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立 政 治 大 學
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1. Introduction
As every regular newspaper reader is told, the relationship between Taiwan and China has been tense ever since the inconclusive ending of the Chinese Civil War in 1949.
Interestingly, however, even though hostilities between the two sides have never formally been ended, for example by passing a bilateral peace treaty, there have been perceivable changes in the way in which both sides of the Taiwan Strait have interacted with each other over the course of the past decades. During the Cold War, the two Chinese Civil War war participants Kuomintang (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continued to bombard each other with military and propagandistic means, and the continued state of war was basically perpetuated by the inability of either side to conquer the other between the 1950s and late 1970s. After democratization in Taiwan and China's course of reform and opening, military confrontation became less of an immediate issue. In its stead, economic relations started to take shape and increasingly entangled both sides with each other over the course of the 1980s and 1990s. The transformation of democracy brought significant changes with regard to how the leaders in Taiwan viewed themselves and the other side or more correctly enabled them to portray these images to the outside. Instead of representing a country named “China” new emphasis was put on the place that was already under effective governance: the island of Taiwan. And instead of seeing it merely as a small part of a greater whole, people started to identify with the place and emphasized its equality vis-a-vis the big neighbor, culminating in the claim that it, too, was a full-fledged state in its own right by the late 1990s. The leaders on the other side, however, holding on to an old orthodoxy continued to make threats of forceful military incorporation into their “motherland,” and tried to intimidate the islanders of choosing a course that would move them too far away from “one China.”
Being undeterred, when the DPP government took over government responsibility in 2000, a formerly pro-independence opposition had finally been voted into office. It then did what it stood for: following a course that sought a formalization of Taiwan's de jure independence from the People's Republic of China, a move that was and remains detrimental to Beijing's claim of sovereignty over the island. Consequently,
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the eight years of DPP rule were overshadowed by a strong notion of potential military escalation, which became ingrained into everyone's mind after China passed its Anti-Secession Law (ASL) in 2005 that formalized, among other things, the use of force as a deterrent to “Taiwanese independence.” When a new KMT government assumed office in 2008 with the promise to stop pursuing any immediate course of action that would decide about Taiwan's status, the picture began to look much different once again. The characteristic discourse of Cross-Strait relationship now moved from one of aggression and potential military escalation to one of political
“thaw” (GLASER 2010)1 or “rapprochement” (SUTTER 2011). Media outlets and academic circles alike have pointed out the more “conciliatory” approach that both governments in Taipei and Beijing have pursued since then. And indeed, where negotiations had been slow at best or come to a standstill at worst for more than a decade, the new government was able to sign 15 agreements in only three years.
Among other things, the increasingly important bilateral trade that had made progress even during the DPP administration2 despite its efforts at preventing a “hollowing-out” of Taiwan, became institutionalized for the first time in June 2010, when both sides signed the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA). Also, suddenly, Beijing allowed Taiwan to participate in the WHA as an observer in 2009 after the twelve previous attempts since 1997 had failed to achieve this goal when the harsh rejection of this aspiration by a Chinese official amidst the SARS crisis in 2003-2004 was still on everyone's mind.3 When saber-rattling, (the failure of) money diplomacy, and an overall aggressive posture brought relations across the Strait to its lowest trough during the past decade, then the new era of cooperation after 2008 was indeed a new high point.
Paradoxically, all these changes happened against a backdrop of old assertions that have never changed. Until today neither the People Republic of China's (PRC)
1 A brief note on the citation format used in this thesis: I used the Harvard style for quotations of secondary sources throughout the text (see 6.2). However, due to the high amount of primary source materials and internet sources I opted for putting the references to these materials in footnotes on the pages where they are cited (see 6.1).
2 For example, China's share of Taiwan's total exports surpassed the one of the US for the first time in 2002 (MYERS / ZHANG 2005: 74).
3 When a Taiwanese reporter at the WHO General Assembly that year asked if Taiwan had a chance of obtaining observer status in the WHA, a Chinese official answered in a widely-reported rant:
“Who cares about you people?,” see GIO (2007): “The Practical Imperative of UN Membership for Taiwan,” via: http://www.gio.gov.tw/unfortaiwan/inun01e.htm (accessed: 2011-07-10).
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claim over Taiwan, which it considers to be part of its territory, nor its actual military threat have ceased to exist. Likewise, the current KMT government has not given up its legal claims over mainland territory. The People's Liberation Army (PLA) continues to target long- and short-range ballistic missiles at Taiwan and their quality as well as quantity have increased rather than decreased over the years and even after 2008. The same can be said about other aspects of China's military buildup and spending, after all, the White Paper on China's National Defense in 2010 still attributed the greatest challenge to its security to the “separatist force” in Taiwan.4 Although the current government in Taiwan does not follow a course of achieving formal independence as a new state, the most significant part of its own Defense White Paper in 2011 concerned the eventualities of a Chinese invasion of the island (MEI 2011). Then there is the persistent rumor that China's first aircraft carrier, a potent symbol of the country's increasing naval power, might be named after Shih Lang (施琅), the Qing dynasty admiral, who was in charge of defeating the resistance of the Zheng family on Taiwan and who played a major role in establishing China's rule over the western parts of the island in 1683.5 How is it possible that the prevailing perception in academic and media circles as well as the one shared by a large segment of the public is one of gradual improvement while the “security dilemma,” as mainstream IR scholars call it, seems to get worse by the day? Or how do such contradicting developments provide for a fertile ground that future political talks for formally “achieving peace” or at least military confidence-building measures between both sides could be based on? Evidently, the process of perceiving or, really, constructing the Cross-Strait Relationship has not been consistent over the past decades, especially in Taiwan, and depended very much on which party was in power or how this party presented itself and its ideas with regard to Taiwan's status.
