IN A CRAMPED WORKSHOP just a few miles off the coast of China, Wu Zen- tung takes an old bomb fragment and within minutes has hammered it into a sleek kitchen knife. The bomb dates from 1958, when Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist forces managed to hold onto Quemoy, the little Taiwanese outpost that would become an issue in the 1960 presidential election. The Nationalists prevailed despite a merciless, 44-day artillery barrage from the mainland that looked like it might prove the trigger for World War III. Chinese Communist forces dropped some 474,910 bombs over those 44 days, and they would continue to shell Quemoy every other day for the next 20 years, right up until the U. S. recognized Beijing on New Year’s Day 1979. That’s a lot of steel, and in good entrepreneurial style Wu used it to found the Jin Her Lin Steel Knife Co., famous throughout Taiwan for its quality.
With China now conducting missile tests off the north coast of Taiwan proper, you might think Quemoy’s residents are having nightmares about a rerun. Yet despite a military buildup that has covered the island with concrete bunkers and fortified gun emplacements — even the main mountain has been hollowed out for defense — this has to be the most laidback flashpoint on earth. Market stalls are full of goods smuggled in from the mainland, including the ubiquitous red-colored packs of Special cigarettes (“Made in the Xiamen Cigarette Factory”). When I ask his customers if they worry about China, I am met with laughter all around. “The next time China tries, they would send guided missiles, not steel bombs,” says Wu. “And I don’t think we will be the target.”
The lack of anxiety in Quemoy illustrates the dramatic shift in Taiwan’s stre ngths and vulnerabilities. In the bad old days, with Chiang and Mao duking it o ut for control, the defense of Quemoy became a focal point of the “who’s tougher on Communism” debates of the Nixon-Kennedy presidential race. But today, Taiwan’s extraordinary financial success has led to an anxiety shift. Those who have look.:d out at Chinese guns for decades are calm. Yet those in the capital city of Taipei, some 250 miles across the Faiwan Strait, are in a panic — maybe because they have so much more to lose. In the month after Beijing’s Jiffy 18 announcement of missile tests, the Taipei stock market dropped 17 percent, and it could easily seesaw up and down should China decide on another show of strength.
All this stands in dramatic contrast to just a few months ago, when not even the massacre of 24 Taiwanese tourists by a renegade People’s Liberation Army outfit stopped the growing business ties between island and mainland (approved Taiwanese investment in China for the first seven months of 1995 is up 44 percent over last year). So what’s got China’s back up? The pundits trace it to Taiwanese President Lee Teng-hui’s visit to Cornell University earlier this year to attend his class reunion.
But it’s not so much the visit itself as the context, which Beijing sees as a concerted effort between the U.S. and Taiwan to split China — an impression only encouraged by Newt Gingrich’s call for the U.S. “to get it over with” and recognize Taiwan, and by Warren Christopher’s assurances to Beijing only a week before the Lee visit that it would not happen. Beijing, moreover, does not distinguish between President Lee, who is pushing for the international community’s de facto recognition of Taiwan’s unique circumstances, and the opposition Democratic Progressive party, which wants a formal divorce from China and the declaration of a new and independent nation. The South China Morning Post quoted Chinese President Jiang Zemin telling his military chiefs that “the Taiwan independence movement is getting out of hand and we cannot let this go on.”
Within Taiwan’s government, China’s anxieties are attributed to a failure to understand the give and take of political expression in a newly open Taiwan. In a recent private meeting with a visiting American supporter, Lee confided that he did not understand China’s pique. “I’m not the president of Taiwan,” he said. “I’m the president of the Republic of China. So what’s the problem?”
The problem, of course, is that China doesn’t believe him. From Beijing’s view, Lee’s push for Taiwan’s reentry into the United Nations (Taiwan was kicked out when the People’s Republic was let in back in the 1970s), his visit to Cornell, and a visit to Europe by Prime Minister Lien Chan is the thin edge of the wedge for Taiwanese independence.
Many of the old guard in the KMT feel the same way. Lee, after all, is a native Taiwanese, not a mainlander as all the island’s leaders have been since Chiang arrived here in 1949. Lee’s connections to China, like those of most Taiwanese, are tenuous at best. And Lee did not help his case much with a May 1994 interview with a Japanese paper where he spoke effusively about Japan ( where he was educated) and with great ambivalence about China.
What do Taiwan’s people want? Well, that’s the kind of theoretical question that only leads in circles.
A far better question is what kind of arrangement they’d settle for. Clearly the business community, which has $ 15 to $ 20 billion investment in China, would like Lee to tone things down and get back to business as usual. Yet even business leaders would like Taiwan to have a little more breathing room, not to be forever shut out of such places as the U.N., the World Trade Organization and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, not to be treated as second-class citizens every time they go abroad and produce a passport recognized by only a handful of nations. “Taiwanese feel their inferior status every day in business when they go through customs or immigration,” says Maysing Yang of the Democratic Progressive party, the chief opposition party.
The DPP solution is straightforward: independence. Miss Yang cites polls showing that public resistance to China’s bullying is stiffening, and that more than two-thirds say they have not been intimidated by the Chinese missile tests. All this is just the kind of thing that sets China’s nerves on edge, but a senior government official emphasizes that it must be put in perspective. “Just because they [the DPP] are louder doesn’t mean they are more popular,” he says of the pro-independence push. And indeed where in the past these sentiments would (and did) land DPP members in jail, today they are a campaign issue. And while nobody in Taipei really expects China to invade because of it — among other things, t’s not clear China would prevail — everyone knows that it is well within China’s power to continue to destabilize Taiwan and undermine its market.
The irony, however, is that Lee is probably the best thing that China could h ave asked for in Taiwan , for he has managed to diffuse pro-independence sentiment by accommodating popular pressures for greater international recognition without surrendering the Communist-KMT orthodoxy that there is but one China, and that eventually Taipei and Beijing will be re-united. Should China continue its attacks, says Andrew Yang of the Taipei-based Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, the result will likely be a polarization of Taiwanese politics as both the KMT and DPP split into embittered factions, not exactly the best prescription for stable relations at a moment when China is itself rent by crisis over succession. “Time is on our side,” he says, “but we need to let the pot cool down. Now is not the time to push China’s bottom line.”
William McGurn is senior editor of the Far Eastern Economic Review.
by William McGurn, Quemoy, Taiwan
