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Dec 26, 2008

CCP peace agreement plans

I posted a little earlier this week on the KMT outline for reaching the peace agreement, but the CCP is of course thinking further ahead of that to unification.

Here's a fascinating, if late, catch of the CCP outline for progression of cross strait relations. The article is a summary of a bigger piece in the monthly China Review News (December edition not yet available online, but the article can be found here). The article was published by professor of international relations Huang Jiashu (黄嘉树), who works at Renmin University of China. Professor Huang professes to be revealing the CCP policy.

I posted this based on the summary, not the full article, and will try to do more on the full article later. The gist of the summary is thus:

Cross strait relations are currently at "low-level peace," which is to say there's no war.

The next step is to sign a peace agreement and thereby arrive at "mid-level peace," where war would be unthinkable and reconciliation would be the order of the day. China expects some regular mechanisms for military, party and leadership exchanges and cooperation (this is the most important step for the CCP; if the Taiwanese military works with the Chinese PLA instead of training to defend against it, weapons sales, defensive posturing, everything, could be drastically altered to the detriment of Taiwan's self-defensive capabilities).

And the third step would be "high-level peace," where economic and cultural relations would be fully normalized/systematized (presumably via common labor and goods markets) and the two sides could arrive at "unification on mutually agreed terms," (共议统一) which as far as I'm aware is the first time such "soft" language has been used in a publication like this, even in such an unofficial capacity.

The article notes that and as long as the forces of Taiwanese Independence "force" the Chinese to attack, the CCP will continue to work towards achieving peaceful unification and thereby "do everything in its power to prevent a cross-strait Chinese civil war."

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... with this government, it just might work.

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