Beijing and US threaten war in Taiwan
By Eva Cheng
Beijing has launched another series of missile "tests" and military exercises near Taiwan, using live ammunition this time and endangering air and sea transport in the area.
The US government has responded quickly, sending two groups of warships to indicate its readiness for military intervention.
Tension is increasing further as Taiwan's March 23 presidential election approaches. This will be the first time that Taiwan picks a president through popular vote. It follows four decades of brutal dictatorship by the Kuomintang (KMT), China's corrupt ruling party until 1949, which is still backed militarily and economically by the US.
The KMT's repressive rule started to ease in 1986 with an end to the ban on political parties other than the KMT. Martial law was lifted the next year.
The general expectation is that current President Lee Teng-hui will win the election. This and Lee's active search for international recognition are interpreted by Beijing as seeking independence for the island, despite Lee's claim that he supports unification with China in the long term. The destabilising effects of an increasingly democratic Taiwan on other parts of China also have not gone unnoticed.
With its threats, Beijing has done the ruling classes of Taiwan and the US a service, fostering the illusion that they and the working people in Taiwan share fundamental common interests and that Beijing is their main enemy.
In an election rally of 20,000 on February 29, Lee said the Taiwanese people are indebted to him for making them "masters" in their own country. Lee propagates the myth that he, as a "local Taiwanese" — one whose ancestors migrated from China to Taiwan before the end of the last century — and the first KMT head of such origin, represents the people, as opposed to the hated old guard in the rival faction of the KMT.
Washington played a decisive role in creating "two Chinas" in 1949, and in maintaining the division since, even while shifting recognition from Taipei to Beijing as the legitimate Chinese government in 1978. There is no reason to doubt its willingness to back Taiwan militarily should the conflict escalate.
The dominant division in Taiwanese society is drawn more and more between those who favour unification with China and those who support independence. Opposing class interests are obscured. The harmful effects of this distortion are evident in the pre-election debate, which largely steers clear of the candidates' social policies.
Different segments in Taiwan have their reasons for favouring or opposing unification. Their visions of unification also vary, and are certainly different from that of Beijing, which expects subservience from Taiwan's ruling class. The latter, until recent years, envisaged unification with China under its rule. The idea of a highly autonomous capitalist Taiwan has been floated by a section of the KMT.
A section of big business favours independence, while many small businesses, which have invested heavily in low-technology labour-intensive operations in China since the early 1980s, have no problem with some forms of unification.
There appears to be a growing sentiment for independence among the working people in recent years, but there is no indication that this is a result of a lack of identification as Chinese, despite the separation of Taiwan from China since 1895 — as a Japanese colony until 1945 and under the unwelcome rule of the KMT since.
The KMT's systematic favouritism towards its own ranks at the expense of the existing population, to the extent of banning them from speaking their own dialect, fostered a strong hostility against the newcomers. This artificial difference between "local Taiwanese" and the "mainlanders" has been a factor in Taiwan's political life since.
But support for unification was increasingly eroded as the distortions to the gains of the Chinese Revolution in 1949 started to become evident under the Stalinist rule of the Chinese Communist Party. The massacre in Tiananmen in 1989 had a decisive impact on many by shattering the prospects of a democratic system in China. The fear of Stalinist rule has translated into increased support for the independence of Taiwan, even in conditions of capitalist exploitation and under the thumb of US imperialism.
The right of the Taiwanese people to determine whether to reintegrate with China should be defended. Their sense of alienation from China as a result of the long separation and fear of even more repressive rule is a fact that must be recognised.
What must be patiently explained is that the need of the Taiwanese working people to do away with capitalist exploitation and that of the mainland population to remove Stalinist distortions are not two distinct tasks. In fact, they complement one another; the working people of both places have everything to gain if the repressive regime in China is removed, replaced by a democratic socialist system.