The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers (20 page)

For the PLA, preparing for war over Taiwan has been the single most persuasive lever for squeezing more money out of the government. For senior party leaders, it has always been an easy way to wrap themselves in the flag. Reunification with Taiwan stands rhetorically as the PLA’s divine mission, in which the military means must serve the political objective. ‘The Party has always seen Taiwan as the final part of the jigsaw puzzle,’ said Andrew Yang, in Taipei. ‘There is no way to persuade them to let Taiwan go.’

Most commentary on the fate of Taiwan focuses on the balance of military forces, counting the missiles in China trained on the nearby island, or tracking the political controversy over the latest US arms package on sale on the other side of the straits. As important as this may be, much of this debate misses the point. The greatest impediment to Taiwan acquiescing to Beijing’s rule has little to do with military firepower, or the prospect of a bloody war and the economic disaster that would doubtless accompany it, although both are crucial considerations for Chinese policy-makers. The obstacle in Taiwan is avowedly political. In a word, it is the Party itself.

When Joseph Wu was studying computer science at university in Taipei in the early seventies, he was pressed constantly to join the ruling party. The advantages of signing up were laid out before him. He could get to the front of the queue for an overseas study visa. If he joined the army, promotions would come more easily. Job-openings in party-owned firms would be his for the taking. ‘Everyone was always trying to recruit me,’ he told me years later in his study at Chengchi University in Taipei. ‘I was told you would have a better life if you enrolled in the Kuomintang.’

The Kuomintang (KMT), or the Nationalist Party, was in many ways the mirror image of the Communist Party, its bitter rival in China, or the mainland, as they call it in Taiwan. Like the Party in China, the KMT had been established on Leninist lines. It had its own organization department for doling out jobs in the state sector. The KMT directly owned some of the largest businesses in the country when it governed Taiwan, rather than just controlling them behind the scenes like the Party in China. The KMT also directly controlled the armed forces. By a small quirk of history (which the Communist Party is reluctant to highlight these days), one of the first political commissars of the KMT army on its founding in 1924 was Zhou Enlai. Later the long-serving and long-suffering premier under Mao, Zhou worked with and alongside the KMT during the brief periods when the two parties were allied or co-operating, in the twenties and in the forties.

The generation that grew up in Taiwan after 1949, the year the KMT fled the mainland to set up government on the island, have a striking clarity about the way China works, because they grew up in a system with so many similarities. The same cannot be said of the Chinese view of Taiwan. From the early nineties when Taiwan began to hold open elections for its national government, a process that has seen the KMT in and out of power ever since, the Party has struggled to come to grips with the idea of the Chinese democracy born and raised next door.

Throughout this period, Chinese leaders incessantly lectured the Taiwanese about the need to accept Chinese sovereignty, reviled their democracy as corrupt and hounded its diplomatic representatives around the world. For good measure, Beijing periodically threatened Taiwan with war, once or twice firing missiles near the island’s northern and southern tips to drive the point home. Ahead of the first three presidential elections beginning in 1996, China issued dire warnings about the consequences of the island going down the path towards independence. All the while, through the bluster and intimidation from the mainland, voting for their leaders in Taiwan became part of people’s lives.

Joseph Wu is just one of many people whose fate has fluctuated with the electoral tides, as careers do in democracies all around the world. Spurning the KMT’s offer of membership in the seventies, he got involved in opposition politics after returning home from gaining a PhD in political science in the US and joining academia. On the re-election as president in 2004 of Chen Shui-bian, leader of the Democratic Progressive Party, he appointed Wu as his chief adviser on mainland affairs and, in 2007, as Taiwan’s de facto ambassador to the US. Wu had a brief, ill-starred stint in Washington, where he struggled for attention in the US capital which was fixated on a powerful, rising China and annoyed with President Chen. After the KMT returned to power, Wu, as a political appointee, was instantly out of a job. When I met him in early 2009, he had returned to work in a small, cluttered office at Chengchi, near the end of the train line on the outskirts of Taipei.

