3. The View from Beijing
3.2 A History of Evolving Chinese Perceptions of Taiwan
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misperceptions and, very often, tragic history between both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
To cite Morgan, China is a state “dissatisfied with a fundamental relationship or system, seeking rightful compensation”.65The Chinese perception of Taiwan is backed by hard interests, from the need to fulfill the longstanding CCP quest of legitimacy over China by finally ending national division, eliminate an ideological adversary, and secure a far safer geo-strategic security environment by breaking China’s isolation from the Pacific Ocean and enable it to monitor nearby seas and communication knots.
In other words, Taiwan presents for China an interesting target for solving its own problems.
3.2 A History of Evolving Chinese Perceptions of Taiwan
China nowadays claims that Taiwan is a Chinese land since “ancient times”. But there is no certainty about the exact date when Taiwan and China began to relate to each other.
What we know for sure is that the Dutch, expelled by the Ming Dynasty from China and the Pescadores Archipelago (currently known as the Penghu Islands) established in what is now Tainan, Tamsui and Keelung during the 17th century. Taiwan was taken from the Dutch by the Chinese Zheng (國姓爺) in 166166, after China fell under Manchu power (the Qing Dynasty). Zheng was a Ming supporter and was dissatisfied with the Qing seizure of power over China in 1644.
The Zheng family, which had found refuge on Taiwan, denied the Manchu’s legitimacy to rule over China67and organized resistance from Taiwan, which triggered a Qing intervention on the island in 1683. From that time, Taiwan indeed became dominated by the same power as China.
The Qing intervention on Taiwan, an attempt to secure the Empire’s borders, highlighted Taiwan’s geo-strategic significance – with Wachman talking about the “Shi Lang Rationale”,68 from the name of the Qing admiral who first recognized the geographical significance of Taiwan. In Chinese hands, Taiwan acts as a shield protecting China’s eastern shores from invasion or foreign encroachment. Conversely, if not controlled by China, Taiwan can serve of bridgehead for the enemy. Thus, at the beginning, Taiwan was certainly not seen as “Chinese sacred territory”, but it already made sense to control it for geostrategic purposes. The current Chinese claim is still based on the same rationale.
Although Taiwan became the new land of an increasing number of Han migrants during the 17th century, the province was often disregarded by central authorities. A Qing
65Morgan, Patrick, “Deterrence – A conceptual analysis”, Sage Publications, 1977, ISBN 0-8039-0819-9, page 106.
66 Wachman A., “Why Taiwan? Geostrategic rationales for China’s territorial integrity”, Studies in Asian Security, Stanford CA, Stanford University Press, page 53.
67 Ibid, page 12.
68 Ibid, page 55.
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emperor once said “Taiwan is a place beyond the seas; it is of no consequence to us (…) it would be no loss if we did not acquire it”. At best Taiwan was seen as a “Great Wall for the ocean frontier”69. No Han power in China ever controlled Taiwan, and the first Chinese settlers were attracted by the Dutch who controlled the island at the time.
Then, for most Qing policy makers, Taiwan was a salvage territory and only a few administrators and military garrisons were stationed there. Only the west coast of the island’s coast was effectively controlled, while the east remained off charts. Taiwan only gained a provincial status in 1887, and in 1895, Taiwan was lost to Japan. The Shimonoseki Treaty, like other “unequal treaties” was and is still felt in China as a historical humiliation – however, in 1895, a little importance was given to the cession of Taiwan to Japan. The Japanese colonization transformed and modernized the island, despite a rough rule of law.
Back in China in 1912, Sun Yat-sen (孫中山)founded the Republic of China (ROC – 中
華民國) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT –國民黨). The father of the ROC was primarily concerned by political development in China and gave little importance to Taiwan. According to Dai Jitao (戴季陶), one of Sun’s confidants, Sun even thought about Japan giving complete autonomy to the peoples of Taiwan and Korea as a peace building measure with China.70 His successor Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石)neither had much interest in the island. In one of his first mentions about Taiwan in 1939, he equated the situation in Korea and Taiwan: “we must enable Korea and Taiwan to restore their independence and freedom.”71But because of the war, that situation changed. During the Cairo Conference on November 16. 1943, the allied powers agreed to restore China’s sovereignty over Taiwan, as part of a “package of promises to Chiang”.72Then, Chiang endorsed the geo-strategic view of Taiwan we wrote about above,“(…)…
Ryukyu islands, Formosa, the Pescadores, Mongolia, Xinjiang (…) and Tibet are all strategic regions for safeguarding the nation’s existence”.73
At first, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP – 中國共產黨) was equally uninterested by Taiwan and the fate of the Taiwanese was considered similar to other “oppressed people”
like the Koreans and the Vietnamese.74Zhou Enlai (周恩來)insisted: “the CCP has opposed aggression from the other nations (…) it should sympathize with independence-liberation movements of other nation states, including those of Korea
69 Teng E.J., “Taiwan's Imagined Geography: Chinese Colonial Travel Writing and Pictures, 1683-1895”, Harvard University Asia Center; Revised edition, Harvard East Asian Monographs, 2006, Cambridge (MA-US), page 58.
