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Dec 3, 2008

Speculation

After going through a couple of the '78-'83 documents yesterday where China lays out the policy for "peaceful unification," I was struck at how little the official position has changed. I mentioned that Hu Jintao could have written Deng Xiaoping's editorial. But he hasn't.

And then I wondered why the CCP has been keeping such a low profile.

If I were the CCP, and I had all these great sounding terms for unification (they sound like "status quo, but we get your 22 allies"), why wouldn't I talk about them them? And then it struck me that the CCP just spent the last 8 years berating and threatening Taiwan; that they got their man in power already; and that if they can just pretend 30 year old terms are new proposals, people might buy it this time around!

So to make that happen, you have to minimize talking about those terms in places where they'll hit the Taiwanese media at large. You've got to keep them fresh. So you just wait. Expect to hear the terms around the time of the peace treaty.

Does this strike you as an accurate reading of the situation?

2 comments:

David said...

I found the documents you posted very interesting reading. The main point that struck me was that they were written when Taiwan was a one-party authoritarian state and the terms would be achievable on that basis. Now the KMT seems to be moving Taiwan in that direction (although still some way from achieving it).

阿牛 said...

I also noticed that as well, and wonder if Beijing is keeping silent on things like whether this is 'region to region' or what not just because they REALLY view it as 'party to party.'