China to US: No Violence Against Confederacy
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
July 28, 1999
July 16, 1860 PEKING (Routers) - China, drawing its own "line in the sand" on the latest East American crisis, warned the U.S. Thursday it would not tolerate a violent solution to the future of the Confederacy.
``We would consider any effort to determine the future of the Confederacy by other than peaceful means as a threat to the peace and security of the Western Atlantic area and of grave concern to China,'' a Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman said. ''That's about as strong a statement as one can make.''
The Chinese government's spokesman told a news briefing China believed the problem should be resolved through peaceful means and ``strongly opposed'' any other course of action.
China's Confederate Relations Act, which governs ties between Beijing and Richmond, commits China to ''appropriate action'' in response to threats to the Confederacy.
After the Union threatened the Confederacy, China gave an indication of how that commitment might be interpreted when it sent two groups of warships to America's eastern seaboard. The incident very nearly resulted in military action.
China issued the statement after the U.S. dusted off its threat to retake the Confederacy by force if the South moved toward independence. The South sparked the latest North-South crisis by declaring earlier this week it was abandoning the ``One America'' policy --the foundation of American federalism for decades.
Although China urged both sides to halt the ferment and restore a dialogue, China's Foreign Minister made clear Beijing felt it necessary to respond directly to the U.S.'s volatile rhetoric over the Confederacy.
Chinese military ships have been dispatched to the Atlantic Coast to deal with any tense situations as a result of Richmond's declaration, China's Minister of Defense told reporters.
Richmond has many supporters in China and China has long been under pressure to be more receptive to ideas about Southern secession. Beijing's first reaction this week was to try to contain the controversy by reaffirming it recognized one America ruled from Washington despite Richmond's decision to reject that policy.
The Confederacy's supporters in China backed Confederate President Jefferson Davis for ``stating the obvious'' and said ``America is a divided nation made up of two separate and sovereign states''.
A pro-Confederate sympathizer expressed dismay that the Chinese government, in affirming its one-America policy, sided with America's northern Republicans instead of Democrats in the South. He pressed for a reiteration ``of our legal defense obligations to the Confederacy.''
Washington, which considers the South a rebel force blocking its drive to reunify America, has threatened to invade the South if independence is declared. Government experts have predicted China likely would be drawn into any war between the Union and the Confederacy.
Earlier Stories
China Warns U.S. Not To Use Violence Against Confederacy (July 15)
China Warns U.S. On Confederacy (July 15)
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Wednesday, July 28, 1999
Friday, July 09, 1999
The New Party March for Peace Declaration
The New Party March for Peace Declaration
On July 9th, 1999, President Lee Teng-hui proclaimed that 'the two sides of the Taiwan Strait represent a "special state to state relationship."' The manner in which he made this proclamation and the locale chosen deserve critical scrutiny.
Lee's proclamation was a reckless gamble whose outcome remains to be seen. At stake with Lee's casual throw of the dice are the lives of 22 million Chinese on Taiwan. This sort of irresponsible, myopic handling of affairs of state as if they were children's games, has pushed Taiwan to the brink of war. The New Party calls on all Chinese citizens who desire peace and oppose war to take to the streets and voice our opposition to Lee's "two states" formulation.
The New Party 'March for Peace' declares that:
1. President Lee's so-called "special state to state relationship" has absolutely nothing in common with the "two Germanys" or "two Koreas" model. His formulation is deliberately worded in order to deceive the public. The "two Koreas" both claim sovereignty over all of Korea. The "West German Basic Law" central to the "two Germanys" formulation clearly stipulated that it applied to all German citizens, and that the West German government's Office for East German Affairs was subsumed under West Germany's Department of the Interior. Therefore within the framework of the Korean and German models each side enjoys a bona fide "special" relationship and connection to the other. President Lee's "special state to state relationship" formulation on the other hand, bears no resemblance whatsoever to the "two Germans" or "two Koreas" models. The defining characteristic of Lee's "special state to state relationship" is its conspicuous lack of specialness. It is nothing more than the relationship between two foreign nations.
2. President Lee's "two states" formulation constitutes a grave violation of the Republic of China's Constitution and law. Although the Republic of China's administrative jurisdiction does not currently encompass the Chinese mainland, according to the Constitution of the Republic of China, the ROC retains sovereignty over the Chinese mainland. Yet President Lee dared to assert that "As of 1991 the Republic of China's territorial sovereignty was confined to Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu," implying that the ROC's sovereignty had been reduced to the Taiwan region alone. This proposition violates Article Four of the ROC Constitution, which stipulates that "The ROC's territory and preexisting boundaries shall not be altered without the approval of the National Assembly." It violates the ROC's "indivisible territory" clause. It violates the "Article on BI-coastal Civil Relations." It violates the "territory may not be divided" provision of the National Security Act. It violates the Eighth National Unification Committee's ruling that '"One China" shall be defined as the Republic of China as established in 1912, whose territorial sovereignty encompasses the entire mainland, whose administrative jurisdiction encompasses Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu, and that Taiwan and the mainland are all part of China." It even violates the administration's own "one separately administered China" policy. It is an attempt to substitute the real Republic of China with a de facto "Republic of Taiwan" via semantic sleight-of-hand. It is in essence a monumental hoax foisted on an unsuspecting public.
3. The New Party vehemently opposes Beijing exploiting the turmoil precipitated by Lee's "two states" formulation to apply military force against Taiwan, and to trample over the Taiwan public's desire for political democracy and economic freedom. The New Party has consistently maintained that the reunification of both sides of the Taiwan Straits must be implemented peacefully, contingent upon the adoption of democratic rule and the establishment of economic parity. We resolutely oppose the use of military force against Chinese citizens on either side of the Straits. If Beijing liberalizes its politics and economy, this liberalization will draw both sides together and we will proceed down the path toward peaceful reunification. Beijing however must not make the mistake of adopting a superior attitude, slighting the Republic of China's equal stature, cramping the Republic of China's international "living space," inciting public unrest, resorting to military intimidation, thereby undermining the indispensible foundation of mutual trust and goodwill. The New Party hereby declares that the New Party and the Chinese people on Taiwan will resist any acts of military aggression against them with all their might.
Finally, The New Party puts forth the following demands:
1. The New Party hopes the Lee adminstration will see the light, clarify its position, and return to the "constructive ambiguity" of "one China, two viewpoints."
2. The New Party hopes Beijing will respect the Taiwan public's fundamental desire for political democracy and economic freedom, and refrain from exploiting populist sentiment or escalating cross Straits tension.
3. The New Party demands that the Lee administration cease and desist from sending propagandists abroad to promote the "two states" formulation.
4. The New Party resolutely opposes any attempts to pass constitutional amendments in an effort to "legitimize" the "two states" formulation.
5. The New Party urges President Lee to refrain from issuing any further inappropriate remarks or advancing any additional ill-conceived proposals prior to the expiration of his current, and final term.
On July 9th, 1999, President Lee Teng-hui proclaimed that 'the two sides of the Taiwan Strait represent a "special state to state relationship."' The manner in which he made this proclamation and the locale chosen deserve critical scrutiny.
Lee's proclamation was a reckless gamble whose outcome remains to be seen. At stake with Lee's casual throw of the dice are the lives of 22 million Chinese on Taiwan. This sort of irresponsible, myopic handling of affairs of state as if they were children's games, has pushed Taiwan to the brink of war. The New Party calls on all Chinese citizens who desire peace and oppose war to take to the streets and voice our opposition to Lee's "two states" formulation.
The New Party 'March for Peace' declares that:
1. President Lee's so-called "special state to state relationship" has absolutely nothing in common with the "two Germanys" or "two Koreas" model. His formulation is deliberately worded in order to deceive the public. The "two Koreas" both claim sovereignty over all of Korea. The "West German Basic Law" central to the "two Germanys" formulation clearly stipulated that it applied to all German citizens, and that the West German government's Office for East German Affairs was subsumed under West Germany's Department of the Interior. Therefore within the framework of the Korean and German models each side enjoys a bona fide "special" relationship and connection to the other. President Lee's "special state to state relationship" formulation on the other hand, bears no resemblance whatsoever to the "two Germans" or "two Koreas" models. The defining characteristic of Lee's "special state to state relationship" is its conspicuous lack of specialness. It is nothing more than the relationship between two foreign nations.
2. President Lee's "two states" formulation constitutes a grave violation of the Republic of China's Constitution and law. Although the Republic of China's administrative jurisdiction does not currently encompass the Chinese mainland, according to the Constitution of the Republic of China, the ROC retains sovereignty over the Chinese mainland. Yet President Lee dared to assert that "As of 1991 the Republic of China's territorial sovereignty was confined to Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu," implying that the ROC's sovereignty had been reduced to the Taiwan region alone. This proposition violates Article Four of the ROC Constitution, which stipulates that "The ROC's territory and preexisting boundaries shall not be altered without the approval of the National Assembly." It violates the ROC's "indivisible territory" clause. It violates the "Article on BI-coastal Civil Relations." It violates the "territory may not be divided" provision of the National Security Act. It violates the Eighth National Unification Committee's ruling that '"One China" shall be defined as the Republic of China as established in 1912, whose territorial sovereignty encompasses the entire mainland, whose administrative jurisdiction encompasses Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen, and Matsu, and that Taiwan and the mainland are all part of China." It even violates the administration's own "one separately administered China" policy. It is an attempt to substitute the real Republic of China with a de facto "Republic of Taiwan" via semantic sleight-of-hand. It is in essence a monumental hoax foisted on an unsuspecting public.
3. The New Party vehemently opposes Beijing exploiting the turmoil precipitated by Lee's "two states" formulation to apply military force against Taiwan, and to trample over the Taiwan public's desire for political democracy and economic freedom. The New Party has consistently maintained that the reunification of both sides of the Taiwan Straits must be implemented peacefully, contingent upon the adoption of democratic rule and the establishment of economic parity. We resolutely oppose the use of military force against Chinese citizens on either side of the Straits. If Beijing liberalizes its politics and economy, this liberalization will draw both sides together and we will proceed down the path toward peaceful reunification. Beijing however must not make the mistake of adopting a superior attitude, slighting the Republic of China's equal stature, cramping the Republic of China's international "living space," inciting public unrest, resorting to military intimidation, thereby undermining the indispensible foundation of mutual trust and goodwill. The New Party hereby declares that the New Party and the Chinese people on Taiwan will resist any acts of military aggression against them with all their might.
Finally, The New Party puts forth the following demands:
1. The New Party hopes the Lee adminstration will see the light, clarify its position, and return to the "constructive ambiguity" of "one China, two viewpoints."
2. The New Party hopes Beijing will respect the Taiwan public's fundamental desire for political democracy and economic freedom, and refrain from exploiting populist sentiment or escalating cross Straits tension.
3. The New Party demands that the Lee administration cease and desist from sending propagandists abroad to promote the "two states" formulation.
4. The New Party resolutely opposes any attempts to pass constitutional amendments in an effort to "legitimize" the "two states" formulation.
5. The New Party urges President Lee to refrain from issuing any further inappropriate remarks or advancing any additional ill-conceived proposals prior to the expiration of his current, and final term.
Wednesday, February 17, 1999
The Pot Calling the Kettle Black
The Pot Calling the Kettle Black
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
February 17, 1999
The debate over Taiwan independence has gone off track. Permit me to re-focus on my original point. Namely, how the moral/ethical arguments invoked against China are never applied even-handedly against the China-bashers' own nations and governments. So please, no more cynical and futile efforts to guilt-trip Chinese who oppose Taiwan and Tibetan secession. China is actually on considerably firmer ground morally and ethically than the US when it comes to her territorial sovereignty. If the relentless and tiresome China critics in the US had enough integrity to apply exactly the same arguments against the US that they regularly apply to China, America's territory would have to shrink back to the original 13 colonies, smaller if truth be told.
Those knowledgeable about Chinese history know that China acquired most other territory when more powerful tribes such as Hunnish and Turkic tribes in the north-west, and later the Mongols and Manchus which were at the time alien conquered her, but subsequently intermarried with so-called "Han Chinese", thereby consolidating their territories. The term "Han" of course has never designated or been intended to designate a "pure" race, as the Han, so-called, were already of mixed ethnicity, and proudly so.
Mr. Walsh wants me to swallow the idea that today's US government doesn't selectively target and persecute those it perceives as dangerous or subversive. His astonishing assertion that political movements in the USA are not targeted for their views and function openly, without persecution, will come as a shock to anyone not living in Ozzie and Harriet Land. Mr. Walsh seems to be inhabiting a pre-Watergate "America can do no wrong" mental universe. Has Mr. Walsh never heard of the term "selective enforcement?" How about "DWB" (Driving while Black?) How about recently revealed FBI investigations into the sex life of the non-violent, committed pacifist civil rights leader Martin Luther King? King wasn't even advocating political secession, merely demanding equal rights under the law within a unified, integrated, colour-blind America. Sounds pretty tame to me. Imagine how J. Edgar Hoover would have dealt with him if he had been a Dalai Lama style head of an armed separatist revolt?
Has Mr. Walsh ever heard of the American Indian rights activist Leonard Peltier? Even after the Freedom of Information Act utterly discredited the evidence used in his conviction, and the Justice Department was forced to admit in his second appeal that it had no idea who killed the two FBI agents he was convicted of murdering, Peltier is still serving two life sentences. It can't happen in America, Mr. Walsh? The ugly reality is that Peltier is a political prisoner in a country that sanctimoniously champions political prisoners in other countries. As the ancient American expression goes, the pot is calling the kettle black.
Mr. Walsh pleads that he does "indeed accept the implications of the principle of self-determination in full." Does he really? I have watched with a mixture of amusement and exasperation as he tap-dances around the downside of the logical implications of genuine self-determination. Not just "self-determination" as defined to suit him, but when it impacts on America instead of China.
Mr. Walsh has a touching faith in "democracy." He seems to imagine that if an individual is outnumbered, then justice has been done, and the individual must lump it. After all, we voted on it, didn't we? But the self that has a right to self determination is not a group. Any group. The true self is the sovereign individual. Genuine self-determination is determination of every individual's fate by the individual himself. Not by any group he is supposed to belong to. Anything less is merely quibbling about whose arrangement for frustrating authentic self-determination is proper. This includes the unjust coercion of every sovereign individual by every "democratically elected" government on the planet. Yes, Mr. Walsh, even America!
When Mr. Walsh claims Americans have genuine liberty, he simply hasn't got a clue what he's talking about. Try seceding from the rule of the federal leviathan in Washington, Mr. Walsh. And watch them come down on you like a ton of bricks. I speak from personal knowledge. A former co-worker of mine in Los Angeles went to prison for just such an offence. I paid for some of his legal bills out of my own pocket. No, he did not commit any violent acts. He merely declared himself sovereign and independent in accordance with Common Law and Pro Se Law, dutifully filing all the necessary legal documents in a peaceful manner, declared that he was relinquishing all future claims on Social Security and other government benefits, and then refused to pay the taxes involved. He was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned in Club Fed for close to a year. No, we are not free in the "democratic" west, Mr. Walsh. We are only "free" if we go along with the crowd like sheep.
Mr. Walsh's flippant remark: "Mr. Chu defends the right of "all Chinese" to vote in a Taiwanese referendum and calls this democratic. Does he support the right of all humans to vote on this issue? How about all Asians who speak Chinese?" reveals his lack of seriousness. His remark that "The rational [sic] for allowing the citizens of the Republic of China to vote on its future, and to exclude those who don't live there is clear... Claiming that the proper geographical area is all of China is not convincingly more logical than the claim that Taiwan is the proper geographical area," reveal that Mr. Walsh is as uninformed about Taiwan's legal status as he is flip.
Did Mr. Walsh say "the proper geographical area?" Mr. Walsh seems to think I arbitrarily gerrymandered an improper geographical area when I included the mainland. I'm sorry to disappoint him, but I derived my proper geographical area from the Republic of China's Constitution. The Republic of China's Constitution defines the territory of the Republic of China as comprising the continental provinces and numerous offshore islands, including the island of Taiwan, Hainan island, Quemoy and Matsu. Let me assure Mr. Walsh I did not make up the ROC's Constitution. Notice I said Republic of China, not People's Republic of China. I am merely taking the Republic of China's Constitution seriously, at face value, even if others, most notably the Quisling Lee Teng-hui, don't. Isn't a Constitution supposed to mean what it says, Mr. Walsh? Or is it just a piece of paper?
Mr. Walsh would do well to read the ROC Constitution before inflicting his uninformed opinion on others. It is of course, written in Chinese. This is because the Chinese people living in the province of Taiwan are Chinese citizens. So they speak, read and write Chinese. I assume Mr. Walsh can read Chinese. Since Mr. Walsh professes such a deep and abiding respect for the laws of democratic governments, then why does he sweep the ROC's Constitution, the ROC's most fundamental law, which explicitly defines the ROC's territorial boundaries as including the Chinese mainland under the rug? Is it simple ignorance? Is it unfair to conclude that the real answer is that it doesn't serve his arbitrary, subjective, ad hoc political purposes?
Mr. Walsh complains that the PRC doesn't permit the 1.2 billion Chinese who happen to have fallen, via the fortunes of China's ongoing Civil War, under their area of control, to vote at the polls. But when I suggest that the ROC ought to do things differently, being nominally democratic after all, setting a better moral example, he objects that that doesn't yield the end result he wants -- Taiwan secession. In short, he wants to rig the game in defiance of the Constitutions of both the ROC and PRC. We now have an ample demonstration of just how much he respects the Rule of Law.
A lot of peculiar and bogus reasoning has been run up the flagpole by TI'ers regarding Taiwan's geography. Taiwan is separated from the Chinese mainland by 100 miles of water. This to TI'ers makes it geographically "separate," therefore politically separate.
Who says?
Hainan island off the coast of Guangdong is separated from the mainland by water too. Is Hainan therefore not part of China by virtue of geography? Hawaii is separated from the Continental United States by approximately 2,000 miles of water. Twenty times the distance Taiwan is from mainland China. Is Hawaii on that basis therefore politically not part of America? Guam is so far from America it is actually closer to China than to America. Should Guam be part of China instead? I don't think so. Alaska, although situated on the continent of North America, is not even contiguous with the lower 48. It borders instead on Canada. Should it therefore be part of Canada and not the US? Japan is an archipelago comprised of a handful of large islands and numerous smaller islets. Should each of these be politically independent because they are separated from each other by ocean? The Philippines and Indonesia are each comprised of hundreds or even thousands of islands. Should each of these patches of land separated by ocean be accorded independence on this basis?
For that matter, many islands are politically divided. The eastern end of the island which contains Haiti also contains the Dominican Republic. The northern part of Borneo belongs to Malaysia, the southern part to Indonesia. Actually from a topological perspective the major continents are merely larger "islands." Is every continent automatically supposed to be a single nation?
