Wednesday, November 19, 2003
CHINA and TAIWAN -- AN EAR FOR TROUBLE
CNN is reporting on official Chinese snarling at the latest round of indpendence sounds coming from Taibei. Some simple facts need to be borne in mind here. First, right or wrong, the CCP will never tolerate an independent Taiwan. It's hard for most Americans or Europeans to comprehend how or why this is, and a short blog post isn't the place for me to explain why I think this in detail. Suffice it to say that Taiwan's separation from the PRC in 1949 was so caught up in the founding mythology of the current regime in Beijing that the CCP's core identity is based on unification as an ultimate goal, whenever it may be achieved and however long it may be postponed. The hypersensitive nationalism cultivated by the CCP (and naturally and genuinely felt by the vast majority of Chinese people) focuses on the territorial integrity of "Greater China" in a way that no other major nation in the world today shares. This has nothing to do with Cold War communist ideology -- whether as it actually existed in China or as it was perceived in the West. Nor is it based on the kind of universalist religious jihadism that drives Islamofascist violence in the Middle East and elsewhere. It's much more akin to the kind of nationalistically-driven violence Europe experienced in the late 19th through the mid-20th centuries. And we know how that turned out.
Second, Taiwanese political and social culture has become increasingly unaware of just how strong the nationalistic feelings for "Han Unity" and "Chinese strength" run in the PRC. Taiwan is much more like Western countries now, with fairly diverse "cross-cutting cleavages" in society that weakens this kind of old-fashioned nationalism. This is what lies behind the continuing crisis. So long as Taiwain was ruled by the old Guomindang and the GMD fueled the same kind of nationalism in Taiwain, there was a strange harmony, albeit in counterpoint, between the songs sung in Taibei and Beijing. Now Taibei sings a very different kind of music. And the tune doesn't fit with the Beijing opera of a united Greater China.
I don't pretend to know how this will end, but I can see -- and hear -- the causes of the trouble...
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 7:07 PM