The KMT, back in power from 2008, was a different animal from the one that had ruled Taiwan for more than fifty years from 1949. Its big businesses had largely been sold off, or reverted to state control. The KMT’s old organization department was used to nominate candidates for elections rather than place people in government jobs. The KMT’s control over the military, control which had been withering away since the early nineties following the lifting of martial law, had gone altogether. The old political commissars in the military had been renamed political welfare officers, with different duties to match their new title. The military, once the KMT’s army, was now firmly the country’s army. ‘Chen made a clear order to get the [KMT] out of the military,’ said Wu. ‘Many of the military officers were relieved they no longer needed to report to two bosses and lead a double life.’

In short, the KMT had shed all the powers that once made it so similar to the Communist Party. As such, the KMT’s transformation was an inspiration to reform-minded people in China, as much as it was an embarrassment for the Party, provoking constant comparisons between democracy on the island and the zealous commitment to authoritarian rule at home. He Weifang, the Peking University law professor, said Taiwan was a living example of how Chinese people were not fated from birth to be ordered around all the time. ‘Taiwan today,’ he said, ‘is the mainland tomorrow.’

For the Party, the fact that the KMT had temporarily lost power was evidence enough of its shortcomings. ‘They failed,’ said Song Xiaojun, the author, who traced the KMT’s problems to their splits with the communists decades before. ‘They made two huge errors. One took place in 1927, when they stood on the side of the warlords and landlords. The second one occurred in 1946, when they sided with rightist forces and attacked the zones liberated by the communists.’ For others, however, modern Taiwan offered the chance for a running commentary on the divergent political systems.

At the opening of the annual session of the National People’s Congress, China’s docile legislature, in Beijing in 2007, Li Zhaoxing, the bumptious former Foreign Minister and spokesman for the body, was asked about Taiwan policy.

‘All policies follow the will of the motherland and the will of the people,’ Li replied.

‘Do you mean you want them to vote?’ a Taiwanese journalist piped up.

‘This question is a tricky one,’ laughed Li uncomfortably. ‘The answer is No. No!’

The KMT has come and gone and come again in Taiwan, but one thing has remained constant on the island through all the elections and changes of government from the early nineties onwards. In public opinion surveys, in which a consistent set of questions has been asked throughout, about 70 to 80 per cent of respondents have consistently supported, in different forms, the island’s current political status. Even those people sympathetic to reunification don’t want to join hands with China while it remains ruled by the Communist Party. Most Taiwanese prefer the status quo, with Taiwan as a self-governing territory, independent in all but name.

The opinion poll results are striking when set against the deep economic and people-to-people ties developed between the two countries. Since the late eighties, millions of Taiwanese have gone to China to do business, rediscover relatives or for sightseeing. At one point, an estimated 600,000 Taiwanese were living in Shanghai alone. Scores of Taiwan’s high-tech companies shifted their entire manufacturing operations to the mainland to cut costs, making China by far Taiwan’s most important economic partner. But over the same period, when Taiwanese witnessed up close China’s astounding development, only a handful warmed to the idea of reunification. ‘One-party rule is the problem,’ said Andrew Yang. ‘People here can tell the difference.’

Taiwan’s boisterous elections are the most obvious manifestation of how different the island’s political culture has become from China. But small things can be just as meaningful. After finishing my session with Joseph Wu at his university office, he ushered me downstairs to meet George Tsai, another former government adviser and academic, but firmly in the KMT camp, who also had an office on campus. In Taiwanese political parlance, Wu was ‘dark green’, the colour ascribed to the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party. Tsai was ‘dark blue’. Wu nonetheless graciously introduced me to Tsai, his avowed political enemy. For someone living in Beijing, where there is no formal political competition, the pair’s polite exchange of pleasantries was arresting, the kind of ordinary democratic gesture absent from life in China.

Tsai himself was deeply committed to reunification. In a perpetual flurry of cross-straits activity, he had three trips to China planned for the following couple of months. His Chinese interlocutors in the past had whisked him away to different parts of the country for seminars–in Inner Mongolia, Dunhuang, site of famous Buddhist frescoes, and Jiangganshan, where Mao had hunkered down with the PLA in the civil war with the Nationalists. On these trips, Tsai would huddle for days with his Chinese interlocutors, discussing the Taiwan issue from every conceivable angle.

