrated by its wooing of the KMT leadership in the period prior to the 2008 parliamentary and presidential elections, including the visit of the former KMT leader Lien Chan to Beijing in 2005. There is now growing optimism in Beijing based on the fact that support for Taiwanese independence seems to have peaked and a view that the majority of Taiwanese are basically pragmatic — supporting, in one form or another, the status quo. The rising economic interdependence between China and Taiwan also points in the direction of the status quo or closer political ties.

  China is prepared to be patient and settle for the status quo for the indefinite future, provided Taiwan does not declare independence. This would have the virtue of enabling Beijing to concentrate on China ’s economic development and sidelining an issue which, in the event of a military conflagration, could do untold damage to the country’s global and regional standing. There is a quiet belief on the part of the Chinese that time is on their side. Taiwan ’s growing economic dependence on China is one obvious reason for this, while China ’s own spectacular progress is clearly making the country steadily less unattractive in the eyes of the much richer Taiwanese. At the same time Taiwan, throttled by its lack of diplomatic recognition, finds itself in danger of being excluded from the new regional trade arrangements centred on ASEAN. [980] Another factor is the improvement in China ’s military competence and capacity across the Taiwan Strait, consequent upon the country’s growing economic and technological capacity, which acts as a powerful deterrent to any adventurist action by Taipei. Furthermore, the fact that the Bush administration consistently sought to restrain President Chen Shui-bian’s more outlandish schemes also served to reassure Beijing. [981] Most important of all, the sweeping victories achieved by the KMT in the parliamentary and presidential elections in early 2008 confirmed Beijing in its new sense of optimism. Weary of Chen’s preoccupation with independence and concerned about the weak state of the economy, the electorate voted decisively for improved relations with the mainland, not least economic, with the new president Ma Ying-jeou promising to maintain the status quo and seek a closer relationship with China. Direct air flights and tourism have followed; and it is possible that a Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement, similar to the one between China and Hong Kong, might in time be agreed. [982] In April 2009 there was dramatic progress when China and Taiwan concluded new agreements on financial services, direct flights and fighting crime. This alm
ost certainly marked a major turning point, paving the way for a much closer relationship between the two countries. Indeed, it is not inconceivable that we might witness a major breakthrough in, or even resolution of, the disputes between China and Taiwan in the relatively near future.

  In the longer run it is conceivable that Washington might contemplate the idea that Taiwan is no longer a fundamental interest that must be defended at all costs. [983] Certainly, in the light of China ’s rise, Taiwan has enjoyed a declining priority in Washington over recent decades. The Chinese may also have begun to entertain the possibility of rather looser political solutions that might one day be acceptable to the Taiwanese. For some time the Chinese have essentially offered Taiwan an enhanced variant of ‘one country, two systems’, [984] but this has recently been given less prominence. Perhaps the Chinese will contemplate the idea of a Chinese commonwealth or a federal commonwealth under which Taiwan would enjoy not only a high degree of autonomy, as it would under the Hong Kong formula, but also, while recognizing the symbolic sovereignty of Beijing, in effect be granted a measure of independence and even limited autonomy to act in the international sphere. [985] For now, China ’s growing optimism is not misplaced. However, the situation remains fraught with uncertainties. If a future DPP government should at some point go for broke and declare independence, then China would almost certainly seek to reverse that action by military means, thereby embroiling the whole region and the United States in a crisis which would have far-reaching consequences. It may be unlikely, but such a scenario cannot yet be ruled out. [986]