The mere fact that the Chinese province of Taiwan is surrounded by water means nothing politically. There is no justification for drawing a line around it politically on that basis.
Unless one is prepared to apply these patently absurd justifications to every nation on the globe, then please refrain from applying them to China. Taiwan is part of China by history, tradition, language, culture, international law and any damned basis you care to mention. Let's have no more of this nonsense.
As it happens, the People's Republic of China agrees with the Republic of China that Taiwan is not a nation. Despite widespread semantic shorthand which refers to the Republic of China as "Taiwan," from an international law perspective there is no nation state in the world known as "Taiwan," just as legally speaking, there never were two political entities known as East Germany and West Germany.
There is of course a province known as Taiwan, but it is not a nation, it is merely one of two dozen provinces of the Republic of China -- or the People's Republic of China -- depending on which of the two rival Chinese political parties (the CCP and the KMT) one happens to support. The government which resides in Taipei and physically controls the island of Taiwan and portions of the mainland province of Fujian, is the Republic of China. The government which resides in Beijing, and controls the rest of the mainland is the People's Republic of China. Both regimes are part of a temporarily divided China. Just as the Union and Confederacy were temporarily divided during the American Civil War.
Even Lee Teng-hui (inadvertently) admitted recently that this PRC/ROC stalemate is part of a yet unresolved Chinese Civil War. Just as East and West Germany were once divided, and North and South Korea still are. Yes, the stand-off has lasted 50 years, while the American Civil War lasted only four. So what? Show me the statute of limitations on reunification. Germany was divided for almost as long. Korea is still divided. None of which is at all relevant. China is China. She has her own timetable. Anyone who knows anything about Chinese history knows China has been divided far longer than that, again and again and again in its 5000 year history.
Just as American citizens who live 2,000 miles off the California coast, in the offshore state of Hawaii, are Americans, so the 1.2 billion Chinese who happen to live a mere 100 miles on the other side of the Taiwan Straits, in Fujian and 22 other mainland provinces and 5 autonomous regions, are also legally citizens of the Republic of China. No more, but no less than the 21 million citizens of China who happened to be living on an offshore province and were thus by sheer dint of fate spared Chairman Mao's insanity.
That of course was then. This is now. Deng was not Mao. Jiang and Zhu are even less like Mao. Premier Zhu Rongji was a victim twice over of Mao's persecution of pro-free market reformers. Even many western journalists, who are often painfully slow on the uptake about developments in China are finally beginning to see the light. The latest issue of Newsweek for example has a surprisingly fair article describing the astonishing lack of constraints ordinary Chinese in post-Mao, post-Deng China experience in their daily lives, certainly compared to Mao's nightmarish era. The Cold War is over. Time to stop nursing old hatreds. Time for reconciliation and reunification. Time to get over the Cold War mindset and let go of the mental pictures of a "terrifying spectre of global communism" threatening "civilisation as we know it." Germany has already done it. Time for China to do the same.
Mr. Walsh says that the Union's forcible prevention of Southern Secession doesn't count. Because it happened in 1865. Well, who made up that rule? Mr. Walsh? Why should anyone else accept his timetable? What will he do if some one else disagrees? Use force? Let's look at Mr. Walsh's nonsensical logic for a minute. Suppose anti-secessionist forces prevent Taiwan independence next year, in Y2K. In 2130 AD a unified China will be able to look back and say exactly the same thing Mr. Walsh did. It doesn't count. It happened in 2000. Ancient history. Is Mr. Walsh's ad hoc excuse-making supposed to represent some sort of moral and intellectual integrity?
Actually this entire debate, both Mr. Walsh's arguments and mine, could be dismissed as mere intellectual masturbation. In the real world these matters are decided the way American Indian territorial sovereignty, Mexican territorial sovereignty, Hawaiian territorial sovereignty, Alaskan Inuit and Eskimo territorial sovereignty were decided. By the sheer military might and brute force of the US Cavalry. By Gatling guns mowing down the aboriginal peoples, until there were not enough left surviving to constitute a coherent pro-independence political force. This of course is the real reason American Indians cannot get their lands back. Is the ever more centralised federal leviathan in Washington prepared to undo any of these unjust territorial acquisitions? Are you kidding? We all know this. Why pretend? This holier-than-thou hypocrisy offends the rest of the world, Mr Walsh. People are not fools. Don't piss on their heads and tell them it's raining. They won't buy it. The bitter irony is that if China had actually committed the genocidal atrocities that America has, and the Dalai Lama and his Hollywood acolytes accuse her of, China would not be pestered with the separatist headaches she is experiencing today.
The just-ended ordeal by public humiliation of William Jefferson Clinton is an object lesson. Or should be. The Democrats were the ones who demanded the creation of the Office of the Independent Counsel during Watergate, when they wanted to get Nixon. They demanded its continuation during Iran-Contra to get Reagan. They demanded its further perpetuation to get Reagan's VP George Bush, for guilt by association. Finally it backfired and almost got their guy, so now of course, they want it abolished. Ideas have consequences, Mr. Walsh.
The Afghan Mujahadin "freedom fighters" funded and supplied with Stinger missiles by the CIA during the Cold War years, have miraculously metamorphosed, like Jekyll into Hyde, into the virulently anti-America Taliban threatening Jihad (holy war) against hapless American civilians today. Does anyone really know what political repercussions sleazy CIA support for the pro-Taiwan independence DPP and the Dalai Lama's reactionary theocrats in Tibet will reap some day?
Those self-appointed Global Policemen who would deliberately weaken China by Balkanising her territorially, invoking the insincere rhetoric of "self-determination," had better understand that the ideas they endorse today may contribute to the political disintegration of the World's Only Remaining Superpower tomorrow. So be careful what you wish for Mr. Walsh. You just might get it.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
February 17, 1999
The debate over Taiwan independence has gone off track. Permit me to re-focus on my original point. Namely, how the moral/ethical arguments invoked against China are never applied even-handedly against the China-bashers' own nations and governments. So please, no more cynical and futile efforts to guilt-trip Chinese who oppose Taiwan and Tibetan secession. China is actually on considerably firmer ground morally and ethically than the US when it comes to her territorial sovereignty. If the relentless and tiresome China critics in the US had enough integrity to apply exactly the same arguments against the US that they regularly apply to China, America's territory would have to shrink back to the original 13 colonies, smaller if truth be told.
Those knowledgeable about Chinese history know that China acquired most other territory when more powerful tribes such as Hunnish and Turkic tribes in the north-west, and later the Mongols and Manchus which were at the time alien conquered her, but subsequently intermarried with so-called "Han Chinese", thereby consolidating their territories. The term "Han" of course has never designated or been intended to designate a "pure" race, as the Han, so-called, were already of mixed ethnicity, and proudly so.
Mr. Walsh wants me to swallow the idea that today's US government doesn't selectively target and persecute those it perceives as dangerous or subversive. His astonishing assertion that political movements in the USA are not targeted for their views and function openly, without persecution, will come as a shock to anyone not living in Ozzie and Harriet Land. Mr. Walsh seems to be inhabiting a pre-Watergate "America can do no wrong" mental universe. Has Mr. Walsh never heard of the term "selective enforcement?" How about "DWB" (Driving while Black?) How about recently revealed FBI investigations into the sex life of the non-violent, committed pacifist civil rights leader Martin Luther King? King wasn't even advocating political secession, merely demanding equal rights under the law within a unified, integrated, colour-blind America. Sounds pretty tame to me. Imagine how J. Edgar Hoover would have dealt with him if he had been a Dalai Lama style head of an armed separatist revolt?
Has Mr. Walsh ever heard of the American Indian rights activist Leonard Peltier? Even after the Freedom of Information Act utterly discredited the evidence used in his conviction, and the Justice Department was forced to admit in his second appeal that it had no idea who killed the two FBI agents he was convicted of murdering, Peltier is still serving two life sentences. It can't happen in America, Mr. Walsh? The ugly reality is that Peltier is a political prisoner in a country that sanctimoniously champions political prisoners in other countries. As the ancient American expression goes, the pot is calling the kettle black.
Mr. Walsh pleads that he does "indeed accept the implications of the principle of self-determination in full." Does he really? I have watched with a mixture of amusement and exasperation as he tap-dances around the downside of the logical implications of genuine self-determination. Not just "self-determination" as defined to suit him, but when it impacts on America instead of China.
Mr. Walsh has a touching faith in "democracy." He seems to imagine that if an individual is outnumbered, then justice has been done, and the individual must lump it. After all, we voted on it, didn't we? But the self that has a right to self determination is not a group. Any group. The true self is the sovereign individual. Genuine self-determination is determination of every individual's fate by the individual himself. Not by any group he is supposed to belong to. Anything less is merely quibbling about whose arrangement for frustrating authentic self-determination is proper. This includes the unjust coercion of every sovereign individual by every "democratically elected" government on the planet. Yes, Mr. Walsh, even America!
When Mr. Walsh claims Americans have genuine liberty, he simply hasn't got a clue what he's talking about. Try seceding from the rule of the federal leviathan in Washington, Mr. Walsh. And watch them come down on you like a ton of bricks. I speak from personal knowledge. A former co-worker of mine in Los Angeles went to prison for just such an offence. I paid for some of his legal bills out of my own pocket. No, he did not commit any violent acts. He merely declared himself sovereign and independent in accordance with Common Law and Pro Se Law, dutifully filing all the necessary legal documents in a peaceful manner, declared that he was relinquishing all future claims on Social Security and other government benefits, and then refused to pay the taxes involved. He was arrested, convicted, and imprisoned in Club Fed for close to a year. No, we are not free in the "democratic" west, Mr. Walsh. We are only "free" if we go along with the crowd like sheep.
Mr. Walsh's flippant remark: "Mr. Chu defends the right of "all Chinese" to vote in a Taiwanese referendum and calls this democratic. Does he support the right of all humans to vote on this issue? How about all Asians who speak Chinese?" reveals his lack of seriousness. His remark that "The rational [sic] for allowing the citizens of the Republic of China to vote on its future, and to exclude those who don't live there is clear... Claiming that the proper geographical area is all of China is not convincingly more logical than the claim that Taiwan is the proper geographical area," reveal that Mr. Walsh is as uninformed about Taiwan's legal status as he is flip.
Did Mr. Walsh say "the proper geographical area?" Mr. Walsh seems to think I arbitrarily gerrymandered an improper geographical area when I included the mainland. I'm sorry to disappoint him, but I derived my proper geographical area from the Republic of China's Constitution. The Republic of China's Constitution defines the territory of the Republic of China as comprising the continental provinces and numerous offshore islands, including the island of Taiwan, Hainan island, Quemoy and Matsu. Let me assure Mr. Walsh I did not make up the ROC's Constitution. Notice I said Republic of China, not People's Republic of China. I am merely taking the Republic of China's Constitution seriously, at face value, even if others, most notably the Quisling Lee Teng-hui, don't. Isn't a Constitution supposed to mean what it says, Mr. Walsh? Or is it just a piece of paper?
Mr. Walsh would do well to read the ROC Constitution before inflicting his uninformed opinion on others. It is of course, written in Chinese. This is because the Chinese people living in the province of Taiwan are Chinese citizens. So they speak, read and write Chinese. I assume Mr. Walsh can read Chinese. Since Mr. Walsh professes such a deep and abiding respect for the laws of democratic governments, then why does he sweep the ROC's Constitution, the ROC's most fundamental law, which explicitly defines the ROC's territorial boundaries as including the Chinese mainland under the rug? Is it simple ignorance? Is it unfair to conclude that the real answer is that it doesn't serve his arbitrary, subjective, ad hoc political purposes?
Mr. Walsh complains that the PRC doesn't permit the 1.2 billion Chinese who happen to have fallen, via the fortunes of China's ongoing Civil War, under their area of control, to vote at the polls. But when I suggest that the ROC ought to do things differently, being nominally democratic after all, setting a better moral example, he objects that that doesn't yield the end result he wants -- Taiwan secession. In short, he wants to rig the game in defiance of the Constitutions of both the ROC and PRC. We now have an ample demonstration of just how much he respects the Rule of Law.
A lot of peculiar and bogus reasoning has been run up the flagpole by TI'ers regarding Taiwan's geography. Taiwan is separated from the Chinese mainland by 100 miles of water. This to TI'ers makes it geographically "separate," therefore politically separate.
Who says?
Hainan island off the coast of Guangdong is separated from the mainland by water too. Is Hainan therefore not part of China by virtue of geography? Hawaii is separated from the Continental United States by approximately 2,000 miles of water. Twenty times the distance Taiwan is from mainland China. Is Hawaii on that basis therefore politically not part of America? Guam is so far from America it is actually closer to China than to America. Should Guam be part of China instead? I don't think so. Alaska, although situated on the continent of North America, is not even contiguous with the lower 48. It borders instead on Canada. Should it therefore be part of Canada and not the US? Japan is an archipelago comprised of a handful of large islands and numerous smaller islets. Should each of these be politically independent because they are separated from each other by ocean? The Philippines and Indonesia are each comprised of hundreds or even thousands of islands. Should each of these patches of land separated by ocean be accorded independence on this basis?
For that matter, many islands are politically divided. The eastern end of the island which contains Haiti also contains the Dominican Republic. The northern part of Borneo belongs to Malaysia, the southern part to Indonesia. Actually from a topological perspective the major continents are merely larger "islands." Is every continent automatically supposed to be a single nation?
The mere fact that the Chinese province of Taiwan is surrounded by water means nothing politically. There is no justification for drawing a line around it politically on that basis.
Unless one is prepared to apply these patently absurd justifications to every nation on the globe, then please refrain from applying them to China. Taiwan is part of China by history, tradition, language, culture, international law and any damned basis you care to mention. Let's have no more of this nonsense.
As it happens, the People's Republic of China agrees with the Republic of China that Taiwan is not a nation. Despite widespread semantic shorthand which refers to the Republic of China as "Taiwan," from an international law perspective there is no nation state in the world known as "Taiwan," just as legally speaking, there never were two political entities known as East Germany and West Germany.
There is of course a province known as Taiwan, but it is not a nation, it is merely one of two dozen provinces of the Republic of China -- or the People's Republic of China -- depending on which of the two rival Chinese political parties (the CCP and the KMT) one happens to support. The government which resides in Taipei and physically controls the island of Taiwan and portions of the mainland province of Fujian, is the Republic of China. The government which resides in Beijing, and controls the rest of the mainland is the People's Republic of China. Both regimes are part of a temporarily divided China. Just as the Union and Confederacy were temporarily divided during the American Civil War.
Even Lee Teng-hui (inadvertently) admitted recently that this PRC/ROC stalemate is part of a yet unresolved Chinese Civil War. Just as East and West Germany were once divided, and North and South Korea still are. Yes, the stand-off has lasted 50 years, while the American Civil War lasted only four. So what? Show me the statute of limitations on reunification. Germany was divided for almost as long. Korea is still divided. None of which is at all relevant. China is China. She has her own timetable. Anyone who knows anything about Chinese history knows China has been divided far longer than that, again and again and again in its 5000 year history.
Just as American citizens who live 2,000 miles off the California coast, in the offshore state of Hawaii, are Americans, so the 1.2 billion Chinese who happen to live a mere 100 miles on the other side of the Taiwan Straits, in Fujian and 22 other mainland provinces and 5 autonomous regions, are also legally citizens of the Republic of China. No more, but no less than the 21 million citizens of China who happened to be living on an offshore province and were thus by sheer dint of fate spared Chairman Mao's insanity.
That of course was then. This is now. Deng was not Mao. Jiang and Zhu are even less like Mao. Premier Zhu Rongji was a victim twice over of Mao's persecution of pro-free market reformers. Even many western journalists, who are often painfully slow on the uptake about developments in China are finally beginning to see the light. The latest issue of Newsweek for example has a surprisingly fair article describing the astonishing lack of constraints ordinary Chinese in post-Mao, post-Deng China experience in their daily lives, certainly compared to Mao's nightmarish era. The Cold War is over. Time to stop nursing old hatreds. Time for reconciliation and reunification. Time to get over the Cold War mindset and let go of the mental pictures of a "terrifying spectre of global communism" threatening "civilisation as we know it." Germany has already done it. Time for China to do the same.
Mr. Walsh says that the Union's forcible prevention of Southern Secession doesn't count. Because it happened in 1865. Well, who made up that rule? Mr. Walsh? Why should anyone else accept his timetable? What will he do if some one else disagrees? Use force? Let's look at Mr. Walsh's nonsensical logic for a minute. Suppose anti-secessionist forces prevent Taiwan independence next year, in Y2K. In 2130 AD a unified China will be able to look back and say exactly the same thing Mr. Walsh did. It doesn't count. It happened in 2000. Ancient history. Is Mr. Walsh's ad hoc excuse-making supposed to represent some sort of moral and intellectual integrity?
Actually this entire debate, both Mr. Walsh's arguments and mine, could be dismissed as mere intellectual masturbation. In the real world these matters are decided the way American Indian territorial sovereignty, Mexican territorial sovereignty, Hawaiian territorial sovereignty, Alaskan Inuit and Eskimo territorial sovereignty were decided. By the sheer military might and brute force of the US Cavalry. By Gatling guns mowing down the aboriginal peoples, until there were not enough left surviving to constitute a coherent pro-independence political force. This of course is the real reason American Indians cannot get their lands back. Is the ever more centralised federal leviathan in Washington prepared to undo any of these unjust territorial acquisitions? Are you kidding? We all know this. Why pretend? This holier-than-thou hypocrisy offends the rest of the world, Mr Walsh. People are not fools. Don't piss on their heads and tell them it's raining. They won't buy it. The bitter irony is that if China had actually committed the genocidal atrocities that America has, and the Dalai Lama and his Hollywood acolytes accuse her of, China would not be pestered with the separatist headaches she is experiencing today.
The just-ended ordeal by public humiliation of William Jefferson Clinton is an object lesson. Or should be. The Democrats were the ones who demanded the creation of the Office of the Independent Counsel during Watergate, when they wanted to get Nixon. They demanded its continuation during Iran-Contra to get Reagan. They demanded its further perpetuation to get Reagan's VP George Bush, for guilt by association. Finally it backfired and almost got their guy, so now of course, they want it abolished. Ideas have consequences, Mr. Walsh.
The Afghan Mujahadin "freedom fighters" funded and supplied with Stinger missiles by the CIA during the Cold War years, have miraculously metamorphosed, like Jekyll into Hyde, into the virulently anti-America Taliban threatening Jihad (holy war) against hapless American civilians today. Does anyone really know what political repercussions sleazy CIA support for the pro-Taiwan independence DPP and the Dalai Lama's reactionary theocrats in Tibet will reap some day?
Those self-appointed Global Policemen who would deliberately weaken China by Balkanising her territorially, invoking the insincere rhetoric of "self-determination," had better understand that the ideas they endorse today may contribute to the political disintegration of the World's Only Remaining Superpower tomorrow. So be careful what you wish for Mr. Walsh. You just might get it.
