Readers in Council,
The Japan Times,
5-4, Shibaura 4-chome,
Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-0023
I am sad that Taiwan has yet again failed to gain membership in the United Nations (“Taiwan vows to pursue U.N. membership despite 15th defeat,” September 21, 2007). The experience is a demonstration of the subjugation of Truth to the relative plasticity of Facts. This is the fact: the Communists control mainland China, the vast majority of Chinese territory and population. It is the platform of the current reality - the victory of Mao Zedong’s Communist Party over the Kwomintang Nationalists in 1949 was an effective fait acocmpli redefining “China” for the rest of the world. Subsequently, the Peking government has consistently described Taiwan as a renegade province and there is common endorsement in the world of the “one China” policy that recognizes Peking as the real government.
Now, here is the Truth: the communist movement that succeeded in China was a renegade movement against the legitimate Nationalist government of the Kwumintang. Therefore it is mainland China, properly speaking, that constitutes the renegade provinces, not tiny Taiwan. Properly speaking, if Truth guided our thinking, no one in the world would imagine to a future when Taiwan is reunited with mainland China, but rather the opposite, a future when the rebelling, communist-controlled mainland provinces are reunited with Taiwan. But a proposition like that is so at odds with the current conventions that it is easily dismissed as a crackpot idea from a crackpot (that’s me).
This does not mean that the Kwomintang government was a good government and better than the communists. Not at all. It is a question of legitimacy traced through pedigree, and the communists represent a broken pedigree. So does the Kwomintang. But the Kwomintang has a better claim to legitimacy through its primacy.