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.
[962] Hughes,
[963] Quoted in Hughes,
[964] The ethnic Chinese account for the following proportion of the total population: Malaysia 29 %; Brunei 15 %; Cambodia 5 %; Indonesia 3.5 %; Myanmar 20 %; Philippines 2.0 %; Thailand 10 %; Vietnam 3 %. Acharya, ‘Containment, Engagement, or Counter-dominance?’, p. 134; Chua,
[965] The Chinese government actively promotes its relations with the overseas Chinese; Kurlantzick,
[966] Wang Gungwu,
[967] Suisheng Zhao,
[968] Zhu Feng, ‘Why Taiwan Really Matters to China ’, 30 November 2004, posted on www.irchina.org
[969] Chu Yun-han, ‘The Political Economy of Taiwan’s Identity Crisis: Implications for Northeast Asia’, paper given at conference on ‘Nationalism and Globalisation in Northeast Asia ’, Asia Research Centre, London School of Economics, 12 May 2007.