In the week before I met him, he said, he had received an urgent phone call from military intelligence in Beijing. Was the address by Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan’s president, delivered to a think-tank in Taipei, to be taken by Beijing as a definitive reply to a recent speech on the island by Hu Jintao? Tsai got on the phone to Taiwan’s National Security Council and other parts of the government, before calling Beijing back, to tell them not to read the speech that way. Beijing clearly trusted Tsai. There were few people on the island as active and supportive of reunification as he was. But Tsai had his own bottom line as well. ‘I am for reunification but I am not going to accept communist rule,’ he said. ‘I hate that.’

Since late in the nineteenth century, Taiwan has been a Japanese colony, a Chinese province and, after the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek set up there in 1949, a rival outpost of the central government of China. From the perspective of the Party, the return of Taiwan would be the final glorious act in the restoration of a China humiliatingly carved up by aggressive foreign powers. Any alternatives to the official narrative have been strictly forbidden since the communists came to power. Over time, China has forced the same framework on its bilateral relations with just about every country in the world. Anyone invited to China, no matter how lowly, is required to acquiesce in the one-China policy, which recognizes Beijing’s sovereignty over Taiwan. To do otherwise instantly renders an individual
persona non grata
. Foreign political leaders who fail to toe the one-China line put diplomatic ties at risk and invite commercial retribution for their companies. The policy has always been policed with a breathtaking exactitude, in which no transgression of the basic rule–that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China–is allowed to pass.

At home, the Chinese media also has to navigate linguistic traps to stay within the rules. A Shanghai newspaper reporting on the construction of a new semi-conductor plant in the city in 2002 hailed it as ‘the largest in China’. It was only the following morning that someone pointed out the grievous error in this formulation. The world’s biggest semi-conductor plants were in Taiwan, which was, of course, part of China as well. The editor was forced to make an old-style self-criticism and take a temporary pay-cut to atone for his mistake.

The reality of Taiwan is very different from the picture Beijing force-feeds to its Chinese citizens. Far from considering themselves part of ‘one family’, as Hu Jintao says, few Taiwanese feel an instinctive connection to a country which has been commandeered by the Party. Lee Teng-hui, the KMT leader who became the first elected president of Taiwan in 1996 and who propelled the push for Taipei to shrug off the mainland, was reviled in Beijing as a traitor to the Chinese nation, a ‘sinner of ten thousand years’. In fact, Lee embodied many of the quirks of the island’s history. Raised under Japanese colonialism, he spoke flawless Japanese and poorly accented Mandarin Chinese. Lee struggled to generate an emotional connection to the motherland for obvious reasons, because he had never been to China in his life.

The rise of Taiwan’s democracy movement under Lee Teng-hui in the nineties triggered a crisis in cross-straits ties that lasted for more than a decade. It was this period that also transformed Jiang into a hawk and aligned him more closely to hardliners within the military establishment. Inside China, Taiwan had always been a test of political virility, in which even the hint of weakness can be exploited by political opponents. Jiang’s first proposal for reunification, issued in early 1995 at a time when he was still consolidating his influence over the PLA, had fallen flat with the military, with not a single senior general offering support. Jiang soon found excuses to toughen up.

When Lee Teng-hui was granted a visa to visit the US a few months later, in June 1995, Jiang succumbed to pressure from the top brass for an aggressive response, agreeing to a PLA recommendation for missiles to be fired into the sea north of Taiwan. The following year, ahead of Taiwan’s first presidential election, Jiang approved another large military exercise to express Beijing’s displeasure, including the firing of more missiles. Once again, Jiang struggled to maintain control over the military’s conduct of the exercise, with the general in charge demanding to manage the drill free of supervision from the Politburo. The final humiliation was the dispatch of a US aircraft carrier group by President Clinton to patrol the seas around Taiwan, a show of force that Jiang could not match.