The Wall Street Journal-20080115-Our One-China Cowardice
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Our One-China Cowardice
Although no one in the State Department or the White House will publicly admit it, there were probably a lot of high fives following the election results for Taiwan's legislature this weekend. The Nationalists (KMT) won a super majority, controlling over two-thirds of the assembly's seats. Equally significant, President Chen Shui- bian's Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was crushed.
The results are widely read in Washington as a decisive repudiation of Mr. Chen's domestic and foreign policies. But celebration would be premature.
On the surface, this looks like an especially hopeful sign for the Bush administration. For a number of years, both President George W. Bush and his most senior advisors have seen Mr. Chen as unreliable and needlessly pushing the envelope with Beijing. The Bush administration was continually upset with Mr. Chen's willingness to raise Beijing's ire by asserting Taiwan's sovereignty.
Of particular concern to the Bush team in recent months is Mr. Chen's decision to hold a nation-wide referendum in March, during the presidential election, on Taiwan's membership to the United Nations. In Washington, virtually everyone from the secretary of state to the country desk officer for China has called on Taiwan to drop the measure. Nor is there support for the referendum in London, Paris, Tokyo, Moscow or, of course, Beijing. To the contrary, both the U.S. and foreign governments have deemed it provocative and dangerous.
Remarkably, the referendum will have no practical impact. Even if it should pass -- and there is a distinct possibility it will not, given the high threshold set by the law governing referendums in Taiwan -- it will be rejected out of hand by the U.N. and the Security Council. In short, the measure is going nowhere.
Of course, U.N. membership is supposed to be "open to all . . . peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained" in the U.N. Charter. And by every traditional measure, the Republic of China (Taiwan) is a sovereign state: It rules over a defined territory, is diplomatically recognized by other member states, and is a major global economic power. Moreover, Taiwan has made a successful transition from being a one-party state to a liberal democracy.
Nor, technically, does Taiwan's desire to join the U.N. in this case vitiate the "one China" policy adhered to by most countries. As we have seen with the two Yemens, East and West Germany, and potentially North and South Korea, two seats in the U.N. does not preclude unification down the road.
The reason for the international fuss is that Mr. Chen's insistence on having a referendum makes it formal policy to request membership to the U.N. under the name "Taiwan" -- and not the "Republic of China." In coupling the vote on the referendum with his country's next presidential election in March, Mr. Chen seems to be hoping to generate a larger turnout for his own party. As polls taken in Taiwan indicate, the majority of the island's citizens take considerable pride in their own young democracy and are largely indifferent or hostile to unification with China.
Here we get to the heart of the matter. Beijing finds the vote intolerable because it signals that the question of future unification will only be decided with the explicit consent of the people of Taiwan. For the leaders of China's Communist Party, whose claim to rule now rests in no small measure on its ability to assuage popular nationalist ambitions, this means that Taiwan is even further from its grasp.
No one would tolerate Berlin waking up tomorrow and telling Paris and the world that it wanted to revisit the issue of Alsace. But somehow the West has come to accept this kind of behavior from China. Appeasing China will not lessen its ambitions toward Taiwan. If anything, by suggesting the referendum is a move toward Taiwan independence, Washington and its allies are unintentionally giving Beijing the very grounds it could use to take a more aggressive approach.
In the best of all worlds, Taiwan's president would not have pushed for the referendum. But he is unlikely to call it off now. The required number of signatures for putting the matter to a vote has been collected, and the DPP's losses in the legislative elections make the need to generate a larger turnout for the presidential election even greater.
The underlying problem reflected in the push to join the U.N. will not be resolved when Mr. Chen leaves office. Chinese nationalism is on the rise and its primary target remains Taiwan. Many Taiwanese are frustrated that their economic and political progress over the past decade has gained them virtually nothing internationally. Taiwan's state of suspended animation is unlikely to be tenable over the long term.
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Mr. Schmitt is director of the American Enterprise Institute's program on advanced strategic studies.
