One China with Two Interpretations of It

Sun Yat-sen

As China is asserting itself as a superpower in the world and is expected to compete for world leadership in no more than a decade or two, the political and social situation in this huge country becomes of great concern for all the people on the planet, since there is a good chance that Beijing will dictate global policies in the decades to come.

Leaders of the countries embattled by economic crisis are already paying visits to the Chinese leaders, and they get their problems solved. Chinese spend a lot of money to help economies in the world and get involved in Europe, where they buy European bonds, bailing out economies that otherwise would go bankrupt, they invest in Africa, where controversial leaders like Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe thank them as the saviors of the economy, they invest in Asia, and probably in America too.

At a time when all economies in the spending consumerist West experience a shortage of cash, China has plenty, maybe because the people of the Communist republic don’t spend that much. Some of them barely spend for a plate of rice daily.

It is conceivable that China is not helping the entire world out of the goodness of its leaders heart. At some point in time, China will want something in return. Probably won’t even be interests for the money loaned, because Chinese mind works different from the speculative mind of some Europeans or Americans, who created the financial bubble with a lot of inexistent money in it, whose explosion brought nations at the doorsteps of the Chinese leaders begging for money.

Chinese have a real cult for work and for earning money in an industrious way, not speculating it in the market stocks. Therefore it is likely that what China will expect in return for its help in this world crisis is a set of gestures of goodwill rather than an economic advantage, since by the end of the new wave of crisis China could be far away in economic terms as compared to the jolted states of Europe or America.

Is it possible for the People’s Republic of China to receive gestures of goodwill similar to those in 1971, when the Republic of China, also known as Taiwan, was expelled from the United Nations General Assembly, where it had been since the foundation of the world body, so that its place be taken by the current money loaner of the economies in trouble?

One of the most interesting problems for mainland China when it comes to the relation to Taiwan is related to its own legitimacy. Taiwan for China is not just another province lost in a colonial time who should be returned to the motherland. Taiwan is considered to be “the other China,” Taiwanese dare say “the real China.”

Mao Zedong

Taiwan is the China that remained after the Communist regime took over most of the territory of China. People’s Republic of China never accepted and never will accept the “two Chinas” concept, emphasizing the concept of “one China one Taiwan” but historically the Republic of China predates the People’s Republic of China, and its presence and recognition by the democratic world also predates the one of the Communist republic.

The Republic of China was founded in 1912 after the overthrowing of the Imperial House of China and was comprising the mainland China and Taiwan, that is the entire territory where Chinese people lived.

The republic was established at the end of the Xinhai revolution and the leader of this revolution was the famous Sun Yat-sen. The capital of the republic was Nanjing and the ruling party of the then Republican China was Kuomingtang of China, which translates “Chinese Nationalist Party,” which is the first Chinese party, founded in 1894 and who rules the Republic of China even now.

Kuomingtang Party is based on three principles: minzu, “nationalism,” understood by Sun Yat-sen as freedom from imperialism and the cultivating of civic nationalism, opposed to ethnic nationalism, thus allowing the ethnic groups in the country to live free under the same rule and within the same borders; minquan, “democracy,” by which the power of the people would be exercised through means of democratic institutions similar to those in the West, on which Sun was drawing; minsheng, the concept of social welfare, which is trying to rectify shortcomings of both socialism and capitalism.

One other principle of this party is the anti-Communism, which is pretty much the principle of all liberal parties in the world.

Sun Yat-sen was the first president of the Republic of China (ROC), and Yuan Shikai followed him in the office. Yuan was a Qing dinasty general and was asked by the revolutionary forces to take the office in exchange for the northern territories and the abdication of the emperor.

The times were volatile for China, and many governments were established in the decades during the WWII. In November 1931, Mao Zedong founded a Chinese Soviet Republic, which lasted 6 years, then the Fujian People’s republic lasted one year, and then the Japanese puppet states, who lasted until the end of the war.

At the end of the civil war, in 1949, the Communist Party of China took over the mainland and established the People’s Republic of China. The Government of the Republic of China retreated on the Taiwan island, where it has been staying until now.

With the United States preserving a line between the two Chinas after the Korean War, the battle between the two became diplomatic.