Wednesday, February 03, 1999
Rebuttal to a Taiwan Independence Fellow Traveler
Rebuttal to a Taiwan Independence Fellow Traveler
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
February 03, 1999
Mr. Walsh's rebuttal is rife with both factual errors and logical contradictions.
First, the factual errors.
Mr. Walsh alleged that "if the people of Quebec vote democratically for independence, they will be granted independence (the unanimous consent of the other provinces is not required)."
What can I say? Except Mr. Walsh is simply wrong.
Canada's Supreme Court ruled in August 1998 that Quebec's separatist government did not have the right to unilaterally declare the province independent.
"Secession of a province 'under the Constitution' could not be achieved unilaterally, that is, without principled negotiation with other participants in Confederation within the existing constitutional framework," the court said in a unanimous decision. "Negotiations would be necessary to address the interests of the federal government, of Quebec and the other provinces, and other participants, as well as the rights of all Canadians both within and outside Quebec... there are linguistic and cultural minorities, including aboriginal peoples, unevenly distributed across the country who look to the Constitution of Canada for the protection of their rights. The court has confirmed that any possible process of independence must proceed in a manner that respects shared values that include federalism, democracy, constitutionalism and the rule of law, and respect for minorities," Chretien said in a statement. "In particular, it has found that the government of Quebec does not have the authority in Canadian law to effect independence unilaterally nor does it have such a right in international law."
Mr. Walsh wrote "What [Bevin Chu] says about ... independence movements in the USA is simply wrong... While it is true that the CCP is not alone in using force against democratic (i.e., non-violent) independence movements, all of the other governments that do so are dictatorships."
Dictatorships? Let me repeat what I wrote before. The United States chose to prosecute an appallingly bloody civil war rather than permit the Confederacy to secede. Mr. Walsh makes no mention of this in his "rebuttal. " Texas and Hawaii were both annexed illegally. The "purchase" of Alaska from Russia was receiving stolen goods. Modern day challenges to federal authority are systematically and ruthlessly suppressed by Federal law enforcement. And we haven't even gotten around to shameful history of genocide and illegal landgrabs from American Indians.
The Texas indendence radicals were probably guilty as hell of the offenses they were charged with. That does not alter the fact that the feds targeted Texas independence radicals not for writing bad checks, but for "plotting secession." No, the feds did not cite sedition or treason as the charge when they rounded them up. They invoked the criminal codes. China bashers, does this ring a bell? It should. The feds did exactly what Beijing does with pesky organizers of opposition political parties, they prosecute them not as subversives but as common criminals.
Now for the logical fallacies.
Mr. Walsh doubts that Taiwan secessionists would deny others in Taiwan the same right of self-determination. He has not witnessed TI legislators physically assault and injure dissenting lawmakers in the Legislative Yuan or thuggish TI taxi drivers attack hapless women passengers who failed to speak the Minnan dialect as "Tai jian" or "traitors to Taiwan." Does Mr. Walsh really believe these humorless fanatics will be content to passively watch the disintegration of their precious "Republic of Taiwan," without "doing something?"
Mr. Walsh defends the TI'ers. My prediction as "only a statement about how any government functions." In other words "Everybody does it. What's the big deal?" But Mr. Walsh contradicts himself. If indeed all governments use force to enforce their laws then how unsubstantiated is my assumption that TI'ers would deny others the right to secede as well?
Mr. Walsh wonders: "Can Mr. Chu really be supporting the principle that the majority cannot determine their own form of government? Mr. Chu doesn't acknowledge it openly, but his words clearly mean support for dictatorship of the few over the many."
Really? China is a nation state whose sovereign territory includes the mainland as well as the offshore islands of Taiwan and Hainan. Both the PRC and the ROC Constitutions agree on this. TI'ers are calling for a "national" referendum in which 1.2 billion fellow citizens outside the TI'ers' unilaterally defined boundary would be prohibited from participating. The TI'ers don't want majority rule. They want their version of majority rule. They want minority rule within an electoral district defined so that they constitute a majority. Perhaps Mr. Walsh can explain to CCF readers just exactly how this is democratic? Since I defend the right of all Chinese citizens to participate in any such referendum, I could argue that I am being much more democratic. The TI'ers, by arbitarily restricting participation in their referendum to only 21 million are being anti-democratic and exclusionary.
Let's not be politically naive. One can achieve a democratic majority on any issue under the sun, provided one gets to set the geographical boundaries of one's electoral district. If one can exclude in advance those who would vote against one's initiative or referendum, then the result is a foregone conclusion. This time-honored process is known as gerrymandering. Gerrymandered electoral districts have nothing to do with democracy. Mr. Walsh merely prefers TI gerrymandered boundaries to China's constitutionally defined (by both the PRC and ROC) national boundaries.
Mr. Walsh infers that "Mr. Chu implicitly acknowledges that a Taiwan secessionist government would have the support of the majority." Hardly. My article was a thought experiment which granted the TI'ers' a hypothetical majority merely to illustrate the invalidity of TI moral/ethical arguments. At no time did I imply that the TI'ers enjoyed a real world majority. In fact, the latest Gallup Poll reveals that the Taiwan public's patience with endless, shrill TI agitation is wearing thin. The DPP's setbacks during the recent Three in One Elections provoked internal bickering over dropping Taiwan independence from the DPP's official charter.
Mr. Walsh hurls the wild accusation that "Mr. Chu, implicitly, supports the right of the unelected government of the PRC to use force against the Chinese people." Mr. Walsh is conflating "government" with "nation." China is a nation. It has been in existence for five thousand years. The Taipei regime is a government. It has been in existence for 87 years. The Beijing regime is another government. It has been in existence for 50 years. Governments come and governments go. Nations, consisting of the land and the people, endure, hopefully. Opposition to national disintegration hardly constitutes endorsement of any particular ephemeral regime. When Hitler violated the cynically drafted Nazi-Soviet Pact and invaded Russia, patriotic Russians fought valiantly at Stalingrad, not for Stalin, whom many of them detested, but for Mother Russia.
The "right to self-determination" is a double-edged sword. If Mr. Walsh wishes to invoke it, he had better be prepared to accept its implications in full. He cannot restrict its application only to regimes he personally approves of. Otherwise he is merely arguing that what's good for the goose is not good for the gander. A principled defense of the right to self-determination would authorize ever smaller political entities to secede from whatever political entity they currently belong to, stopping only at the level of the individual citizen. This means, theoretically at least, every property owner on earth would be legally and morally entitled to hold a "national" referendum, with himself as the sole voter, declare his own private plot of land a sovereign republic, and refuse to pay taxes to the nation, the state or province, the city or county in which he (formerly) resided. Not surprisingly, no government on earth is willing do more than pay hypocritical lip service to the concept.
As a libertarian and borderline anarchist I assure Mr. Walsh I on the other hand, have no objection whatsoever to such a global scenario. If this were what secessionists the world over actually advocated, I would be ecstatic.
But this is not what they want. What they want are merely smaller -- but not freer -- tribalist collectives tailored to suit their personal ethnic prejudices. Woe to any genuine liberty loving individualists unfortunate enough to find themselves trapped in such "independent republics." They can look forward to being treated the way German Jews were treated by the Nazis, or the way ethnic Chinese-Indonesians are treated by rabid Indonesian bigots.
Parting Shot
March 17, 1999
Mr. Walsh alleges that my response "was... clever... but it avoids the question."
CCF readers know better. Actually Mr. Walsh himself knows better. My original piece stuck in his craw precisely because it was impolite enough to draw attention to the widespread hypocritical application of one standard for America and another standard for China. When it comes to demanding respect for "human rights" what was good enough for the American goose is apparently not good for the Chinese gander. Fair-minded readers understood perfectly well that was my original point.
Mr. Walsh gives it one final try when he states: "In Mr. Chu's opinion the PRC should use force to compel the people of the ROC to accept re-unification with the PRC if they refuse to do so voluntarily."
You mean like President Abraham Lincoln's opinion that the USA was right to use force to compel the people of the CSA to accept reunification with the USA when they refused to do so voluntarily, Mr. Walsh? You mean like "A house divided against itself cannot stand" Mr. Walsh?
The fact is that Mr. Walsh, when confronted with his (1) flagrant double-standards and (2) crude verbal sleights of hand, repeatedly pretended that nobody was alert enough to realize what he had done. CCF readers witnessed him do this with (1) huffy demands that China forswear the use of force to prevent national disintegration, even while he made excuses for the Union's refusal to let the South go its own way, merely because it happened before his private Statute of Limitations and (2) the substitution of "PRC" for "China," even after I took pains to remind him of the distinction between governments and countries. Did anyone miss the fact that his motive for conflating "PRC" and "China" was to milk the residue of Cold War paranoia for what it was worth?
Mr. Walsh consistently refused to deal with the issues honestly and frankly. I too, have nothing more to say to him. The old expression "playing a lute to a cow" pretty much sums up my experience with Mr. Walsh.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
February 03, 1999
Mr. Walsh's rebuttal is rife with both factual errors and logical contradictions.
First, the factual errors.
Mr. Walsh alleged that "if the people of Quebec vote democratically for independence, they will be granted independence (the unanimous consent of the other provinces is not required)."
What can I say? Except Mr. Walsh is simply wrong.
Canada's Supreme Court ruled in August 1998 that Quebec's separatist government did not have the right to unilaterally declare the province independent.
"Secession of a province 'under the Constitution' could not be achieved unilaterally, that is, without principled negotiation with other participants in Confederation within the existing constitutional framework," the court said in a unanimous decision. "Negotiations would be necessary to address the interests of the federal government, of Quebec and the other provinces, and other participants, as well as the rights of all Canadians both within and outside Quebec... there are linguistic and cultural minorities, including aboriginal peoples, unevenly distributed across the country who look to the Constitution of Canada for the protection of their rights. The court has confirmed that any possible process of independence must proceed in a manner that respects shared values that include federalism, democracy, constitutionalism and the rule of law, and respect for minorities," Chretien said in a statement. "In particular, it has found that the government of Quebec does not have the authority in Canadian law to effect independence unilaterally nor does it have such a right in international law."
Mr. Walsh wrote "What [Bevin Chu] says about ... independence movements in the USA is simply wrong... While it is true that the CCP is not alone in using force against democratic (i.e., non-violent) independence movements, all of the other governments that do so are dictatorships."
Dictatorships? Let me repeat what I wrote before. The United States chose to prosecute an appallingly bloody civil war rather than permit the Confederacy to secede. Mr. Walsh makes no mention of this in his "rebuttal. " Texas and Hawaii were both annexed illegally. The "purchase" of Alaska from Russia was receiving stolen goods. Modern day challenges to federal authority are systematically and ruthlessly suppressed by Federal law enforcement. And we haven't even gotten around to shameful history of genocide and illegal landgrabs from American Indians.
The Texas indendence radicals were probably guilty as hell of the offenses they were charged with. That does not alter the fact that the feds targeted Texas independence radicals not for writing bad checks, but for "plotting secession." No, the feds did not cite sedition or treason as the charge when they rounded them up. They invoked the criminal codes. China bashers, does this ring a bell? It should. The feds did exactly what Beijing does with pesky organizers of opposition political parties, they prosecute them not as subversives but as common criminals.
Now for the logical fallacies.
Mr. Walsh doubts that Taiwan secessionists would deny others in Taiwan the same right of self-determination. He has not witnessed TI legislators physically assault and injure dissenting lawmakers in the Legislative Yuan or thuggish TI taxi drivers attack hapless women passengers who failed to speak the Minnan dialect as "Tai jian" or "traitors to Taiwan." Does Mr. Walsh really believe these humorless fanatics will be content to passively watch the disintegration of their precious "Republic of Taiwan," without "doing something?"
Mr. Walsh defends the TI'ers. My prediction as "only a statement about how any government functions." In other words "Everybody does it. What's the big deal?" But Mr. Walsh contradicts himself. If indeed all governments use force to enforce their laws then how unsubstantiated is my assumption that TI'ers would deny others the right to secede as well?
Mr. Walsh wonders: "Can Mr. Chu really be supporting the principle that the majority cannot determine their own form of government? Mr. Chu doesn't acknowledge it openly, but his words clearly mean support for dictatorship of the few over the many."
Really? China is a nation state whose sovereign territory includes the mainland as well as the offshore islands of Taiwan and Hainan. Both the PRC and the ROC Constitutions agree on this. TI'ers are calling for a "national" referendum in which 1.2 billion fellow citizens outside the TI'ers' unilaterally defined boundary would be prohibited from participating. The TI'ers don't want majority rule. They want their version of majority rule. They want minority rule within an electoral district defined so that they constitute a majority. Perhaps Mr. Walsh can explain to CCF readers just exactly how this is democratic? Since I defend the right of all Chinese citizens to participate in any such referendum, I could argue that I am being much more democratic. The TI'ers, by arbitarily restricting participation in their referendum to only 21 million are being anti-democratic and exclusionary.
Let's not be politically naive. One can achieve a democratic majority on any issue under the sun, provided one gets to set the geographical boundaries of one's electoral district. If one can exclude in advance those who would vote against one's initiative or referendum, then the result is a foregone conclusion. This time-honored process is known as gerrymandering. Gerrymandered electoral districts have nothing to do with democracy. Mr. Walsh merely prefers TI gerrymandered boundaries to China's constitutionally defined (by both the PRC and ROC) national boundaries.
Mr. Walsh infers that "Mr. Chu implicitly acknowledges that a Taiwan secessionist government would have the support of the majority." Hardly. My article was a thought experiment which granted the TI'ers' a hypothetical majority merely to illustrate the invalidity of TI moral/ethical arguments. At no time did I imply that the TI'ers enjoyed a real world majority. In fact, the latest Gallup Poll reveals that the Taiwan public's patience with endless, shrill TI agitation is wearing thin. The DPP's setbacks during the recent Three in One Elections provoked internal bickering over dropping Taiwan independence from the DPP's official charter.
Mr. Walsh hurls the wild accusation that "Mr. Chu, implicitly, supports the right of the unelected government of the PRC to use force against the Chinese people." Mr. Walsh is conflating "government" with "nation." China is a nation. It has been in existence for five thousand years. The Taipei regime is a government. It has been in existence for 87 years. The Beijing regime is another government. It has been in existence for 50 years. Governments come and governments go. Nations, consisting of the land and the people, endure, hopefully. Opposition to national disintegration hardly constitutes endorsement of any particular ephemeral regime. When Hitler violated the cynically drafted Nazi-Soviet Pact and invaded Russia, patriotic Russians fought valiantly at Stalingrad, not for Stalin, whom many of them detested, but for Mother Russia.
The "right to self-determination" is a double-edged sword. If Mr. Walsh wishes to invoke it, he had better be prepared to accept its implications in full. He cannot restrict its application only to regimes he personally approves of. Otherwise he is merely arguing that what's good for the goose is not good for the gander. A principled defense of the right to self-determination would authorize ever smaller political entities to secede from whatever political entity they currently belong to, stopping only at the level of the individual citizen. This means, theoretically at least, every property owner on earth would be legally and morally entitled to hold a "national" referendum, with himself as the sole voter, declare his own private plot of land a sovereign republic, and refuse to pay taxes to the nation, the state or province, the city or county in which he (formerly) resided. Not surprisingly, no government on earth is willing do more than pay hypocritical lip service to the concept.
As a libertarian and borderline anarchist I assure Mr. Walsh I on the other hand, have no objection whatsoever to such a global scenario. If this were what secessionists the world over actually advocated, I would be ecstatic.
But this is not what they want. What they want are merely smaller -- but not freer -- tribalist collectives tailored to suit their personal ethnic prejudices. Woe to any genuine liberty loving individualists unfortunate enough to find themselves trapped in such "independent republics." They can look forward to being treated the way German Jews were treated by the Nazis, or the way ethnic Chinese-Indonesians are treated by rabid Indonesian bigots.
Parting Shot
March 17, 1999
Mr. Walsh alleges that my response "was... clever... but it avoids the question."
CCF readers know better. Actually Mr. Walsh himself knows better. My original piece stuck in his craw precisely because it was impolite enough to draw attention to the widespread hypocritical application of one standard for America and another standard for China. When it comes to demanding respect for "human rights" what was good enough for the American goose is apparently not good for the Chinese gander. Fair-minded readers understood perfectly well that was my original point.
Mr. Walsh gives it one final try when he states: "In Mr. Chu's opinion the PRC should use force to compel the people of the ROC to accept re-unification with the PRC if they refuse to do so voluntarily."
You mean like President Abraham Lincoln's opinion that the USA was right to use force to compel the people of the CSA to accept reunification with the USA when they refused to do so voluntarily, Mr. Walsh? You mean like "A house divided against itself cannot stand" Mr. Walsh?
The fact is that Mr. Walsh, when confronted with his (1) flagrant double-standards and (2) crude verbal sleights of hand, repeatedly pretended that nobody was alert enough to realize what he had done. CCF readers witnessed him do this with (1) huffy demands that China forswear the use of force to prevent national disintegration, even while he made excuses for the Union's refusal to let the South go its own way, merely because it happened before his private Statute of Limitations and (2) the substitution of "PRC" for "China," even after I took pains to remind him of the distinction between governments and countries. Did anyone miss the fact that his motive for conflating "PRC" and "China" was to milk the residue of Cold War paranoia for what it was worth?
Mr. Walsh consistently refused to deal with the issues honestly and frankly. I too, have nothing more to say to him. The old expression "playing a lute to a cow" pretty much sums up my experience with Mr. Walsh.
Wednesday, January 20, 1999
Taiwan Independence, Objection Sustained
Taiwan Independence, Objection Sustained
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
January 20, 1999
You think you are Chinese, or not, born that way? Think about it again. Whether Mongolian Chinese and Tibetan Chinese are Chinese, you may argue with Luo Ning. But, some Taiwan Chinese or Minnan Chinese have been trying to be not Chinese. What's in Taiwan indepedence? Bevin Chu tells you what he foresees.
-- CCF Editors
Diehard Taiwan independence activists have recently stepped up pressure for a national referendum on Taiwan independence. They have cited a wide range of untenable legal arguments to justify their shrill demands. International and constitutional law experts have rebutted these elsewhere, so I will not belabor them here.
Above all they have claimed that their cause is nothing less than the natural expression of the Will of the People and therefore occupies the moral high ground.
The gist of their argument is that the inhabitants of any given geographical region on the earth have the incontrovertible right to self-rule, specifically to establish their own national governments. How, they protest, can any enlightened person who professes respect for human rights and democracy argue with this obvious truth?
Confronted with this sort of rhetoric, some defenders of Chinese national unity have fallen silent.
This is a mistake.
The fact is the Taiwan secessionists have never fully considered the logical implications of their simplistic pro-independence rationale. Their case is far shakier than it might initially seem.
