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Apr 30, 2009

Not with a bang

See Michael Turton's critical, perhaps pivotal, post on Connecting the Dots. In light of other recent moves of the KMT along with recent revival of the Treaty of Taipei I made a comment there amounting to this: I now believe the upcoming peace treaty will declare a formal end to hostilities of the Chinese civil war (not far fetched at all), will make some sort of statement about the place of Taiwan, autonomous region of China, will authorize conditional de facto self-administration by the ROC government on Taiwan, and will postpone ultimate discussions on joint administration/unification/annexation for a set period of time.

Before he made the post we were chatting online about the same topic, and I realized why I hadn't been able to visualize what a peace agreement will look like. In my mind, the sovereignty question was still untouchable and unresolvable, because the KMT would be forcibly constrained by public opinion in Taiwan, and because practical benefits of de facto independence would outweigh any ideological tendency to resolve the Taiwan question in a way that would be so decisive.

Now I believe they will sign an agreement which effectively resolves the Taiwan question, pass it off as Chinese recognition of the "status quo," get China to do a lot of investing and perhaps job creation as the election approaches, and pretend like nothing really happened on the sovereignty issue at all.

The KMT could well manage to do what I had believed to be unthinkable, formally wrap this all up in one term.

The DPP had better put together a real platform fast and begin collecting signatures for a referendum topic that might be able to head off the end game (no point waiting around now) -- perhaps something like "Do you agree that any change to Taiwan's current 'de facto' independence from the People's Republic of China' or agreements signed with that polity require approval by the people through referenda?"

2 comments:

Dixteel said...

Hmm...it's a very likely scenario...

Perhaps what we can also do is to argue that those treaties are only between CCP and KMT, not between China and Taiwan. The arguement is very logical, although KMT is Taiwan's current governing party, Taiwanese did not concent them to sign any treaty regarding Taiwan's soverignty.

However, although undesirable, Taiwanese cannot stop KMT from signing such treaty, because it's their own business. In fact, perhaps Taiwanese should encourage KMT party to go back to China. But the deal should only be between KMT and CCP, not Taiwan (ROC) and China. Although to China, CCP equals Chinese government, but to Taiwan, KMT does not equal to Taiwanese government.

If this type of argument is made clear domestically and internationally, Taiwan might be able to avoid total ruin. KMT will loss their footing in Taiwan in election. After this...arguement for removal of ROC "government in exile" can be made because there is no reason for exile anymore due to KMT CCP consolidation. The important thing is to make clear that ROC is a government in "exile," and does not have the right to represent Taiwanese. Taiwanese can then setup a true Taiwanese government.

Hmm...this suggestion is probably not practical...but I am just throwing out some idea...this is really a crisis for Taiwan.

阿牛 said...

I think it's nice to talk about all options at this point, as we are running out of time. Some good analysis here, Dixteel.