After the recent release of the widely censured White Paper intended to intimate the Taiwanese voters in the momentary presidential election, Chinese President Jiang Jemin (江澤民) was reciting poems and verses again. Surrounded by affectionate reporters, Jiang seemed content to enjoy the kowtow from the Chinese peripheries, such as Hong Kong, Macao, and perhaps Taiwan, as did the Chinese emperors at the zenith of glory in the golden age.
In contrast to the hawkish menacing threat screamed by the military, Jiang's entertaining remarks were certainly designed to mystify himself as a dove to the keen international audience. Nonetheless, remember that the ultimatum embodied in the latest White Paper is unmistakable orchestrated by Jiang himself. Only considerate or innocent sympathizers are anxious to interpret the show as a gesture of goodwill.
As seasoned Chinese watchers would agree, while factional competitions between the conservatives and the reformers have been inescapably rampant in the Chinese political arena, bureaucratic politics, in the sense of "where you stand decides what you say," also stipulates one's role, whether hawk, dove, or even the Janus-faced so-called "dowk."
While denying that there is any such a sense of "beacon fire" on the Chinese part, Jiang wasted no time in warning the Taiwanese vaguely that Taiwan's Independence means frying the beans with faring fire on wok. It is not clear who is cooking whom under such a circumstance. If the metaphor of the beans symbolizes the Taiwanese, the bean straws would be the aggressive Chinese. In such as case, Jiang was merely rephrasing his threat in a much more sophisticated way.
On the other hand, would the Taiwanese pursue their sovereign state in order to render the Chinese vulnerable to their enemies, if any, in their determination to recover the glory of the once grandiose China in the post-Cold-War ear?
Of course, not! The Taiwanese are undeceitfully and undauntedly asking for the opportunity to exercise their right to national self-determination harbingered in the French Revolution and the American Independence, and further enthroned in Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, but long overdue for them. If the aspiration to pursue a nation-state of their own making stands for a form of Taiwanese nationalism, it is in plain sight meant for a liberal one, in the sense that peoples have the right to decide their own future as President Clinton has reaffirmed recently.
The Chinese leaders might be in the right to suspect that an independent Republic of Taiwan may ally itself with the US and/or Japan once frictions among the powers turn into warfare. Still, one must remind the Chinese: the present-day quasi-independent Republic of China has long been engaged in some semi-alliance relations with the US under the Taiwan Relations Act, and some partial military linkages with Japan via the newly revised Guidelines for the US-Japan Treaty of Cooperation and Security.
If Chinese decision-makers are rational enough, except for forced incorporation of Taiwan against the will of the residents, they ought to calculate how to court the Taiwanese to strike a balance among the power in East Asia in case in case of conflict. A sovereign state for them may be a plausible and feasible option to all. Are they resolved to uphold China as a benign hegemon or a malevolent hoodlum in the world?
Finally, Jiang raised the question whether Taiwan's Independence is justifiable since both Chines and the Taiwanese are of the same root. This understanding is only half-truth. Taking the US, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada for examples, no one can dismiss their grit to establish their own separate nation-states detached from the UK even though they are largely made up of Anglo-Saxon stock.
Furthermore, in order to accommodate the aboriginal peoples and immigrants, the settler's states have come to reconcile themselves to the idea of multiculturalism. Following the same suit, Taiwan has renounced than exclusive Han mono-cultural chauvinism since the earlier 1990s.
By resorting the vague and ambiguous concept of the Chinese nation (中華民族), Jiang undertakes to woo the Taiwanese back to the embrace of China. Are we the same nation? The acid test would be whether the Taiwanese are willing to share a common political state with the Chinese. Although the former may still possess some sentimental attachment to Han culture, they are no more Chinese than the Americans, Australians, or Canadians are British. No, we don't belong to same nation.