Taiwan secessionists would draw a boundary line through the territory of an existing nation, China, defining the territory to be unilaterally declared independent, the offshore island of Taiwan.
Taiwan secessionists would call for a "national referendum," not a referendum open to the nation, but one in which citizens outside their arbitrarily drawn boundary would be prohibited from participating.
Having secured their independence, Taiwan secessionists would compel any unwilling minority within the boundary which voted against independence to accept the pro-independence outcome, by force if necessary.
Consider the following hypothetical string of events.
One: Beijing finds itself temporarily distracted by a crisis in Xinjiang or Xizhang. Taiwan independence elements seize the opportunity to establish a "Republic of Taiwan."
Two: Loyalist elements in northern Taiwan counter the Taiwan independence move by holding an identical "national referendum," open only to those inside a new boundary line they have drawn up around metropolitan Taipei, where opposition to Taiwan independence is most heavily concentrated.
Three: They successfully establish a loyalist "Chinese Republic," an unhappy minority of pro-Taiwan independence voters inside this new "Chinese Republic" is outvoted.
Four: Elements of the Hakka minority and the Nine Aboriginal Tribes, formerly content to be part of a tolerant, multicultural China, are now wary of a Minnan-dominated "Republic of Taiwan." Each establishes its own nation, carving up this offshore island of China into ten more "sovereign republics."
Five: Initially triumphant but now stymied Taiwan independence plotters, having finally realized their cherished "Taiwan Dream" after four decades of scheming, have two ways to respond.
Response A: They recognize the right of the eleven new republics to do exactly what they themselves just did. They sit by and watch idly as their newly founded "Republic of Taiwan" breaks apart before their very eyes.
Response B: They invade Taipei to prevent "splittism," Beijing's term for separatism. They do exactly what they condemn Beijing for threatening to do if Taiwan declares independence, resort to military force to preserve national unity.
What do they do?
No one familiar with the mindset of militant DPP and TAIP secessionists can have any illusions about what their response would be. It is not as if they haven't made their unalloyed fanaticism perfectly clear in public debates on Taiwan television talk shows. It should be clear now that Taiwan independence advocates have no right to complain when Beijing adopts the very same policies they would if the unity of a "Republic of Taiwan" were threatened by secessionist movements.
Not one of the modern world's large nations permits portions of their country to secede unilaterally in this manner.
Quebec independence, for example, requires the unanimous consent of Canada's other provinces.
The United States, possibly still the freest nation in the world, certainly has no right to object to Beijing's explicit intention to invade if Taiwan declares independence. It chose to prosecute an appallingly bloody civil war rather than permit the Confederacy to secede. China did not then dispatch warships to America's Atlantic coast to side with the Confederacy.
As recently as last year federal law enforcement agents besieged and captured a tiny band of Texans for plotting Texas independence. Refusing to relinquish the military option of nipping independence movements in the bud is hardly a policy exclusive to Beijing.
Thoughtful defenders of liberty must resist the temptation to assume that any and all independence movements are necessarily "freedom fighters." As one Cold War joke wryly noted, a freedom fighter is "someone who fights freedom."
Defenders of China's national unity need offer no apologies for opposing Taiwan independence, a petty tribalist secession movement motivated by ethnic bigotry. Taiwan independence rhetoric collapses under close scrutiny.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
January 20, 1999
You think you are Chinese, or not, born that way? Think about it again. Whether Mongolian Chinese and Tibetan Chinese are Chinese, you may argue with Luo Ning. But, some Taiwan Chinese or Minnan Chinese have been trying to be not Chinese. What's in Taiwan indepedence? Bevin Chu tells you what he foresees.
-- CCF Editors
Diehard Taiwan independence activists have recently stepped up pressure for a national referendum on Taiwan independence. They have cited a wide range of untenable legal arguments to justify their shrill demands. International and constitutional law experts have rebutted these elsewhere, so I will not belabor them here.
Above all they have claimed that their cause is nothing less than the natural expression of the Will of the People and therefore occupies the moral high ground.
The gist of their argument is that the inhabitants of any given geographical region on the earth have the incontrovertible right to self-rule, specifically to establish their own national governments. How, they protest, can any enlightened person who professes respect for human rights and democracy argue with this obvious truth?
Confronted with this sort of rhetoric, some defenders of Chinese national unity have fallen silent.
This is a mistake.
The fact is the Taiwan secessionists have never fully considered the logical implications of their simplistic pro-independence rationale. Their case is far shakier than it might initially seem.
Taiwan secessionists would draw a boundary line through the territory of an existing nation, China, defining the territory to be unilaterally declared independent, the offshore island of Taiwan.
Taiwan secessionists would call for a "national referendum," not a referendum open to the nation, but one in which citizens outside their arbitrarily drawn boundary would be prohibited from participating.
Having secured their independence, Taiwan secessionists would compel any unwilling minority within the boundary which voted against independence to accept the pro-independence outcome, by force if necessary.
Consider the following hypothetical string of events.
One: Beijing finds itself temporarily distracted by a crisis in Xinjiang or Xizhang. Taiwan independence elements seize the opportunity to establish a "Republic of Taiwan."
Two: Loyalist elements in northern Taiwan counter the Taiwan independence move by holding an identical "national referendum," open only to those inside a new boundary line they have drawn up around metropolitan Taipei, where opposition to Taiwan independence is most heavily concentrated.
Three: They successfully establish a loyalist "Chinese Republic," an unhappy minority of pro-Taiwan independence voters inside this new "Chinese Republic" is outvoted.
Four: Elements of the Hakka minority and the Nine Aboriginal Tribes, formerly content to be part of a tolerant, multicultural China, are now wary of a Minnan-dominated "Republic of Taiwan." Each establishes its own nation, carving up this offshore island of China into ten more "sovereign republics."
Five: Initially triumphant but now stymied Taiwan independence plotters, having finally realized their cherished "Taiwan Dream" after four decades of scheming, have two ways to respond.
Response A: They recognize the right of the eleven new republics to do exactly what they themselves just did. They sit by and watch idly as their newly founded "Republic of Taiwan" breaks apart before their very eyes.
Response B: They invade Taipei to prevent "splittism," Beijing's term for separatism. They do exactly what they condemn Beijing for threatening to do if Taiwan declares independence, resort to military force to preserve national unity.
What do they do?
No one familiar with the mindset of militant DPP and TAIP secessionists can have any illusions about what their response would be. It is not as if they haven't made their unalloyed fanaticism perfectly clear in public debates on Taiwan television talk shows. It should be clear now that Taiwan independence advocates have no right to complain when Beijing adopts the very same policies they would if the unity of a "Republic of Taiwan" were threatened by secessionist movements.
Not one of the modern world's large nations permits portions of their country to secede unilaterally in this manner.
Quebec independence, for example, requires the unanimous consent of Canada's other provinces.
The United States, possibly still the freest nation in the world, certainly has no right to object to Beijing's explicit intention to invade if Taiwan declares independence. It chose to prosecute an appallingly bloody civil war rather than permit the Confederacy to secede. China did not then dispatch warships to America's Atlantic coast to side with the Confederacy.
As recently as last year federal law enforcement agents besieged and captured a tiny band of Texans for plotting Texas independence. Refusing to relinquish the military option of nipping independence movements in the bud is hardly a policy exclusive to Beijing.
Thoughtful defenders of liberty must resist the temptation to assume that any and all independence movements are necessarily "freedom fighters." As one Cold War joke wryly noted, a freedom fighter is "someone who fights freedom."
Defenders of China's national unity need offer no apologies for opposing Taiwan independence, a petty tribalist secession movement motivated by ethnic bigotry. Taiwan independence rhetoric collapses under close scrutiny.
Wednesday, March 04, 1998
The Yellow Man and the White Woman
The Yellow Man and the White Woman
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
March 04, 1998
CCF Editors: Bevin Chu's essay on the eternal anti-romance between the yellow man and the white woman leads off the discussion.
I would like to stick in my two cents worth regarding the recently raised (or re-raised) hot-button issue of yellow men and white women, and vice-versa. I hope I won't regret stepping into what could turn into a John Woo bloodbath.
It is impossible for any fair-minded person to take an unflinching look at the evidence and deny the existence of what Mr. Ku talked about regarding the popular media in America, often the most revealing barometer of a culture's implicit value system. Asian-American actors (and actresses) in Hollywood complain about this constantly. I know. I got to know many of them while I was taking acting classes myself in order to learn how to write film dialog. I could add a hundred examples of my own to Mr. Ku's laundry list, but I won't.
Since I am talking about media stereotypes as indicator of statistical cultural norms and not Mr. Meyer's personal life, I hope that he will not take offense. I do not know him and would not presume to question why he and his wife married other than that they love each other. For the record I have long been an enthusiastic champion of mixed marriages. Nothing would make me happier than if everyone who married in the next generation married outside their race, because the resulting children of mixed marriages would go a long way toward bridging cultures and contribute by merely being to the diminution of racial bigotry. This is why I was so gratified by the public's unabashed affection for golfing phenomenon Tiger Woods. He represents the future of mankind.
On the other hand I hope Mr. Meyer can appreciate why Mr. Ku is not entirely unjustified in being outraged at the marked lack of symmetry. This need not imply disapproval of Mr. Meyer's marriage, but merely a desire on the part of Mr. Ku to do exactly the same thing as Mr. Meyer. What's wrong with that? After all, if Mr. Ku really were a bigot, would he even be trying to get dates with white women, possibly marry one and have Amerasian kids? Mr. Ku's kids would then be just like Mr. Meyer's kids, would they not? Surely Mr. Meyer cannot find that objectionable? I am inclined to conclude that Mr. Meyer's lashing out at Mr. Ku's alleged bigotry is not entirely fair.
Just why aren't there an equal number or mixed race couples with the male/female roles reversed? Mr. Ku I feel is on the mark here. Again, this is not a commentary on any specific couple's perfectly reasonable and emotionally sound marital choice, but rather on a society's prevailing cultural norms. I assume none of us are talking about legally coerced "affirmative action" measures but rather a hypothetical social ideal. If there were no bigotry tilting the scales why wouldn't there be a roughly 50/50 mix of Asian male / Caucasian female and Asia female / Caucasian male relationships? This question deserves an answer. It would clearly not be legitimate to demand a reversal of the current arrangement, but is strikes me as entirely legitimate to expect something closer to symmetry. Opposition to a lack of symmetry is not opposition to mixed marriages. This needs to be clarified from the outset.
As a screenwriter who authored two screenplays when I lived in LA, I have done some informal research on the casting of Asian male and Caucasian female leads in film. Nothing rigorous or scholarly mind you, but enough digging around to confirm that Mr. Ku is not terribly far off the mark on this issue. Aside from "Bridge to the Sun," a 1961 film starring James Shigeta and Carroll Baker, very few Hollywood movies in the four decades since have paired Asian leading men with Caucasian leading ladies.
Far more typical, by many orders of magnitude, is the "Sayonara" or "World of Suzie Wong" scenario with a Caucasian male and Asian female. The latter film noteworthy in that Nancy Kwan, who is Eurasian and who portrayed Suzie Wong, is the daughter of a Hongkong Chinese father and English mother. (In case you hadn't figured it out from her last name.) The irony being that she is required in the film to play the opposite situation with 50's hunk William Holden.
This sort of male / female pairing is by no means a recent phenomenon. It goes back to Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly" and Leo Delibe's opera "Lakme." The former everyone knows about, and I will spare everyone additional commentary. The latter involves an English officer and an Indian (Hindustan) woman, but in a virtually identical scenario. He throws her away with casual contempt after using her as a convenient sexual diversion. The Chinese-American playwright David Henry Hwang was immensely successful with his long-running hit play "M. Butterfly" in which he pulled no punches exploring this perspective many Caucasian males have regarding Asian females.
John Lone did play an Asian male paired with a Caucasian female in a quirky Alan Rudolph film back in the 80's, the title of which slips my mind at the moment. Rudolph is an exceptionally sensitive director, but alas this particular film merely confirms Mr. Ku's allegation, as Lone was relegated to portraying a nasty character who abused and therefore did not deserve the love of his Caucasian wife.
To the best of my knowledge it has taken just about forty years for any admirable Asian male character to be again paired with a Caucasian female. Jason Scott Lee in "The Jungle Book" is a recent example mentioned by Mr. Ku. Russell Wong in "Vanishing Son," a disappointing made for TV flop, was another. Chow Yun-fat in "The Replacement Killers" in which a dashing Chinese man is paired with voluptuous blonde Amazon (Mira Sorvino) just might possibly be a watershed. We will see. Even here however, the filmmakers soft pedaled this arrangement. The script saw to it that the Chow character was married to a Chinese woman back home and was faithful to her. This spared the filmmakers (including John Woo, one of the producers) the commercial risk of having to show sex between the yellow man and the white woman, thereby alienating many (I want to stress not all) white male action adventure genre ticket buyers. No nude scenes of them in bed together. Only the subtlest implication of sexual tension in some of the dialog between Chow and Sorvino. Sorvino says to Chow at the end something like "I'm going to miss you." We still have a long way to go to true equality, it would seem.
On the other hand, the "Suzie Wong Syndrome" of white leading men treating Asian female characters as disposable sexual playthings remains all too clearly in evidence. This is why so much was made in the promotional interviews of Michelle Yeoh's somewhat more assertive role while paired with Pierce Brosnan in "Tomorrow Never Dies."
The fact is that male sexual power is inextricably linked with power as such, in all its manifestations. Financial wealth, political office, or in its crudest form, military might. Hotshot US Naval aviators stationed in Vietnam and the Philippines during the Vietnam War used to refer to impoverished local women as "little brown fucking machines." This is a well known fact in the military and not something Mr. Ku made up, however Mr. Meyer might be inclined to attribute Mr. Ku's bitterness to personal neurosis. It is simply impossible to deny that a nation's secular power helps imbue the males of its dominant ethnic group with an aura of sexual desirability. One would have to be either naive or dishonest not to see it. When tactfully asked by reporters how it was he managed to date such stunning Hollywood beauties as Jill St. John, portly Henry Kissinger, who knew he was no stud, was remarkably candid and answered bluntly "Power is an aphrodisiac."
As far as Mr. Meyer's remark about "what kind of culture views women as commodities to buy and sell anyway?" The answer, sadly, is every culture. I know of no culture, east or west, ancient or contemporary which does not demean women by treating them as things. It is grossly wrong and tragic, but it is a fact. The president of the United States is currently in hot water for acting on just such assumptions about the subservient role of women. One hardly needs to go to Sichuan to find women being bought and sold. In fact, wasn't this exactly what Mr. Ku was complaining about? That men from nations with greater wealth and power too often get a free ride and abuse this power regarding women from less developed nations.
If by historical accident the situation were reversed, i.e., if brown and yellow nations happened to be technologically more advanced and powerful, and the women of white western nations thereby susceptible to being bought and sold as a consequence of their comparative poverty, would Mr. Meyer be denouncing his own nation with remarks such as "what kind of culture views women as commodities to buy and sell anyway?" or would he be writing letters similar to Mr. Ku's?
Let me reiterate, none of us knows Mr. Meyer, so we are emphatically not commenting on his marriage in particular. He has no reason to take it that way. Unless of course something has struck home. What is being debated is a sociological phenomenon in the abstract. From this perspective one can only conclude that Mr. Meyer's rather intemperate response to Mr. Ku's postings were somewhat excessive. Even if Mr. Meyer feels Mr. Ku was also wrong, two wrongs only compound the error.
Permit me to digress in order to point out that this is one of many reasons why the Dalai Lama does not deserve his inflated public image as some sort of humanist "great soul," an image Hollywood acolytes have seen fit to bestow on him. This man (he is only a man after all, not an angel from heaven) is little more than a petty tribalist preoccupied with the "ethnic purity" of "the Tibetan People." (As if being of mixed Tibetan-Han descent constituted "cultural genocide" of "his" people.) Perhaps SS- Oberscharfurher Heinrich Harrer taught him more about Aryan concepts of "racial purity" than Becky Johnston (the screenwriter of "Seven Years in Tibet") let on. For his information there is no monolithic entity called "the Tibetan People," of which he is "the spiritual and political leader." There are only individual Tibetans with individual rights, plenty of whom he does not speak for. The Dalai Lama does not occupy the moral high ground when he condemns Tibetan-Chinese and Han-Chinese for wanting to remain united in a multi-racial, multi-ethnic Chinese "melting pot." Ethnic separatism is thoroughly contemptible. It is a form of racism. I look forward to the day when all mankind is like Tiger Woods [in ethnic makeup, not personal conduct]. I have no problem with Mr. Meyer's children. I think they are the hope of the future.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
March 04, 1998
CCF Editors: Bevin Chu's essay on the eternal anti-romance between the yellow man and the white woman leads off the discussion.
I would like to stick in my two cents worth regarding the recently raised (or re-raised) hot-button issue of yellow men and white women, and vice-versa. I hope I won't regret stepping into what could turn into a John Woo bloodbath.
It is impossible for any fair-minded person to take an unflinching look at the evidence and deny the existence of what Mr. Ku talked about regarding the popular media in America, often the most revealing barometer of a culture's implicit value system. Asian-American actors (and actresses) in Hollywood complain about this constantly. I know. I got to know many of them while I was taking acting classes myself in order to learn how to write film dialog. I could add a hundred examples of my own to Mr. Ku's laundry list, but I won't.
Since I am talking about media stereotypes as indicator of statistical cultural norms and not Mr. Meyer's personal life, I hope that he will not take offense. I do not know him and would not presume to question why he and his wife married other than that they love each other. For the record I have long been an enthusiastic champion of mixed marriages. Nothing would make me happier than if everyone who married in the next generation married outside their race, because the resulting children of mixed marriages would go a long way toward bridging cultures and contribute by merely being to the diminution of racial bigotry. This is why I was so gratified by the public's unabashed affection for golfing phenomenon Tiger Woods. He represents the future of mankind.
On the other hand I hope Mr. Meyer can appreciate why Mr. Ku is not entirely unjustified in being outraged at the marked lack of symmetry. This need not imply disapproval of Mr. Meyer's marriage, but merely a desire on the part of Mr. Ku to do exactly the same thing as Mr. Meyer. What's wrong with that? After all, if Mr. Ku really were a bigot, would he even be trying to get dates with white women, possibly marry one and have Amerasian kids? Mr. Ku's kids would then be just like Mr. Meyer's kids, would they not? Surely Mr. Meyer cannot find that objectionable? I am inclined to conclude that Mr. Meyer's lashing out at Mr. Ku's alleged bigotry is not entirely fair.