Obviously, explaining these changes can not be done by realist or liberal approaches alone with their focus on structures and “wholes.” There is, however, one strand of constructivism that deals with speech acts, one of whose basic tenets is that we, as agents, construct social reality by the words we say, or that indeed saying equals doing. Using this framework, the Cross-Strait relationship can be analyzed as a
4 See MOD (2010): White Paper on China's National Defense in 2010, via: http://eng.mod.gov.cn/
TopNews/2011-03/31/content_4235292.htm (accessed: 2011-07-10).
5 Asia Times (13 April 2011): “Ming Dynasty Admiral Spooks Taiwan,” via: http://atimes.com/
atimes/China/MD13Ad03.html (accessed: 2011-07-10).
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social arrangement or construct. By giving the agents in society, especially one like Taiwan's where the focus on and the role of identity has always had far-reaching implications (socially and politically), as well as the language that these agents use, the prominent place in analysis that they deserve, this framework seems more adequate for gaining a deeper understanding of the above-mentioned changes and how they came about. Identifying the dominant speech acts means to understand what the rules are that agents on both sides of the Taiwan Strait make and that, at the same time, define these agents and their interactions with one another.
In this thesis the argument shall be put forth that the changes in the way which the Cross-Strait relationship has been conducted, have mostly derived from changes in perceptions of oneself as well as of the other side and are reflected in corresponding speech acts. Using my reading of Nicholas Onuf's rule-based constructivism, which will be explained in the next chapter, this thesis aims at analyzing the speech acts that have been used in past Cross-Strait exchanges as well as the rules that have resulted from them and that have been characteristic for governing Taiwan-China relations.
These changes have been more visible in Taiwan than in China due to its development from an authoritarian state to a democratic one that, starting from the late 1970s, gave the then-opposition and the people living in Taiwan a more prominent role in deciding the island's future and the opportunity to challenge existing orthodoxies that had characterized rule in Taiwan until then. The two subsequent power transitions that have taken place since in 2000 and 2008 respectively have further emphasized the possibility of seemingly very different Cross-Strait relationships as they allowed parties with antithetical ideological backgrounds to take over the responsibilities of governing the island. The thesis shall address the following questions:
1. Starting from the premise that Cross-Strait relations can be understood as a social construct, who are the major agents that are actively shaping this relationship and what are their respective interests?
2. What are the rules, established by speech acts, that have governed the developments across the Strait since 1949 and how do these developments contrast with the current “rapprochement” between both sides?
3. Are there rules in the making that will maintain this development? What are the general prospects for future Cross-Strait relations based on the findings?
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4. Since rule-based constructivism does not exclude the influence of material resources or external circumstances from the analysis, another question to be posed is: what are some of these constraints in the case study of Cross-Strait relations and how do they influence agents in the process of construction?
After introducing the basic assumptions of the framework, the third chapter will go back to the beginnings and take a closer look at the history of the Cross-Strait relationship since 1949 and its development over time. Enriching the secondary literature with a selected important primary sources, a brief historic account of 1949-2000 will inform us about the context for the current development of Cross-Strait relations. Although it is to be assumed that a historic review of this evolution from the presidencies of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) to Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) and putting them into relation to the dominant ideas in Washington and Beijing, will mostly highlight changes in Taiwan, there were also adjustments of views in China and the US. Using the rule-based constructivist framework, it will be seen what mechanisms were responsible for holding the relationship together and in what parameters or unsurmountable restrictions agents had to deal in when making their choices in pursuit of their respective goals. One central rule most speech acts centered around and that therefore governed Cross-Strait relations during most of that time span could be called the rule of “one China.” Although the exact definition of “one China” was (and remains) quite different for agents in Taipei, Beijing and Washington, it was the adherence to this rule that upheld the “status quo” over the Taiwan Strait. Only during the last years of Lee Teng-hui's presidency was this rule severely challenged by speech acts from Taipei that aimed at breaking or circumventing it, namely Lee's
“state-to-state” remarks and following discourses.
Chapter III will be the main part of the thesis. It starts with the year 2000, for it was then that the world witnessed the first change of governing parties in Taiwan, which led to a critical juncture in Cross-Strait developments and revealed many new dynamics. In addition to some secondary literature, I will rely on primary source materials as well as news reports to trace the drastic changes of development in speech acts and rules governing Cross-Strait interactions. As outlined above a special focus will be put on the “one China” rule. In the framework of three main discourses that have been used in relation to this rule during that time and that became especially
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dominant after 2008, it will be analyzed how different agents have tried to weaken or strengthen the rule. These are the discourses of Taiwan's status and the Republic of China (ROC) Constitution, the “1992 Consensus,” and the idea of the “Chinese nation.” Based on this framework, the nature of the Cross-Strait situation should become clearer and should allow to draw inferences about future developments in this volatile relationship. Therefore, the thesis will be rounded out with a conclusion that sums up the findings and comments on prospects of Cross-Strait relations for the time after Taiwan's presidential election in 2012.
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