70 Wachman A., “Why Taiwan? Geostrategic rationales for China’s territorial integrity”, Studies in Asian Security, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, page 73.
71 Ibid. 75.
72 Wachman A., “Why Taiwan? Geostrategic rationales for China’s territorial integrity”, Studies in Asian Security, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, page 77.
73 Ibid. 80.
74 Wachman A., “Why Taiwan? Geostrategic rationales for China’s territorial integrity”, Studies in Asian Security, Stanford University Press, Stanford CA, page 93.
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and Taiwan”.75The CCP changed its stance around 1942-1943 but references are vague about why it happened – for Wachman:“one is left to speculate”76.
In October 1945, the Nationalist landed on Taiwan, which had been occupied by the Empire of Japan for 50 years. After the KMT disastrous management of the civil war in China, Chiang started to consider Taiwan as a place for retreat in 1948.77 During the next years, more than one million Chinese exiled to Taiwan, to form a ruling
“Mainlander” minority of the island. Formosa was not seen as a place to stay for the ROC, but rather as a stepping stone to take back the mainland from the CCP. Chiang made on Taiwan the recovering of the “mainland” the “raison d’être” of its regime and its main source of legitimization.78Mao Zedong (毛澤東) founded the People’s Republic of China (PRC – 中華人民共和國) in Beijing in 1949, vowed, and still vows to eradicate of the ROC, surviving on Taiwan, to finally and formally end the Chinese Civil War.
When it signed the 1951 peace treaty, Japan formally renounced its sovereignty on Taiwan but did not transferred its right on the island to another regime. As a result, Taiwan has never been officially handed to anyone, neither the ROC nor the PRC.79 In 1950, the U.S., which government was shocked about the level of corruption and incompetence of the ROC leaders, was still hesitating whether to support or abandon Chiang and Taiwan. Truman initially considered that the sacrifices of protecting Taiwan against the CCP would be too high, but the U.S. endorsing of a containment policy against communism as well as North Korea’s invasion of South Korea in 1950, saved the ROC. The U.S. Navy 7th fleet was sent in the Taiwan Strait in order to deter the CCP from invading. Fully surrounded by U.S. forces, the People’s Republic of China quickly saw Taiwan as a bridgehead for the U.S. military against China and the island stepped in the Sino-U.S. strategic standoff. Despite suffering several changes, this overall Taiwan Strait security architecture perpetuated ever since.
Here, one can make an analogy between the 17th century Shi Lang rationale we mentioned above and the current situation: China is embarrassed because Taiwan is seen as the bridgehead of an alien adversary, putting its shores in danger.
We could also draw a comparison between the 17th century’s (pro-Ming) Zheng power on Taiwan against the Qing dynasty, and today’s survival of the ROC against the PRC.
The element that prevented the PRC to suppress the ROC, like the Qing did for Zheng, is the natural defense of the Taiwan Strait and the security umbrella provided by the
75 Ibid. 89.
76 Ibid. 96.
77 Corcuff, S., “The Liminality of Taiwan: A Case-Study in Geopolitics”, Taiwan in Comparative Perspective, Vol. 4, December 2012, pp. 34–64 ISSN 1752-7732 © Taiwan Research Program, London School of Economics, page 9.
78 Corcuff, S., “Liminality and Taiwan tropism in a postcolonial context - Schemes of national
identification among Taiwan’s ‘Mainlanders’ on the eve of Kuomintang’s return to power”, 2011, page 6.
79Cabestan J.P., Vermander B., « La Chine en quête de ses frontières, la confrontation Chine-Taiwan, » Sciences Po – Les Presses, Paris, 2005, page 26.
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United States.80 In 1949, China was divided once again, a trauma for both the CCP and the KMT.
But history did not repeat itself. From 1950 to now on, the island has been efficiently protected from invasion even if major cross-strait crisis happened in 1954, 1958 and 1996 (the latter was felt by China as another humiliation). Also, despite his lifelong autocratic rule, Chiang Kai-shek could not prevent the regime to be progressively
“Taiwanized”. After its democratization, Taiwan fully adopted the representative democratic governance and the national identity of the island renewed itself.
Consequently, support for unification with China has decreased to marginal levels. This development fundamentally upset the rules of the game in the Taiwan Strait.
Taiwan now regards China as a foreign country and affirms itself as a fully independent nation state. But as Taiwan and most other parties favor the situation as it stands now, the PRC continues to claim that Taiwan and China are part of the same nation. In the end, the way China sees the situation has nothing in common with the Taiwanese perceptions of the issue. Both Taiwanese and Chinese want the land for purposes of national completion, but not of the same nation! Therefore Taiwan and China’s objectives are clashing fundamentally.
In sum, China’s view of Taiwan evolved throughout history, from indifference to geostrategic interest. From a place “far, far away beyond the sea”81, Taiwan became
“China’s core interests” and a place of “internal affair”. Historically, this shift was fed by the Chinese leaders’ realization that failing to control Taiwan is a liability for China’s security. The shift is also the result of China’s particular history and trauma, with the century of humiliation, the legacy of the division of China into two competing regimes, and the trauma of a land that has yet to be recovered. All fuel Chinese nationalism and still have implications on Beijing’s perceptions of the issue.