Just why aren't there an equal number or mixed race couples with the male/female roles reversed? Mr. Ku I feel is on the mark here. Again, this is not a commentary on any specific couple's perfectly reasonable and emotionally sound marital choice, but rather on a society's prevailing cultural norms. I assume none of us are talking about legally coerced "affirmative action" measures but rather a hypothetical social ideal. If there were no bigotry tilting the scales why wouldn't there be a roughly 50/50 mix of Asian male / Caucasian female and Asia female / Caucasian male relationships? This question deserves an answer. It would clearly not be legitimate to demand a reversal of the current arrangement, but is strikes me as entirely legitimate to expect something closer to symmetry. Opposition to a lack of symmetry is not opposition to mixed marriages. This needs to be clarified from the outset.
As a screenwriter who authored two screenplays when I lived in LA, I have done some informal research on the casting of Asian male and Caucasian female leads in film. Nothing rigorous or scholarly mind you, but enough digging around to confirm that Mr. Ku is not terribly far off the mark on this issue. Aside from "Bridge to the Sun," a 1961 film starring James Shigeta and Carroll Baker, very few Hollywood movies in the four decades since have paired Asian leading men with Caucasian leading ladies.
Far more typical, by many orders of magnitude, is the "Sayonara" or "World of Suzie Wong" scenario with a Caucasian male and Asian female. The latter film noteworthy in that Nancy Kwan, who is Eurasian and who portrayed Suzie Wong, is the daughter of a Hongkong Chinese father and English mother. (In case you hadn't figured it out from her last name.) The irony being that she is required in the film to play the opposite situation with 50's hunk William Holden.
This sort of male / female pairing is by no means a recent phenomenon. It goes back to Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly" and Leo Delibe's opera "Lakme." The former everyone knows about, and I will spare everyone additional commentary. The latter involves an English officer and an Indian (Hindustan) woman, but in a virtually identical scenario. He throws her away with casual contempt after using her as a convenient sexual diversion. The Chinese-American playwright David Henry Hwang was immensely successful with his long-running hit play "M. Butterfly" in which he pulled no punches exploring this perspective many Caucasian males have regarding Asian females.
John Lone did play an Asian male paired with a Caucasian female in a quirky Alan Rudolph film back in the 80's, the title of which slips my mind at the moment. Rudolph is an exceptionally sensitive director, but alas this particular film merely confirms Mr. Ku's allegation, as Lone was relegated to portraying a nasty character who abused and therefore did not deserve the love of his Caucasian wife.
To the best of my knowledge it has taken just about forty years for any admirable Asian male character to be again paired with a Caucasian female. Jason Scott Lee in "The Jungle Book" is a recent example mentioned by Mr. Ku. Russell Wong in "Vanishing Son," a disappointing made for TV flop, was another. Chow Yun-fat in "The Replacement Killers" in which a dashing Chinese man is paired with voluptuous blonde Amazon (Mira Sorvino) just might possibly be a watershed. We will see. Even here however, the filmmakers soft pedaled this arrangement. The script saw to it that the Chow character was married to a Chinese woman back home and was faithful to her. This spared the filmmakers (including John Woo, one of the producers) the commercial risk of having to show sex between the yellow man and the white woman, thereby alienating many (I want to stress not all) white male action adventure genre ticket buyers. No nude scenes of them in bed together. Only the subtlest implication of sexual tension in some of the dialog between Chow and Sorvino. Sorvino says to Chow at the end something like "I'm going to miss you." We still have a long way to go to true equality, it would seem.
On the other hand, the "Suzie Wong Syndrome" of white leading men treating Asian female characters as disposable sexual playthings remains all too clearly in evidence. This is why so much was made in the promotional interviews of Michelle Yeoh's somewhat more assertive role while paired with Pierce Brosnan in "Tomorrow Never Dies."
The fact is that male sexual power is inextricably linked with power as such, in all its manifestations. Financial wealth, political office, or in its crudest form, military might. Hotshot US Naval aviators stationed in Vietnam and the Philippines during the Vietnam War used to refer to impoverished local women as "little brown fucking machines." This is a well known fact in the military and not something Mr. Ku made up, however Mr. Meyer might be inclined to attribute Mr. Ku's bitterness to personal neurosis. It is simply impossible to deny that a nation's secular power helps imbue the males of its dominant ethnic group with an aura of sexual desirability. One would have to be either naive or dishonest not to see it. When tactfully asked by reporters how it was he managed to date such stunning Hollywood beauties as Jill St. John, portly Henry Kissinger, who knew he was no stud, was remarkably candid and answered bluntly "Power is an aphrodisiac."
As far as Mr. Meyer's remark about "what kind of culture views women as commodities to buy and sell anyway?" The answer, sadly, is every culture. I know of no culture, east or west, ancient or contemporary which does not demean women by treating them as things. It is grossly wrong and tragic, but it is a fact. The president of the United States is currently in hot water for acting on just such assumptions about the subservient role of women. One hardly needs to go to Sichuan to find women being bought and sold. In fact, wasn't this exactly what Mr. Ku was complaining about? That men from nations with greater wealth and power too often get a free ride and abuse this power regarding women from less developed nations.
If by historical accident the situation were reversed, i.e., if brown and yellow nations happened to be technologically more advanced and powerful, and the women of white western nations thereby susceptible to being bought and sold as a consequence of their comparative poverty, would Mr. Meyer be denouncing his own nation with remarks such as "what kind of culture views women as commodities to buy and sell anyway?" or would he be writing letters similar to Mr. Ku's?
Let me reiterate, none of us knows Mr. Meyer, so we are emphatically not commenting on his marriage in particular. He has no reason to take it that way. Unless of course something has struck home. What is being debated is a sociological phenomenon in the abstract. From this perspective one can only conclude that Mr. Meyer's rather intemperate response to Mr. Ku's postings were somewhat excessive. Even if Mr. Meyer feels Mr. Ku was also wrong, two wrongs only compound the error.
Permit me to digress in order to point out that this is one of many reasons why the Dalai Lama does not deserve his inflated public image as some sort of humanist "great soul," an image Hollywood acolytes have seen fit to bestow on him. This man (he is only a man after all, not an angel from heaven) is little more than a petty tribalist preoccupied with the "ethnic purity" of "the Tibetan People." (As if being of mixed Tibetan-Han descent constituted "cultural genocide" of "his" people.) Perhaps SS- Oberscharfurher Heinrich Harrer taught him more about Aryan concepts of "racial purity" than Becky Johnston (the screenwriter of "Seven Years in Tibet") let on. For his information there is no monolithic entity called "the Tibetan People," of which he is "the spiritual and political leader." There are only individual Tibetans with individual rights, plenty of whom he does not speak for. The Dalai Lama does not occupy the moral high ground when he condemns Tibetan-Chinese and Han-Chinese for wanting to remain united in a multi-racial, multi-ethnic Chinese "melting pot." Ethnic separatism is thoroughly contemptible. It is a form of racism. I look forward to the day when all mankind is like Tiger Woods [in ethnic makeup, not personal conduct]. I have no problem with Mr. Meyer's children. I think they are the hope of the future.
Sunday, February 22, 1998
Are Capitalism, Democracy linked?
Are Capitalism, Democracy linked?
Bevin Chu
February 21, 1998
Letters Editor
Sraits Times
Dear Sir/Madam,
Re: Steve Lohr, New York Times (Are capitalism, democracy linked?, The Straits Times - Comment and Perspective FEB 20 1998)
An endless procession of pundits have taken it upon themselves to enlighten poor benighted Asians about the cause of their financial woes: "It's the democracy, stupid!" "Your recession is your Asian Values bill come due!"
This self-congratulatory "explanation" may flatter Asia-bashers egos, but it hardly accords with economic history. The worst economic catastrophe in modern times was America's Great Depression. Was America devastated by the Great Depression because her citizens were denied free and fair elections? Was four term president Franklin D. Roosevelt a practitioner of "untenable Asian Values?"
As a passionate advocate of classical liberalism I am confident that pure laissez-faire is the optimal economic system; that any nation which adopts it will enjoy rapid growth and general prosperity.
The problem is free market capitalism is not the preferred economic system of those who typically speak in solemn tones about the sanctity of democracy, universal suffrage, and majority rule. Their preferred economic system is more often than not democratic socialism, and the ballot box their instrument for legalized plunder.
As H.L. Mencken observed "an election is nothing more than an advance auction of stolen goods." "Rule of Law" legal protections afforded private property have historically been shredded by mob "rule of the majority."
Democracy is far more hostile to capitalism than Mr. Lohr and champions of "western values" would have us believe. What the answer is to this dilemma I do not claim to know. But the simplistic formulations I have heard so far are definitely not it.
Sincerely,
Bevin Chu
Taipei, Taiwan, China
Bevin Chu
February 21, 1998
Letters Editor
Sraits Times
Dear Sir/Madam,
Re: Steve Lohr, New York Times (Are capitalism, democracy linked?, The Straits Times - Comment and Perspective FEB 20 1998)
An endless procession of pundits have taken it upon themselves to enlighten poor benighted Asians about the cause of their financial woes: "It's the democracy, stupid!" "Your recession is your Asian Values bill come due!"
This self-congratulatory "explanation" may flatter Asia-bashers egos, but it hardly accords with economic history. The worst economic catastrophe in modern times was America's Great Depression. Was America devastated by the Great Depression because her citizens were denied free and fair elections? Was four term president Franklin D. Roosevelt a practitioner of "untenable Asian Values?"
As a passionate advocate of classical liberalism I am confident that pure laissez-faire is the optimal economic system; that any nation which adopts it will enjoy rapid growth and general prosperity.
The problem is free market capitalism is not the preferred economic system of those who typically speak in solemn tones about the sanctity of democracy, universal suffrage, and majority rule. Their preferred economic system is more often than not democratic socialism, and the ballot box their instrument for legalized plunder.
As H.L. Mencken observed "an election is nothing more than an advance auction of stolen goods." "Rule of Law" legal protections afforded private property have historically been shredded by mob "rule of the majority."
Democracy is far more hostile to capitalism than Mr. Lohr and champions of "western values" would have us believe. What the answer is to this dilemma I do not claim to know. But the simplistic formulations I have heard so far are definitely not it.
Sincerely,
Bevin Chu
Taipei, Taiwan, China
Thursday, March 27, 1997
Washington is not America, Beijing is not China
Washington is not America, Beijing is not China
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
March 26, 1997
Mr. Cornett's thoughtful letter deserves a respectful reply. I hope he will agree that I have made a sincere attempt to provide just that.
To begin with I too am an American. I am Chinese by birth and ethnicity, but 100% American in my political philosophy. I was naturalized under Ronald Reagan, who reminded Americans that the proper role of government was to get the hell out of our way. As Thomas Jefferson put it, "those people are governed best who are governed least."
The American concept of good government is next to no government. A government is not a country. A country is not its government. A nation's life is lived in its private sector, its civil society. The government's role is to be the nighwatchman in the basement, while the real business of the country is conducted in the office suites. America is not Pennsylvania Avenue, it is Main Street and Wall Street. It is 100% American to love one's country while hating one's government. This is what Reagan meant when he spoke to cheering audiences about "getting Big Government off our backs."
Mr. Cornett mentions Lao-tse, to me the greatest Chinese philosopher of all time. Lao-tse originated the concept of minimal government, which he summed up as "wu wei erh zhi" or "administering by doing nothing." If "wu wei erh zhi" sounds astonishingly similar to classical liberal concepts of "laissez faire" and "the Invisible Hand" it merely confirms that Chinese people share this fundamental value with westerners.
I love America. It is no contradiction to say that I hate the oppressive, arrogant Federal government in Washington. It simultaneously abuses American citizens at home while lecturing other governments abroad for doing the same. Consider recent remarks by State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns:
"I don't think . . . we need to listen to lectures from authoritarian countries about our human rights performance because we are the world's champion of human rights,'' [Those around the world who had their human rights taken away] ``look to us to speak up for them''. [The US government] is ``very confident about our policy and emphasis on human rights and we're not going to be deterred, especially by countries that are major violators of human rights.''
As Tonto reminded the Lone Ranger, "What do you mean we Kemo Sabe?" If Mr. Burns thinks that the victims of Ruby Ridge and Waco identify with the US Federal government as "the world's champion of human rights" he should talk to Timothy McVeigh.
My response: "The violation of rights and liberty by other governments can never justify foreign intervention by the United States government. Today, no government is innocent of violating human rights and liberty, and none can approach the issue with clean hands. In keeping with our goal of peaceful international relations, we call upon the United States government to cease its hypocrisy and its sullying of the good name of human rights. Only private individuals and organizations have any place speaking out on this issue."
This was taken from the Libertarian Party's platform on Human Rights, but I couldn't have said it any better myself.
Today we hear a lot of sermonizing from both American leftists and rightists about the "human rights" concerns of the US government and how these concerns must take precedence over the "mere" commercial interests of private American businesses. Whole forests have died in order that they could denounce the "New China Lobby" (comprised incidentally, of highly knowledgeable China hands from the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations) which is accused of being unpatriotic and of selling out American values.
The critics have it backwards. According to traditional American values the moral judgements of public servants, elected or otherwise, does not have priority over the commercial interests of American citizens. To hold such a view is UN-American. In America the government is the servant, not the parole officer/moral guardian of the American citizen. "Linkage" may sound high-minded, but "linkage" itself is a human rights violation. It violates the rights of private citizens to engage in free trade simply because government bureaucrats "don't like it."
Sorry, but it's not their place to like or dislike it. If Madeleine Albright, Jesse Helms or Nancy Pelosi can't get along with their counterparts in Beijing, that's just too damned bad. They should go into counseling and let the CEOs of Boeing, Caterpillar, MacDonalds and Motorola get on with the serious work of building the emerging global economy. The emerging global economy in which Honda builds automobile plants in Ohio and Dell builds computer plants in Japan is unlikely to witness either another Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima. Japanese and Americans are not about to bomb their own factories.
Obviously the same holds true of the US and China. If the business communities (not the governments) of both nations build on an already deepening mutual economic interdependence, the dreaded "Coming Conflict with China" will never happen. The global economy may just turn out to be the unappreciated harbinger of a planetwide civil society which finally makes mankind's yearning for enduring peace more than just an idle dream.
It would be an ironic vindication of laissez-faire economists Adam Smith and Friedrich Bastiat if world peace was finally brought about by aggressive, tough-minded businessmen such as "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap and Bill Gates (the CEOs of Sunbeam and Microsoft) rather than bleeding hearts such as the Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
March 26, 1997
Mr. Cornett's thoughtful letter deserves a respectful reply. I hope he will agree that I have made a sincere attempt to provide just that.
To begin with I too am an American. I am Chinese by birth and ethnicity, but 100% American in my political philosophy. I was naturalized under Ronald Reagan, who reminded Americans that the proper role of government was to get the hell out of our way. As Thomas Jefferson put it, "those people are governed best who are governed least."
The American concept of good government is next to no government. A government is not a country. A country is not its government. A nation's life is lived in its private sector, its civil society. The government's role is to be the nighwatchman in the basement, while the real business of the country is conducted in the office suites. America is not Pennsylvania Avenue, it is Main Street and Wall Street. It is 100% American to love one's country while hating one's government. This is what Reagan meant when he spoke to cheering audiences about "getting Big Government off our backs."
Mr. Cornett mentions Lao-tse, to me the greatest Chinese philosopher of all time. Lao-tse originated the concept of minimal government, which he summed up as "wu wei erh zhi" or "administering by doing nothing." If "wu wei erh zhi" sounds astonishingly similar to classical liberal concepts of "laissez faire" and "the Invisible Hand" it merely confirms that Chinese people share this fundamental value with westerners.
I love America. It is no contradiction to say that I hate the oppressive, arrogant Federal government in Washington. It simultaneously abuses American citizens at home while lecturing other governments abroad for doing the same. Consider recent remarks by State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns:
"I don't think . . . we need to listen to lectures from authoritarian countries about our human rights performance because we are the world's champion of human rights,'' [Those around the world who had their human rights taken away] ``look to us to speak up for them''. [The US government] is ``very confident about our policy and emphasis on human rights and we're not going to be deterred, especially by countries that are major violators of human rights.''
As Tonto reminded the Lone Ranger, "What do you mean we Kemo Sabe?" If Mr. Burns thinks that the victims of Ruby Ridge and Waco identify with the US Federal government as "the world's champion of human rights" he should talk to Timothy McVeigh.
My response: "The violation of rights and liberty by other governments can never justify foreign intervention by the United States government. Today, no government is innocent of violating human rights and liberty, and none can approach the issue with clean hands. In keeping with our goal of peaceful international relations, we call upon the United States government to cease its hypocrisy and its sullying of the good name of human rights. Only private individuals and organizations have any place speaking out on this issue."
This was taken from the Libertarian Party's platform on Human Rights, but I couldn't have said it any better myself.
Today we hear a lot of sermonizing from both American leftists and rightists about the "human rights" concerns of the US government and how these concerns must take precedence over the "mere" commercial interests of private American businesses. Whole forests have died in order that they could denounce the "New China Lobby" (comprised incidentally, of highly knowledgeable China hands from the Nixon, Reagan and Bush administrations) which is accused of being unpatriotic and of selling out American values.
The critics have it backwards. According to traditional American values the moral judgements of public servants, elected or otherwise, does not have priority over the commercial interests of American citizens. To hold such a view is UN-American. In America the government is the servant, not the parole officer/moral guardian of the American citizen. "Linkage" may sound high-minded, but "linkage" itself is a human rights violation. It violates the rights of private citizens to engage in free trade simply because government bureaucrats "don't like it."
Sorry, but it's not their place to like or dislike it. If Madeleine Albright, Jesse Helms or Nancy Pelosi can't get along with their counterparts in Beijing, that's just too damned bad. They should go into counseling and let the CEOs of Boeing, Caterpillar, MacDonalds and Motorola get on with the serious work of building the emerging global economy. The emerging global economy in which Honda builds automobile plants in Ohio and Dell builds computer plants in Japan is unlikely to witness either another Pearl Harbor or Hiroshima. Japanese and Americans are not about to bomb their own factories.
Obviously the same holds true of the US and China. If the business communities (not the governments) of both nations build on an already deepening mutual economic interdependence, the dreaded "Coming Conflict with China" will never happen. The global economy may just turn out to be the unappreciated harbinger of a planetwide civil society which finally makes mankind's yearning for enduring peace more than just an idle dream.
It would be an ironic vindication of laissez-faire economists Adam Smith and Friedrich Bastiat if world peace was finally brought about by aggressive, tough-minded businessmen such as "Chainsaw" Al Dunlap and Bill Gates (the CEOs of Sunbeam and Microsoft) rather than bleeding hearts such as the Dalai Lama and Mother Theresa.
Thursday, March 06, 1997
Media, Human Rights, and Waco
Media, Human Rights, and Waco
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
March 5, 1997
Response to Da-jiang Liu
I regret that Mr. Liu felt I was having a facile joke at his expense. I see in retrospect how it might have come across that way, but that was not my intention. My purpose was quite serious -- to illustrate the lack of symmetry in the way the US Federal government routinely preaches human rights to the governments of other countries. It habitually drags other countries' domestic transgressions into international trade negotiations, but never seems to notice that hardly any other government presumes to relate to the US government the same way.
