Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
5-4 Shibaura 4-chome,
Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0023
China reacted strongly to recent comments by Taiwan’s President Lee Teng-hui. I think, though, that what China is really demonstrating is, as former U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said long ago, its immeasurable capacity to lie about common truths that everyone else in the world knows full well.
Beijing says that it regards Taiwan as a “renegade province” and continues to tout its “one China”policy - a policy that the United States pays lip service to and that we hear a lot about in the media. I also agree with a “one China” policy, but let’s get one thing straight. It is the Communist-controlled provinces of mainland China that are the renegades. Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalist Party might not have been the best government for China. In fact, it was horrible. But if we are talking about legitimacy of administrative heritage, we must remember that it was the Communists who were in revolt against the Nationalists, not the other way around.
Beijing talks about Taiwan’s eventual reunification with the motherland, and does not rule out the use of military force toward that end. I think that we should be talking about the reunification of mainland China with Taiwan, not the other way around. Unfortunately, we live in a world where truth succumbs to practicality in the name of peacefully “moving forward,” and the numbers favor China. If we throw away the truth, what are we moving forward to?
Published on Wednesday, August 4, 1999 as “China should unite with Taiwan.”
As time goes by I feel more and more strongly about this point. The quid pro quo of communist mainland China as the only recognized China so successfully pushes out other options that it changes reality. The reality is that the communists were in rebellion against the Chinese nationalists, not the other way round, so the reasonableness of my proposition that it is mainland China that ought rightly to re-join with Taiwan, not the other way around, seems obvious to me.