Do Helmut Kohl and Jacques Chirac condition trade with America on redress of BATF and FBI violations of human rights at Ruby Ridge and Waco? Some insist that international trade must be linked to human rights. My response: Should Kohl and Chirac prohibit Daimler Benz from exporting Mercedes to eagerly awaiting American car buyers, or Coca-Cola from serving thirsty Frenchmen until Waco and Ruby Ridge are resolved to German and French government satisfaction? Should they demand that American law enforcement agents be called onto the carpet to answer to them? How would Americans react if they did? Would we conclude Europeans were empathizing with our plight and thank them for it, or would we bristle at them as sanctimonious busy bodies?
Premier Li Peng and General Chi Haotien brutalizing Chinese civilians within China is a domestic Chinese issue. President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno authorizing the legalized murder of American citizens at Ruby Ridge and Waco is a domestic American issue. For foreigners to presume that Americans can't resolve homegrown abuses of governmental power without foreign intervention insults the American public. For Americans to assume that foreigners can't do the same within their own countries insults foreigners. The role reversal gimmick was merely an attempt to illustrate that point.
To a champion of laissez-faire and minimal government America is not the Federal juggernaut in Washington DC. America is Boeing, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Motorola, and Proctor & Gamble, ad infinitum, all of whose shareholders' have the right to trade with the Chinese people. As a former Republican president once quipped "The business of America is business." Therefore when the US Federal government (or the PRC Central government) tramples on the rights of American and Chinese citizens to engage in free trade, that is an intolerable human rights violation.
Capitalism and communism are economic systems first, political systems second. Communism's "human rights violations" were violations of economic rights before anything else. Maoism's violation of Chinese peasants' economic rights during the Great Leap Forward alone resulted in the death by starvation of 30 million Chinese. Capitalism's virtue is its defense of people's economic rights. "Human rights champions" who demean economic liberalization as "meaningless" without political liberalization should try living without economic rights. They know nothing about the millions who were reduced to eating grass and bark before dying agonizing deaths.
Today's Federal leviathan has no more moral claim to be a defender of human rights abroad than it does at home. To cast it in the role of a global knight errant is to fall into the trap of worshipping the state as a higher entity than individual human beings. Ironically it is falling prey to the same statism which handed China to Mao. Paradoxically the wise government of the early Founding Fathers, imbued with incomparably greater moral virtue than modern American administrations, never presumed to preach human rights to the rest of the world. Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that those who walk the walk, don't need to talk the talk?
The Federal government which Thomas Jefferson deemed a necessary evil hasn't become any more necessary but it is a hell of a lot more evil. It has metastasized into the cancer of Big Government which former president Ronald Reagan tried valiantly but vainly to get off the backs of Americans. No longer content with infringing the rights of Americans by plundering one third of their hard-earned wealth every April 15th, it now wants to infringe the economic rights of the rest of the world. Canada, Mexico, and the European Union with Helms-Burton. China with Most Favored Nation -- as if refraining from violating the rights of Americans and Chinese to engage in free trade constituted a favor.
I am indeed frustrated with the intellectual mainstream's selective moral conscience. But since when is it narrow minded to expect that moral standards applied to others be applied with equal force to oneself? There is a word for moral/ethical consistency: integrity. And there is a word for its opposite: hypocrisy. Frustrated? You bet!
Response to Chengming Yang
Mr. Yang assumes that others share his low opinion of the parishioners of the Branch Davidian Church, therefore to compare them to the pro-democracy hunger strikers at Tiananmen Square demeans the latter. But many Americans, myself included, do not feel the Davidians did anything wrong, certainly nothing that warranted being starved, gassed and burned to death for. Since I don't feel the Davidians were wrong or evil, I feel the comparison is favorable to both the Tiananmen protestors and to the Davidians.
But even if Mr. Yang feels the Davidians weren't on the same moral plane as the Tiananmen protestors, the question is still irrelevant. The issue doesn't hinge on the moral stature of the victims. The point is that when push comes to shove the US Federal government isn't much more just than the Beijing government is toward its own citizens. FBI Director Louis Freeh had as little patience and respect for American citizens who defied them as General Chi Haotien had for the pro-democracy activists who were asserting their constitutional rights in Tiananmen Square.
The Davidians were merely exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, a right guaranteed by the US Constitution, a right the Chinese people ought to enjoy. Chinese civilians, armed to the teeth like the civilian militia in the United States with AK-47s imported, ironically from PRC munitions maker Norinco, could hardly be abused by their own government with the impunity they have been. Personally I find it curious that many of the same US elected officials who advocate gun prohibition are among the loudest voices denouncing the PRC.
Furthermore, those "human rights" advocates in the US who demonize China as "aggressively expansionist" as an pretext to contain it are using the same public relations spin control as the Federal authorities who carefully demonized and thus marginalized the Davidians as "fanatical cultists" so they could get away with gassing and incinerating them without raising too loud a hue and cry from mainstream America.
Those genuinely distressed about human rights abuses must not be naive about the cynical motivations involved and blindly assume that everyone who criticizes the Beijing regime's brutality does so out of solicitude for the fate of ordinary Chinese citizens. I wish it were not so, but far too many people in this world have highly suspect motives for ostensibly noble behavior.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
March 5, 1997
Response to Da-jiang Liu
I regret that Mr. Liu felt I was having a facile joke at his expense. I see in retrospect how it might have come across that way, but that was not my intention. My purpose was quite serious -- to illustrate the lack of symmetry in the way the US Federal government routinely preaches human rights to the governments of other countries. It habitually drags other countries' domestic transgressions into international trade negotiations, but never seems to notice that hardly any other government presumes to relate to the US government the same way.
Do Helmut Kohl and Jacques Chirac condition trade with America on redress of BATF and FBI violations of human rights at Ruby Ridge and Waco? Some insist that international trade must be linked to human rights. My response: Should Kohl and Chirac prohibit Daimler Benz from exporting Mercedes to eagerly awaiting American car buyers, or Coca-Cola from serving thirsty Frenchmen until Waco and Ruby Ridge are resolved to German and French government satisfaction? Should they demand that American law enforcement agents be called onto the carpet to answer to them? How would Americans react if they did? Would we conclude Europeans were empathizing with our plight and thank them for it, or would we bristle at them as sanctimonious busy bodies?
Premier Li Peng and General Chi Haotien brutalizing Chinese civilians within China is a domestic Chinese issue. President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno authorizing the legalized murder of American citizens at Ruby Ridge and Waco is a domestic American issue. For foreigners to presume that Americans can't resolve homegrown abuses of governmental power without foreign intervention insults the American public. For Americans to assume that foreigners can't do the same within their own countries insults foreigners. The role reversal gimmick was merely an attempt to illustrate that point.
To a champion of laissez-faire and minimal government America is not the Federal juggernaut in Washington DC. America is Boeing, Coca-Cola, McDonald's, Motorola, and Proctor & Gamble, ad infinitum, all of whose shareholders' have the right to trade with the Chinese people. As a former Republican president once quipped "The business of America is business." Therefore when the US Federal government (or the PRC Central government) tramples on the rights of American and Chinese citizens to engage in free trade, that is an intolerable human rights violation.
Capitalism and communism are economic systems first, political systems second. Communism's "human rights violations" were violations of economic rights before anything else. Maoism's violation of Chinese peasants' economic rights during the Great Leap Forward alone resulted in the death by starvation of 30 million Chinese. Capitalism's virtue is its defense of people's economic rights. "Human rights champions" who demean economic liberalization as "meaningless" without political liberalization should try living without economic rights. They know nothing about the millions who were reduced to eating grass and bark before dying agonizing deaths.
Today's Federal leviathan has no more moral claim to be a defender of human rights abroad than it does at home. To cast it in the role of a global knight errant is to fall into the trap of worshipping the state as a higher entity than individual human beings. Ironically it is falling prey to the same statism which handed China to Mao. Paradoxically the wise government of the early Founding Fathers, imbued with incomparably greater moral virtue than modern American administrations, never presumed to preach human rights to the rest of the world. Is it too much of a stretch to suggest that those who walk the walk, don't need to talk the talk?
The Federal government which Thomas Jefferson deemed a necessary evil hasn't become any more necessary but it is a hell of a lot more evil. It has metastasized into the cancer of Big Government which former president Ronald Reagan tried valiantly but vainly to get off the backs of Americans. No longer content with infringing the rights of Americans by plundering one third of their hard-earned wealth every April 15th, it now wants to infringe the economic rights of the rest of the world. Canada, Mexico, and the European Union with Helms-Burton. China with Most Favored Nation -- as if refraining from violating the rights of Americans and Chinese to engage in free trade constituted a favor.
I am indeed frustrated with the intellectual mainstream's selective moral conscience. But since when is it narrow minded to expect that moral standards applied to others be applied with equal force to oneself? There is a word for moral/ethical consistency: integrity. And there is a word for its opposite: hypocrisy. Frustrated? You bet!
Response to Chengming Yang
Mr. Yang assumes that others share his low opinion of the parishioners of the Branch Davidian Church, therefore to compare them to the pro-democracy hunger strikers at Tiananmen Square demeans the latter. But many Americans, myself included, do not feel the Davidians did anything wrong, certainly nothing that warranted being starved, gassed and burned to death for. Since I don't feel the Davidians were wrong or evil, I feel the comparison is favorable to both the Tiananmen protestors and to the Davidians.
But even if Mr. Yang feels the Davidians weren't on the same moral plane as the Tiananmen protestors, the question is still irrelevant. The issue doesn't hinge on the moral stature of the victims. The point is that when push comes to shove the US Federal government isn't much more just than the Beijing government is toward its own citizens. FBI Director Louis Freeh had as little patience and respect for American citizens who defied them as General Chi Haotien had for the pro-democracy activists who were asserting their constitutional rights in Tiananmen Square.
The Davidians were merely exercising their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, a right guaranteed by the US Constitution, a right the Chinese people ought to enjoy. Chinese civilians, armed to the teeth like the civilian militia in the United States with AK-47s imported, ironically from PRC munitions maker Norinco, could hardly be abused by their own government with the impunity they have been. Personally I find it curious that many of the same US elected officials who advocate gun prohibition are among the loudest voices denouncing the PRC.
Furthermore, those "human rights" advocates in the US who demonize China as "aggressively expansionist" as an pretext to contain it are using the same public relations spin control as the Federal authorities who carefully demonized and thus marginalized the Davidians as "fanatical cultists" so they could get away with gassing and incinerating them without raising too loud a hue and cry from mainstream America.
Those genuinely distressed about human rights abuses must not be naive about the cynical motivations involved and blindly assume that everyone who criticizes the Beijing regime's brutality does so out of solicitude for the fate of ordinary Chinese citizens. I wish it were not so, but far too many people in this world have highly suspect motives for ostensibly noble behavior.
Thursday, February 13, 1997
China Wants US Attorney General to Testify
China Wants US Attorney General to Testify
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
February 12, 1997
Friday December 13 2:37 PM EST China's Central Committee Chairman Wants US Attorney General to Testify
BEIJING (Router) - A senior PRC Central Committee member Friday challenged US Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh to testify before China's Central Committee and offer proof that the FBI did not start the blaze which burned 25 children to death in the 1993 Waco Massacre.
Reno said Tuesday in a speech at Beijing University that David Koresh, not the FBI was responsible for the 75 civilian deaths at the Branch Davidian religious community, including 25 children. David Koresh, or Vernon Howell, was the spiritual leader of the Branch Davidians, a Protestant sect and offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Reno and Director Freeh are on a two week China visit.
Committee Chairman Bao said at a news conference he had invited Reno and Freeh to testify next week at a hearing of the Human Rights Watch America subcommittee, which Chi chairs.
"We cannot accept the statements of Attorney General Reno without her providing the evidence to refute the pictures we have seen of the slaughter and the words of those who witnessed and lived through the Mount Carmel massacre," Chi said.
He said if Reno and Freeh could not attend the hearing in Beijing, members of the subcommittee would meet Reno and Freeh anywhere they wanted to hear their evidence.
Foreign Minister Shen Kuofang said Thursday China knew there had been many deaths at the Branch Davidian compound. The U.S., while admitting some "cultists" were killed as the BATF and FBI moved against the Branch Davidian Church, has consistently denied that Federal law enforcement tactics were responsible for the deaths of 25 children in the holocaust itself. Lethal CS gas, US Army helicopters and tanks were mobilized against the religious commune.
Shen called Reno's comments "unfortunate," "ill-timed" and "inaccurate", but refused to call the attorney general a liar. Reno was the US's top law enforcement officer in 1989.
Bao, a frequent critic of China policy toward the U.S., called the administration's response "unbelieveably weak." He said he was upset that Reno had been granted full state honors and a meeting with President Jiang Zemin during her visit.
"What is just as tragic as the statements made by Attorney General Reno is the shameless actions of the Jiang administration which allowed the attorney general to stand before Chinese officials and deny responsibility for the massacre of civilians by federal officers and unconstitutional use of the US military for domestic law enforcement," Bao Gong said. "Will the president [Jiang Zemin] stop at nothing to give the US government everything it wants while it continues the reign of terror in the United States?"
Bao Gong and other members of the PRC government want Jiang to link China trade with US to Washington's human rights record.
[The above was of course, a fabrication. The real news report follows. But I hope this illustrates the unexamined arrogance and presumption of modern US foreign policy.]
Friday December 13 2:37 PM EST House Chairman Wants China's Chi to Testify
WASHINGTON (Reuter) - A senior House Republican Friday challenged Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Chi Haotian to testify before Congress and offer proof that no civilians were killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Chi said Tuesday in a speech at the U.S. National Defense University that there were no civilian deaths at Tiananman Square. He is on a two week U.S. visit.
Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, said at a news conference he had invited Chi to testify next week at a hearing of the International Operations and Human Rights subcommittee, which Smith chairs.
"We cannot accept the statements of Gen. Chi without him providing the evidence to refute the pictures we have seen of the slaughter and the words of those who witnessed and lived through the Tiananmen Square massacre," Smith said.
He said if Chi could not attend the hearing in Washington, members of the subcommittee would meet Chi anywhere he wanted to hear his evidence.
State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said Thursday the United States knew there had been many deaths in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. China, while admitting some "hooligans" were killed as the army moved against pro-democracy demonstrators, has consistently denied that any civilians died in the square itself.
Burns called Chi's comments "unfortunate," "ill-timed" and "inaccurate", but refused to call the general a liar. Chi was China's top military officer in 1989.
Smith, a frequent critic of U.S. policy toward China, called the administration's response "unbelieveably weak." He said he was upset that Chi had been granted full military honors and a meeting with President Clinton during his visit.
"What is just as tragic as the statements made by Gen. Chi is the shameless actions of the Clinton administration which allowed the general to stand before U.S. military officers and deny that the massacre took place," Smith said. "Will the president stop at nothing to give the Chinese government everything it wants while it continues the reign of terror in the People's Republic of China?"
Smith and other members of both parties want Clinton to link U.S. trade with China to Beijing's human rights record.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
February 12, 1997
Friday December 13 2:37 PM EST China's Central Committee Chairman Wants US Attorney General to Testify
BEIJING (Router) - A senior PRC Central Committee member Friday challenged US Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh to testify before China's Central Committee and offer proof that the FBI did not start the blaze which burned 25 children to death in the 1993 Waco Massacre.
Reno said Tuesday in a speech at Beijing University that David Koresh, not the FBI was responsible for the 75 civilian deaths at the Branch Davidian religious community, including 25 children. David Koresh, or Vernon Howell, was the spiritual leader of the Branch Davidians, a Protestant sect and offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Reno and Director Freeh are on a two week China visit.
Committee Chairman Bao said at a news conference he had invited Reno and Freeh to testify next week at a hearing of the Human Rights Watch America subcommittee, which Chi chairs.
"We cannot accept the statements of Attorney General Reno without her providing the evidence to refute the pictures we have seen of the slaughter and the words of those who witnessed and lived through the Mount Carmel massacre," Chi said.
He said if Reno and Freeh could not attend the hearing in Beijing, members of the subcommittee would meet Reno and Freeh anywhere they wanted to hear their evidence.
Foreign Minister Shen Kuofang said Thursday China knew there had been many deaths at the Branch Davidian compound. The U.S., while admitting some "cultists" were killed as the BATF and FBI moved against the Branch Davidian Church, has consistently denied that Federal law enforcement tactics were responsible for the deaths of 25 children in the holocaust itself. Lethal CS gas, US Army helicopters and tanks were mobilized against the religious commune.
Shen called Reno's comments "unfortunate," "ill-timed" and "inaccurate", but refused to call the attorney general a liar. Reno was the US's top law enforcement officer in 1989.
Bao, a frequent critic of China policy toward the U.S., called the administration's response "unbelieveably weak." He said he was upset that Reno had been granted full state honors and a meeting with President Jiang Zemin during her visit.
"What is just as tragic as the statements made by Attorney General Reno is the shameless actions of the Jiang administration which allowed the attorney general to stand before Chinese officials and deny responsibility for the massacre of civilians by federal officers and unconstitutional use of the US military for domestic law enforcement," Bao Gong said. "Will the president [Jiang Zemin] stop at nothing to give the US government everything it wants while it continues the reign of terror in the United States?"
Bao Gong and other members of the PRC government want Jiang to link China trade with US to Washington's human rights record.
[The above was of course, a fabrication. The real news report follows. But I hope this illustrates the unexamined arrogance and presumption of modern US foreign policy.]
Friday December 13 2:37 PM EST House Chairman Wants China's Chi to Testify
WASHINGTON (Reuter) - A senior House Republican Friday challenged Chinese Defense Minister Gen. Chi Haotian to testify before Congress and offer proof that no civilians were killed in the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown.
Chi said Tuesday in a speech at the U.S. National Defense University that there were no civilian deaths at Tiananman Square. He is on a two week U.S. visit.
Rep. Chris Smith, a New Jersey Republican, said at a news conference he had invited Chi to testify next week at a hearing of the International Operations and Human Rights subcommittee, which Smith chairs.
"We cannot accept the statements of Gen. Chi without him providing the evidence to refute the pictures we have seen of the slaughter and the words of those who witnessed and lived through the Tiananmen Square massacre," Smith said.
He said if Chi could not attend the hearing in Washington, members of the subcommittee would meet Chi anywhere he wanted to hear his evidence.
State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns said Thursday the United States knew there had been many deaths in Beijing's Tiananmen Square. China, while admitting some "hooligans" were killed as the army moved against pro-democracy demonstrators, has consistently denied that any civilians died in the square itself.
Burns called Chi's comments "unfortunate," "ill-timed" and "inaccurate", but refused to call the general a liar. Chi was China's top military officer in 1989.
Smith, a frequent critic of U.S. policy toward China, called the administration's response "unbelieveably weak." He said he was upset that Chi had been granted full military honors and a meeting with President Clinton during his visit.
"What is just as tragic as the statements made by Gen. Chi is the shameless actions of the Clinton administration which allowed the general to stand before U.S. military officers and deny that the massacre took place," Smith said. "Will the president stop at nothing to give the Chinese government everything it wants while it continues the reign of terror in the People's Republic of China?"
Smith and other members of both parties want Clinton to link U.S. trade with China to Beijing's human rights record.
Tuesday, February 04, 1997
Uncle Sam, Persecutor of Christians
Uncle Sam, Persecutor of Christians
Bevin Chu
February 03, 1997
The China News
Letters Editor
Dear Sir/Madam,
My jaw dropped when I read that that Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck had condemned Saudi Arabia for repression of religious freedom, charging that the government "commits and tolerates human rights abuses" citing a case where -- quoting the Reuters report -- "a Christian service was broken up by police... and the man who hosted the service was lashed."
It dropped even further when I read that newly appointed Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had declared that religious freedom around the world would be a new priority of US human rights policy.
Four years ago in 1993, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh did considerably more than "break up" a Christian service and "lash the host." They surrounded a wooden church annex in Mount Carmel, Texas belonging to a tiny sect of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. With the help of US Army tanks and helicopters and the full legal weight of the Federal law enforcement Leviathan behind them, they terrorized and starved the parishioners within, gassed them with potentially lethal CS gas, and finally in a fit of frustration set fire to the wooden structure and burned 75 church members to death, including 25 children.
May I suggest that before the US State Department and Human Rights Watch preach their (by now all too familiar) Human Rights Sermon to foreign nations such as Saudi Arabia and China, that they first have a "heart to heart" with the US Justice Department, the BATF and the FBI? And while we're on the subject of religion, perhaps the Bibilical injunction to "look not for the mote in someone else's eye, but attend first to the beam in one's own" would not be out of order?
Sincerely,
Bevin Chu
Taipei, Taiwan, China
Bevin Chu
February 03, 1997
The China News
Letters Editor
Dear Sir/Madam,
My jaw dropped when I read that that Assistant Secretary of State John Shattuck had condemned Saudi Arabia for repression of religious freedom, charging that the government "commits and tolerates human rights abuses" citing a case where -- quoting the Reuters report -- "a Christian service was broken up by police... and the man who hosted the service was lashed."
It dropped even further when I read that newly appointed Secretary of State Madeleine Albright had declared that religious freedom around the world would be a new priority of US human rights policy.
Four years ago in 1993, U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh did considerably more than "break up" a Christian service and "lash the host." They surrounded a wooden church annex in Mount Carmel, Texas belonging to a tiny sect of the Seventh Day Adventist Church. With the help of US Army tanks and helicopters and the full legal weight of the Federal law enforcement Leviathan behind them, they terrorized and starved the parishioners within, gassed them with potentially lethal CS gas, and finally in a fit of frustration set fire to the wooden structure and burned 75 church members to death, including 25 children.
May I suggest that before the US State Department and Human Rights Watch preach their (by now all too familiar) Human Rights Sermon to foreign nations such as Saudi Arabia and China, that they first have a "heart to heart" with the US Justice Department, the BATF and the FBI? And while we're on the subject of religion, perhaps the Bibilical injunction to "look not for the mote in someone else's eye, but attend first to the beam in one's own" would not be out of order?
Sincerely,
Bevin Chu
Taipei, Taiwan, China
Thursday, January 16, 1997
Mr. Democracy Revisited
Mr. Democracy Revisited
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
January 15, 1997
Letters Editor
Newsweek Magazine
editors@newsweek.com
Dear Sir/Madam,
I don't know if Newsweek has been keeping up on Taiwan's Lee Teng-hui, but "Mr. Democracy" has just convened a so-called National Development Conference in Taipei.
Under the pretext of eliciting a diversity of opinions from the two major opposition parties in order to reach a tri-partisan consensus for the future of Taiwan, he sprung a little surprise on his unwary guests.
What he said in effect was "As long as I have you all here, I propose to revise the ROC Constitution so that I can dissolve the Legislature at my discretion, strip the National Assembly of its impeachment power, abolish all local elections, making county supervisors and city mayors presidential appointments, and abolish the Taiwan Provincial government in its entirety, ridding Taiwan of its pesky dual status as a province of China and moving it one step closer to independence. Any objections?"
Imagine the reaction from the American media, including Newsweek, if a US president suddenly declared that he intended to revise the American Constitution so that he could dissolve Congress at will, strip it of its impeachment power, abolish local elections for county and municipal governments making them presidential appointments, and abolish the fifty state governments in one fell swoop?
Would Newsweek continue to refer to such a man as "Mr. Democracy" and coo about his "fundamentally democratic instincts"? Time for a followup story, don't you think?
Sincerely,
Bevin Chu
Consultant to Professor Fu Kuen-chen, Member of ROC Legislature (New Party)
(The opinion expressed is my own, and does not necessarily reflect that of any other individual or party)
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Bevin Chu
January 15, 1997
Letters Editor
Newsweek Magazine
editors@newsweek.com
Dear Sir/Madam,
I don't know if Newsweek has been keeping up on Taiwan's Lee Teng-hui, but "Mr. Democracy" has just convened a so-called National Development Conference in Taipei.
Under the pretext of eliciting a diversity of opinions from the two major opposition parties in order to reach a tri-partisan consensus for the future of Taiwan, he sprung a little surprise on his unwary guests.
What he said in effect was "As long as I have you all here, I propose to revise the ROC Constitution so that I can dissolve the Legislature at my discretion, strip the National Assembly of its impeachment power, abolish all local elections, making county supervisors and city mayors presidential appointments, and abolish the Taiwan Provincial government in its entirety, ridding Taiwan of its pesky dual status as a province of China and moving it one step closer to independence. Any objections?"
Imagine the reaction from the American media, including Newsweek, if a US president suddenly declared that he intended to revise the American Constitution so that he could dissolve Congress at will, strip it of its impeachment power, abolish local elections for county and municipal governments making them presidential appointments, and abolish the fifty state governments in one fell swoop?
Would Newsweek continue to refer to such a man as "Mr. Democracy" and coo about his "fundamentally democratic instincts"? Time for a followup story, don't you think?
Sincerely,
Bevin Chu
Consultant to Professor Fu Kuen-chen, Member of ROC Legislature (New Party)
(The opinion expressed is my own, and does not necessarily reflect that of any other individual or party)
Sunday, September 29, 1996
Tiaoyutai is Chinese Territory!
Tiaoyutai (Diaoyutai) is Chinese Territory!
Fung Hu-hsiang, Ph. D., Member of the Legislature, ROC
Translated by Bevin Chu
September 28, 1996
Tiaoyutai (Diaoyutai) is Chinese Territory!
The Evidence is Beyond Dispute
1. Imperial Chinese "Envoy Chen Kan's Lui Chiu Chronicles" circa Ming Dynasty Chia-ching 13 (1534 A.D.) proves that the Tiaoyutai Islands belong to China and are not part of the Ryukyus. Even the Japanese edition of the "Chung Shan World Almanac" is in complete agreement. (Note: "Chung San" refers to the Rykuyus.)
2. The "Kuo Ru-ling Lui Chiu Chronicles" circa Ming Dynasty Chia-ching 42 (1563 A.D.) records that "after Tiaoyutai, we arrived on Redtail Island on the third of the month.; Redtail Island is close to the Ryukyus" indicating that Tiaoyutai belonged to China, not to the Ryukyus.
3. During the reign of Ching Emperor Kang-hsi (1785 A.D.), Hsu Pao-kuang's "Thirty-six Islands Map" and related "Map Legend" of the Ryukyus did not include Tiaoyutai.
4. During the reign of Ching Emperor Chien-lung (1785 A.D.), the "Map and General Survey of Three Countries" by Japanese cartographer (named Ling Tse-ping in Chinese) unambiguously indicates that Tiaoyutai belongs to China, uses the same color for Tiaoyutai as for the rest of China, and uses a different color for the map of the Ryukyus.
5. The "Imperial Map of Native and Foreign Lands, Volume 7, Southern Portion" dating from Ching Emperor Tung-chi 2 (1862 A.D.) shows Taiwan's territory as including Tiaoyutai.
6. In Meiji 6 (1873 A.D.) the official Japanese government's "Complete Ryukyu Islands Map" omits Tiaoyutai.
7. In Meiji 10 (1877 A.D.) the official Japanese government publication "Okinawa Chronicles" similarly omits Tiaoyutai.
8. During the reign of Ching Dynasty Dowager Empress Tse-hsi (1893 A.D.) the Dowager Empress issued a Special Edict granting Tiaoyutai to Sheng Hsuan-hui for services rendered gathering herbal remedies from Taioyutai to treat the Empress's illnesses. The Special Edict has since been preserved in the Chinese National Archives. The Japanese first laid claim to Tiaoyutai in Meiji 28 (1895 A.D.), clearly later than Tse-hsi's land grant.
9. In Meji 17 (1884 A.D.) Japanese Minister of the Interior Yamagada Akimoto petitioned Okinawa Prefecture to erect national markers on Tiaoyutai. Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Inouye Kaolu replied that such an act "would attract the attention of the Ching Nation" and therefore "should await a more opportune time." (See Japanese Parliamentary Library, Foreign Affairs Archives) This reveals that the Japanese themselves knew the Tiaoyutai Islands did not belong to Japan and that they could not annex it outright, but merely bide their time.
10. In Meiji 28 (1895 A.D.) following the Sino-Japanese War the Ching Imperial Court was defeated and under coercion ceded Taiwan and Penghu. The Japanese deemed the time had come to annex Tiaoyutai, but even then hesitated to publicly announce it in their official publications. A September 1996 issue of a Japanese monthly ("Chan Ching Hsing Wen" in Chinese) cited a 1920 letter of thanks from the Chinese Consul to Nagasaki for the rescue of Chinese fishermen by Japanese on Tiaoyutai as evidence of Japanese sovereignty over the island. But since even Taiwan and Penghu were under Japanese occupation at the time, this argument is obviously irrelevant and meaningless.
11. In 1931, while Taiwan was still under Japanese occupation, Taipei County and Okinawa Prefecture quarrelled over the jurisdiction of Tiaoyutai. A Tokyo court decided in favor of Taipei County, proving that even during Japanese occupation, Tiaoyutai still belonged to Taiwan. Therefore when WWII ended in 1945, and in accordance with the Cairo Conference Japan returned Taiwan and Penghu to China, it was simultaneously obliged to return Tiaoyutai - a part of Taiwan - to China.
12. In 1990 the United States State Department reiterated that "according to the 1951 Peace Treaty with Japan, the United States of America had only administrative authority over Okinawa, therefore the 1972 handover to Japan has no effect on its sovereignty." This demonstrates that the United States could at most transfer administrative authority of the Rykuyus to Japan, not sovereignty, let alone the sovereignty of Tiaoyutai, which did not belong to the Rykuyus in the first place.
13. During the Cold War when American forces were stationed on Taiwan, military maneuvers were periodically held which required the use of Tiaoyutai as an aerial bombing target. The American military applied each time to the ROC government for authorization, confirming again that Tiaoyutai is ROC territory.
14. In 1955 Nationalist Troops while retreating from Tachen Island, were garrisoned on Tiaoyutai. Approaching Japanese ships would be fired upon to drive them away. This proves that even at that time the ROC government possessed sovereignty over Tiaoyutai.
15. Finally, the overriding historical fact which renders all Japanese claims to Tiaoyutai utterly hollow and without force, is the 1952 Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty, signed by both the governments of China and Japan. Article 4 of the Treaty explicitly declares that "All treaties, special accords, agreements concluded prior to the Ming Kuo 30 or December 9, 1941 Sino-Japanese Accord, are as a consequence of the conclusion of the war, hereby null and void." In other words the Ma-kuan Treaty of 1895 was null and void. Japan's acquisition of Taiwan and Tiaoyutai were null and void. Japan simply and plainly cannot make demands or claims of any sort whatsoever regarding sovereignty over Tiaoyutai.
Let Chinese throughout the world stand united, setting aside political differences to unite in defense of Tiaoyutai, refusing to yield until we emerge victorious!
The Republic of China Alliance for the Defense of Tiaoyutai
9/28/1996
Fung Hu-hsiang, Ph. D., Member of the Legislature, ROC
Translated by Bevin Chu
September 28, 1996
Tiaoyutai (Diaoyutai) is Chinese Territory!
The Evidence is Beyond Dispute
1. Imperial Chinese "Envoy Chen Kan's Lui Chiu Chronicles" circa Ming Dynasty Chia-ching 13 (1534 A.D.) proves that the Tiaoyutai Islands belong to China and are not part of the Ryukyus. Even the Japanese edition of the "Chung Shan World Almanac" is in complete agreement. (Note: "Chung San" refers to the Rykuyus.)
2. The "Kuo Ru-ling Lui Chiu Chronicles" circa Ming Dynasty Chia-ching 42 (1563 A.D.) records that "after Tiaoyutai, we arrived on Redtail Island on the third of the month.; Redtail Island is close to the Ryukyus" indicating that Tiaoyutai belonged to China, not to the Ryukyus.
3. During the reign of Ching Emperor Kang-hsi (1785 A.D.), Hsu Pao-kuang's "Thirty-six Islands Map" and related "Map Legend" of the Ryukyus did not include Tiaoyutai.
4. During the reign of Ching Emperor Chien-lung (1785 A.D.), the "Map and General Survey of Three Countries" by Japanese cartographer (named Ling Tse-ping in Chinese) unambiguously indicates that Tiaoyutai belongs to China, uses the same color for Tiaoyutai as for the rest of China, and uses a different color for the map of the Ryukyus.
5. The "Imperial Map of Native and Foreign Lands, Volume 7, Southern Portion" dating from Ching Emperor Tung-chi 2 (1862 A.D.) shows Taiwan's territory as including Tiaoyutai.
6. In Meiji 6 (1873 A.D.) the official Japanese government's "Complete Ryukyu Islands Map" omits Tiaoyutai.
7. In Meiji 10 (1877 A.D.) the official Japanese government publication "Okinawa Chronicles" similarly omits Tiaoyutai.
8. During the reign of Ching Dynasty Dowager Empress Tse-hsi (1893 A.D.) the Dowager Empress issued a Special Edict granting Tiaoyutai to Sheng Hsuan-hui for services rendered gathering herbal remedies from Taioyutai to treat the Empress's illnesses. The Special Edict has since been preserved in the Chinese National Archives. The Japanese first laid claim to Tiaoyutai in Meiji 28 (1895 A.D.), clearly later than Tse-hsi's land grant.
9. In Meji 17 (1884 A.D.) Japanese Minister of the Interior Yamagada Akimoto petitioned Okinawa Prefecture to erect national markers on Tiaoyutai. Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs Inouye Kaolu replied that such an act "would attract the attention of the Ching Nation" and therefore "should await a more opportune time." (See Japanese Parliamentary Library, Foreign Affairs Archives) This reveals that the Japanese themselves knew the Tiaoyutai Islands did not belong to Japan and that they could not annex it outright, but merely bide their time.
10. In Meiji 28 (1895 A.D.) following the Sino-Japanese War the Ching Imperial Court was defeated and under coercion ceded Taiwan and Penghu. The Japanese deemed the time had come to annex Tiaoyutai, but even then hesitated to publicly announce it in their official publications. A September 1996 issue of a Japanese monthly ("Chan Ching Hsing Wen" in Chinese) cited a 1920 letter of thanks from the Chinese Consul to Nagasaki for the rescue of Chinese fishermen by Japanese on Tiaoyutai as evidence of Japanese sovereignty over the island. But since even Taiwan and Penghu were under Japanese occupation at the time, this argument is obviously irrelevant and meaningless.
11. In 1931, while Taiwan was still under Japanese occupation, Taipei County and Okinawa Prefecture quarrelled over the jurisdiction of Tiaoyutai. A Tokyo court decided in favor of Taipei County, proving that even during Japanese occupation, Tiaoyutai still belonged to Taiwan. Therefore when WWII ended in 1945, and in accordance with the Cairo Conference Japan returned Taiwan and Penghu to China, it was simultaneously obliged to return Tiaoyutai - a part of Taiwan - to China.
12. In 1990 the United States State Department reiterated that "according to the 1951 Peace Treaty with Japan, the United States of America had only administrative authority over Okinawa, therefore the 1972 handover to Japan has no effect on its sovereignty." This demonstrates that the United States could at most transfer administrative authority of the Rykuyus to Japan, not sovereignty, let alone the sovereignty of Tiaoyutai, which did not belong to the Rykuyus in the first place.
13. During the Cold War when American forces were stationed on Taiwan, military maneuvers were periodically held which required the use of Tiaoyutai as an aerial bombing target. The American military applied each time to the ROC government for authorization, confirming again that Tiaoyutai is ROC territory.
14. In 1955 Nationalist Troops while retreating from Tachen Island, were garrisoned on Tiaoyutai. Approaching Japanese ships would be fired upon to drive them away. This proves that even at that time the ROC government possessed sovereignty over Tiaoyutai.
15. Finally, the overriding historical fact which renders all Japanese claims to Tiaoyutai utterly hollow and without force, is the 1952 Sino-Japanese Peace Treaty, signed by both the governments of China and Japan. Article 4 of the Treaty explicitly declares that "All treaties, special accords, agreements concluded prior to the Ming Kuo 30 or December 9, 1941 Sino-Japanese Accord, are as a consequence of the conclusion of the war, hereby null and void." In other words the Ma-kuan Treaty of 1895 was null and void. Japan's acquisition of Taiwan and Tiaoyutai were null and void. Japan simply and plainly cannot make demands or claims of any sort whatsoever regarding sovereignty over Tiaoyutai.
Let Chinese throughout the world stand united, setting aside political differences to unite in defense of Tiaoyutai, refusing to yield until we emerge victorious!
The Republic of China Alliance for the Defense of Tiaoyutai
9/28/1996
Sunday, September 08, 1996
Lee Teng-hui: Tiaoyutai, or Senkaku?
Lee Teng-hui: Tiaoyutai, or Senkaku?
Bevin Chu
September 07, 1996
The China News
Letters Editor
Dear Sir/Madam,
Some trusting souls in Taiwan are patiently awaiting R.O.C. President Lee Teng-hui to take decisive action against the naked Japanese bullying of Taiwanese fishermen attempting to lawfully fish in Chinese territorial waters.
They must have been on vacation last summer when Lee held his now infamous interview with the late Japanese journalist Ryotaro Shiba. Lee brusquely ordered his entire staff out of the room, even the secret service detail entrusted with his personal safety, so he could indulge in a nostalgic lovefest with his long lost compatriot. Lee, in a confessional mood, revealed that he had "thought of himself as Japanese" and reminisced how heartbroken he was upon learning that Japan, having lost its savage war of aggression against China and America, was restoring Taiwan (of which Tiaoyutai is a part) to China.
Does the term "Stockholm Syndrome" ring a bell? No? How about "Quisling"? Does anyone care to bet that Lee, who to this day speaks better Japanese than Chinese, thinks of the Chinese island by its Japanese name "Senkaku" rather than by its Chinese name "Tiaoyutai"?
Compare Lee's theatrical show of bravado in response to Beijing's missile tests with his reaction, or more accurately, non-reaction, to repeated blatant Japanese gunboat intimidation. Not a peep. Not a whimper.
To anyone who genuinely imagines that Lee Teng-hui would dare give offense to his beloved Japanese colonial masters and defend the territorial integrity of the nation to which he is President and Commander in Chief, my advice is "Don't hold your breath."
Sincerely,
Bevin Chu
Taipei, Taiwan, China
Bevin Chu
September 07, 1996
The China News
Letters Editor
Dear Sir/Madam,
Some trusting souls in Taiwan are patiently awaiting R.O.C. President Lee Teng-hui to take decisive action against the naked Japanese bullying of Taiwanese fishermen attempting to lawfully fish in Chinese territorial waters.
They must have been on vacation last summer when Lee held his now infamous interview with the late Japanese journalist Ryotaro Shiba. Lee brusquely ordered his entire staff out of the room, even the secret service detail entrusted with his personal safety, so he could indulge in a nostalgic lovefest with his long lost compatriot. Lee, in a confessional mood, revealed that he had "thought of himself as Japanese" and reminisced how heartbroken he was upon learning that Japan, having lost its savage war of aggression against China and America, was restoring Taiwan (of which Tiaoyutai is a part) to China.
Does the term "Stockholm Syndrome" ring a bell? No? How about "Quisling"? Does anyone care to bet that Lee, who to this day speaks better Japanese than Chinese, thinks of the Chinese island by its Japanese name "Senkaku" rather than by its Chinese name "Tiaoyutai"?
Compare Lee's theatrical show of bravado in response to Beijing's missile tests with his reaction, or more accurately, non-reaction, to repeated blatant Japanese gunboat intimidation. Not a peep. Not a whimper.
To anyone who genuinely imagines that Lee Teng-hui would dare give offense to his beloved Japanese colonial masters and defend the territorial integrity of the nation to which he is President and Commander in Chief, my advice is "Don't hold your breath."
Sincerely,
Bevin Chu
Taipei, Taiwan, China
Wednesday, December 20, 1995
Can Taiwan join the United Nations?
Can Taiwan join the United Nations?
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Herb Ho
December 20, 1995
Comment: One of a handful of articles posted at The China Desk not written by me. Too good not to be included.
United Nations Logo
Taiwan now wants to join the United Nations, and the mainland China would like to keep it out. It seems like a replay of the diplomatic tug of war between the two parties from 1949 to 1971, only with their roles reversed. Back then, it was the mainland China that wanted to join the UN, and Taiwan was doing all it could to keep China beyond the pale.
It took the mainland China 22 years to succeed, but succeed it did, at Taiwan's expense. Taiwan's campaign now is apparently much more daunting than the mainland China's then, as the mainland China is now a much more formidable foe to Taiwan than Taiwan was then to the mainland. But Taiwan's appetite is also much smaller. China then wanted not only to join but also to join as a major power, recognized with a permanent seat at the Security Council. In addition, China also insisted that its entry be preceded with the removal of any and all of Taiwan's representation at the UN, no matter under what name. Taiwan now just wants to join, under any name, as an ordinary member so that it does not have to be excluded from the international community.
So, is there any possibility for Taiwan to join the UN by international law?
With 21 million people, Taiwan represents the world's largest self-governing body politic that is denied UN membership. One of the arguments that has often been made in support of Taiwan's UN membership is that its exclusion is itself a violation of the principle of universality as provided for in the Charter of the United Nations. Is it so? Well, not exactly. The Charter does contain a universality principle regarding membership. It is found in Paragraph 1 of Article 4, which reads:
Membership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter and, in the judgement of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations.
Now, if you read it carefully, you will find that this universality principle, the way it is phrased, only requires the organization to grant membership for STATES. By and of itself, it does not mandate membership for a group of people or an organization that does not constitute a state, whether or not that group or organization would otherwise be able to enjoy any international representation. So Taiwan's exclusion does not violate the Charter principle of universality unless Taiwan is a state at international law.
Is Taiwan a state? The Charter does not define what a state is, nor does any other UN document. The formula set out in the Montevideo Convention, 1933, to which only the United States and 15 Latin American countries are parties, is now seen as best reflecting the classical conditions under customary international law that a prospective state must satisfy. Article 1 of that convention (the word convention means treaty here, as is usual in international law):
The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with other states.
There can be no question that Taiwan has a permanent population and a government. Its territory may not be exactly defined, considering that a dispute over the Penghu (Pescadores) Achipelago, and the Jinmen and Mazu islands would almost certainly erupt between China and Taiwan, should the latter ever become unquestionably a state. But this is not fatal, as precedents exist, such as in the case of Israel, of a state coming into being with territorial disputes with its neighbours. The problem is with the last element.
The capacity to enter into relations with other states is both a prerequisite and a consequence of statehood because, until a body politic is accepted by established states as a state, it is prevented from entering into diplomatic relations even if it is willing and capable to do so. This brings us to the international law of recognition, which is the first and critical step for any prospective state to win an international personality.
Recognition is really two-fold: recognition of the state and recognition of the government, although they are typically done at the same time. Taiwan as a state has never been and is still not recognized by any state. Until it gets such recognition, it is moot to talk about its membership in the United Nations. But the government in Taipei was once recognized by most of the world and is still recognized by close to 30 countries as the government of the Republic of China, which presumably covers all of China, including the mainland. And it was in that capacity that the Taipei government once had a seat in the UN as a member as well as a permanent member of its Security Council. Yet, by UN resolution, the Republic of China has been replaced by the People's Republic of China, and as far as the UN is concerned, the Republic of China that ruled all China has ceased to exist. More on this later.
Now, the Taiwan government of late has been espousing the idea of the Republic of China on Taiwan. It seems to be taking the position that there is now another Republic of China, which covers only Taiwan, and possibly Penghu, Jinmen and Mazu as well. Its efforts to "return" to the UN appears to be premised on that position. But this proposition is fraught with problems of logic and quite untenable at international law. There may be a de facto Republic of China on Taiwan, but, de jure, when and from where did this ROC on Taiwan crop up? How can an undeclared new state be a new state? If it is a new state, how can it "return" to the UN, since it has never been a UN member? And who has recognized such a state? As of yet, there does not seem to be any formal international recognition of an ROC on Taiwan as a separate and independent state, if you say the term in one breath.
At times, the Taiwanese authorities seem to argue that ROC was founded in 1911 to as a successor state to the state of the Qing Dynasty, and that it has continued to exist to the present day, albeit with a much smaller territory now. They contend that the fact that its territory has drastically shrunk should not be used against according it international personality. Moreover, the PRC, they insist, cannot claim to have sovereignty over Taiwan, since it has never ruled Taiwan at all. But PRC can counter by saying that, if the ROC, which did not rule Taiwan during its first 34 years, could regain sovereignty over Taiwan for China, the PRC can do the same as a successor state to the ROC. Such succession has after all been sanctioned by the United Nations through the Resolution 2759 passed by the General Assembly at its 26th session on October 25, 1971. For its premier importance, the Resolution is worth quoting in full:
The General Assembly, Recalling the principles of the Charter of United Nations, Considering that the restoration of the lawful rights of the People's Republic of China is essential both for the protection of the Charter of the United Nations and for the cause that the United Nations must serve under the Charter, Recognizing that the representatives of the Government of the People's Republic of China are the only lawful representatives of China to the United Nations and that the People's Republic of China is one of the five permanent members of Security Council, Decides to restore all its rights to the People's Republic of China and to recognize the representatives of its Government as the only legitimate representatives of China to the United Nations, and to expel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek from the place they unlawfully occupy at the United Nations and in all the organizations related to it.
The resolution really could not have been framed in clearer terms. The PRC, which had since its inception exhibited a strong interest in joining the United Nations, had always insisted on joining with conditions. That is, it must be recognized as a successor state to ROC and ROC must not be allowed to continue any representation in the UN. In other words, Taiwan had to be rendered illegitimate at international law. It took PRC 22 years to get it, but it did get it. It was a remarkable diplomatic triumph, all the more remarkable because Taiwan then had the full backing of the United States and it itself was still sitting as a permanent member of the Security Council until the day before the decision was made to kick it out.
China's entry into the UN marked one of the few times that a General Assembly resolution carried teeth. For all its representativeness, the General Assembly does not really have much power, its role on substantive issues being confined to making recommendations for the Security Council, where most of the UN power is vested by Chapter V of the Charter. The monumental decision on China's UN representation was in fact made as one on the credentials of the representatives, a procedural matter, relating only to the internal administration of the UN, which is one of the few things that the General Assembly can make clearly binding decisions without authorization from the Security Council. Such being the case, the legal force of the resolution was not subject to a vote at the Security Council, precluding a veto by any of its permanent members. And when Western nations headed by the United States failed to have it classified as "an important question" as described in Article 18 of the Charter, it did not have to meet the two thirds majority hurdle either. It was not even considered an issue of admission of a new member or expulsion of an old member. The whole thing was simply considered the replacement of illegitimate representatives with legitimate ones, from the same country. The representatives of Chiang Kai-shek were expelled, but not as representatives of any state, since the representation of that state was being continued. They were expelled simply because they did not legitimately represent any state. So, even the veto power that they could have brandished a few days earlier did not help them.
In the current replay of the similar, if not same, drama, is it possible to for Taiwan to repeat the scheme? Barring unimaginable changes in China or the UN, no. This is because, if Taiwan wants to join the UN, they will have to join as a new member, under whatever name. Regarding admission of new members, Paragraph 2 of Article 4 of the Charter has this to say:
The admission of any such state to membership in the United Nations will be effected by a decision of the General Assembly upon recommendation of the Security Council.
This is to say that an admission of a new member must be approved by the Security Council first before the General Assembly can make any decision thereupon. Since China will certainly veto any such recommendation, there is really no way Taiwan can join the UN unless and until it sorts out its relations with mainland China. Not even if it succeeds in declaring independence and becomes outright independent. The harsh reality that dreamers of Taiwan independence have to face is that, without UN membership, Taiwan's claim as an independent state will always sound hollow, but unless it becomes an independent state recognized by China, it cannot possibly join the UN.
Originally posted at Chinese Community Forum (CCF)
Herb Ho
December 20, 1995
Comment: One of a handful of articles posted at The China Desk not written by me. Too good not to be included.
United Nations Logo
Taiwan now wants to join the United Nations, and the mainland China would like to keep it out. It seems like a replay of the diplomatic tug of war between the two parties from 1949 to 1971, only with their roles reversed. Back then, it was the mainland China that wanted to join the UN, and Taiwan was doing all it could to keep China beyond the pale.
It took the mainland China 22 years to succeed, but succeed it did, at Taiwan's expense. Taiwan's campaign now is apparently much more daunting than the mainland China's then, as the mainland China is now a much more formidable foe to Taiwan than Taiwan was then to the mainland. But Taiwan's appetite is also much smaller. China then wanted not only to join but also to join as a major power, recognized with a permanent seat at the Security Council. In addition, China also insisted that its entry be preceded with the removal of any and all of Taiwan's representation at the UN, no matter under what name. Taiwan now just wants to join, under any name, as an ordinary member so that it does not have to be excluded from the international community.
So, is there any possibility for Taiwan to join the UN by international law?
With 21 million people, Taiwan represents the world's largest self-governing body politic that is denied UN membership. One of the arguments that has often been made in support of Taiwan's UN membership is that its exclusion is itself a violation of the principle of universality as provided for in the Charter of the United Nations. Is it so? Well, not exactly. The Charter does contain a universality principle regarding membership. It is found in Paragraph 1 of Article 4, which reads:
Membership in the United Nations is open to all other peace-loving states which accept the obligations contained in the present Charter and, in the judgement of the Organization, are able and willing to carry out these obligations.
Now, if you read it carefully, you will find that this universality principle, the way it is phrased, only requires the organization to grant membership for STATES. By and of itself, it does not mandate membership for a group of people or an organization that does not constitute a state, whether or not that group or organization would otherwise be able to enjoy any international representation. So Taiwan's exclusion does not violate the Charter principle of universality unless Taiwan is a state at international law.
Is Taiwan a state? The Charter does not define what a state is, nor does any other UN document. The formula set out in the Montevideo Convention, 1933, to which only the United States and 15 Latin American countries are parties, is now seen as best reflecting the classical conditions under customary international law that a prospective state must satisfy. Article 1 of that convention (the word convention means treaty here, as is usual in international law):
The state as a person of international law should possess the following qualifications: (a) a permanent population; (b) a defined territory; (c) government; and (d) capacity to enter into relations with other states.
There can be no question that Taiwan has a permanent population and a government. Its territory may not be exactly defined, considering that a dispute over the Penghu (Pescadores) Achipelago, and the Jinmen and Mazu islands would almost certainly erupt between China and Taiwan, should the latter ever become unquestionably a state. But this is not fatal, as precedents exist, such as in the case of Israel, of a state coming into being with territorial disputes with its neighbours. The problem is with the last element.
The capacity to enter into relations with other states is both a prerequisite and a consequence of statehood because, until a body politic is accepted by established states as a state, it is prevented from entering into diplomatic relations even if it is willing and capable to do so. This brings us to the international law of recognition, which is the first and critical step for any prospective state to win an international personality.
Recognition is really two-fold: recognition of the state and recognition of the government, although they are typically done at the same time. Taiwan as a state has never been and is still not recognized by any state. Until it gets such recognition, it is moot to talk about its membership in the United Nations. But the government in Taipei was once recognized by most of the world and is still recognized by close to 30 countries as the government of the Republic of China, which presumably covers all of China, including the mainland. And it was in that capacity that the Taipei government once had a seat in the UN as a member as well as a permanent member of its Security Council. Yet, by UN resolution, the Republic of China has been replaced by the People's Republic of China, and as far as the UN is concerned, the Republic of China that ruled all China has ceased to exist. More on this later.
Now, the Taiwan government of late has been espousing the idea of the Republic of China on Taiwan. It seems to be taking the position that there is now another Republic of China, which covers only Taiwan, and possibly Penghu, Jinmen and Mazu as well. Its efforts to "return" to the UN appears to be premised on that position. But this proposition is fraught with problems of logic and quite untenable at international law. There may be a de facto Republic of China on Taiwan, but, de jure, when and from where did this ROC on Taiwan crop up? How can an undeclared new state be a new state? If it is a new state, how can it "return" to the UN, since it has never been a UN member? And who has recognized such a state? As of yet, there does not seem to be any formal international recognition of an ROC on Taiwan as a separate and independent state, if you say the term in one breath.
At times, the Taiwanese authorities seem to argue that ROC was founded in 1911 to as a successor state to the state of the Qing Dynasty, and that it has continued to exist to the present day, albeit with a much smaller territory now. They contend that the fact that its territory has drastically shrunk should not be used against according it international personality. Moreover, the PRC, they insist, cannot claim to have sovereignty over Taiwan, since it has never ruled Taiwan at all. But PRC can counter by saying that, if the ROC, which did not rule Taiwan during its first 34 years, could regain sovereignty over Taiwan for China, the PRC can do the same as a successor state to the ROC. Such succession has after all been sanctioned by the United Nations through the Resolution 2759 passed by the General Assembly at its 26th session on October 25, 1971. For its premier importance, the Resolution is worth quoting in full:
The General Assembly, Recalling the principles of the Charter of United Nations, Considering that the restoration of the lawful rights of the People's Republic of China is essential both for the protection of the Charter of the United Nations and for the cause that the United Nations must serve under the Charter, Recognizing that the representatives of the Government of the People's Republic of China are the only lawful representatives of China to the United Nations and that the People's Republic of China is one of the five permanent members of Security Council, Decides to restore all its rights to the People's Republic of China and to recognize the representatives of its Government as the only legitimate representatives of China to the United Nations, and to expel forthwith the representatives of Chiang Kai-shek from the place they unlawfully occupy at the United Nations and in all the organizations related to it.
The resolution really could not have been framed in clearer terms. The PRC, which had since its inception exhibited a strong interest in joining the United Nations, had always insisted on joining with conditions. That is, it must be recognized as a successor state to ROC and ROC must not be allowed to continue any representation in the UN. In other words, Taiwan had to be rendered illegitimate at international law. It took PRC 22 years to get it, but it did get it. It was a remarkable diplomatic triumph, all the more remarkable because Taiwan then had the full backing of the United States and it itself was still sitting as a permanent member of the Security Council until the day before the decision was made to kick it out.
China's entry into the UN marked one of the few times that a General Assembly resolution carried teeth. For all its representativeness, the General Assembly does not really have much power, its role on substantive issues being confined to making recommendations for the Security Council, where most of the UN power is vested by Chapter V of the Charter. The monumental decision on China's UN representation was in fact made as one on the credentials of the representatives, a procedural matter, relating only to the internal administration of the UN, which is one of the few things that the General Assembly can make clearly binding decisions without authorization from the Security Council. Such being the case, the legal force of the resolution was not subject to a vote at the Security Council, precluding a veto by any of its permanent members. And when Western nations headed by the United States failed to have it classified as "an important question" as described in Article 18 of the Charter, it did not have to meet the two thirds majority hurdle either. It was not even considered an issue of admission of a new member or expulsion of an old member. The whole thing was simply considered the replacement of illegitimate representatives with legitimate ones, from the same country. The representatives of Chiang Kai-shek were expelled, but not as representatives of any state, since the representation of that state was being continued. They were expelled simply because they did not legitimately represent any state. So, even the veto power that they could have brandished a few days earlier did not help them.
In the current replay of the similar, if not same, drama, is it possible to for Taiwan to repeat the scheme? Barring unimaginable changes in China or the UN, no. This is because, if Taiwan wants to join the UN, they will have to join as a new member, under whatever name. Regarding admission of new members, Paragraph 2 of Article 4 of the Charter has this to say:
The admission of any such state to membership in the United Nations will be effected by a decision of the General Assembly upon recommendation of the Security Council.
This is to say that an admission of a new member must be approved by the Security Council first before the General Assembly can make any decision thereupon. Since China will certainly veto any such recommendation, there is really no way Taiwan can join the UN unless and until it sorts out its relations with mainland China. Not even if it succeeds in declaring independence and becomes outright independent. The harsh reality that dreamers of Taiwan independence have to face is that, without UN membership, Taiwan's claim as an independent state will always sound hollow, but unless it becomes an independent state recognized by China, it cannot possibly join the UN.
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