Taipei

People’s Republic of China was recognized by the states in the Soviet bloc and by the United Kingdom in 1950. Until 1971, the Republic of China was the legal representative by the United Nations of the entire Chinese people.

The United States and the allies in the Western bloc have supported the claim of the Republic of China to be the only representative of the Chinese people because they didn’t want the Soviet bloc to gain another vote in the United Nations. The Soviet Union boycotted on several occasions the reunions of the UN on that matter.

In 1955, Republic of China used a veto vote to block Mongolia’s admission to the UN on the ground that Mongolia is part of China. Mongolia’s admittance happened in 1960 at the end of an intense struggle.

Since 1960, the nations in the UN which were friendly to the People’s Republic of China started to move annual resolution in order to remove “Chiang Kai-shek’s representatives,” (that is the ROC) from the council and replace it by the People’s Republic of China.

The tide began to turn in favor of the Communist state by the end of the 1960s, when the newly admitted African countries were more in favor of Beijing’s China rather than of the one in Taipei. That would explain the fact that People’s Republic of China is now that grateful to the African regimes.

As many Western countries began taking the side of the People’s Republic in China in the UN assembly, in 1971, it was internationally recognized as the representative of the Chinese people. The Republic of China lost its seat in the United Nations Security Council and its place as a mere member by Resolution 2758, passed that year. By this resolution it was said that Taiwan was part of China (the People’s Republic of China, that is).

Since 1990, the Republic of China has constantly been asking the United Nations to recognize its representation in the United Nations as the sovereign of Taiwan land and the islands surrounding it.

The United Nations continues to deny its representation, even though the leaders of ROC have been willing to change their claim to representation of all Chinese people, and even to change the name of the country from Republic of China to Republic of China on Taiwan or simply Taiwan. People’s Republic of China continue to block this initiative.

At the present moment there are 23 nations that have diplomatic relations with the Republic of China, the most notable of which is the Vatican state, the only one in Europe to do so. There are four in Africa, six in Oceania, 12 in the Central and South America. There are many other states that don’t have relations on diplomatic level but maintain informal relations with this state.

Republic of China has submitted various applications to become members of the UN as simply sovereign state on Taiwan, renouncing the claim over mainland China and outer Mongolia. The move was dismissed systematically on the same ground: Taiwan is a province of China.

Giving its policies in the past, when it gave in to pressure during the Cold War, the United Nations are now trapped between their own resolution that says Taiwan is part of China, and the right of 25 million people to self-determination.

The last application ROC made by the UN was in 2008, when they were turn down as usual. Since 2009 they stopped making such applications. In 2008, Kuomingtang came to power again and the idea of Republic of China representing all Chinese in the world began a new era in Taiwan.

Kuomingtang has always opposed independence of Taiwan, because it would come along with renouncing the claim on representing all Chinese, and the former Vice President of the republic Lien Chan even agreed to a five-point plan with Hu Jintao to thaw the relations between the two parts of China. Chan was awarded for that in 2010 the first Confucius Peace Prize created as a counterpart to Nobel Peace Prize, awarded in 2010 to Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo.

Chan expressed his attachmant to the provision of the “1992 Consensus,” achieved at a meeting in November 1992 between representatives of both Chinese states, by which they all agreed that there was only one China, each part having a different interpretation of it: Communists consider that there is one China under Communist rule, while Taiwanese that there is one China under Kuomingtang rule.

Flag of the Republic of China

In spite of that consensus, or maybe because of it, Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China deny each other’s sovereignty and do not recognize each other as representatives of Chinese people.

Before the death of Mao Zedong, People’s Republic of China was thinking of “liberation” of Taiwan, with the same liberation they offered the Tibetans in the 1950s. Then, People’s Republic of China began reconstruction and the “liberation” was forgotten.

At the same time, the Republic of China was thinking of a liberation of its own, with the help of the U.S. military and a national uprising on mainland China that would bring nationalist forces in power in Beijing.

Now there is talk of reunification of China, of course each part understanding the reunification under their leadership: Communist Chinese under theirs, nationalist Chinese under their.

Republic of China went through its set of political problems of its own and had to keep a dictatorial regime on the island until the 1980s, as the Communist threat was imminent. 140,000 people were reported imprisoned or executed during what was called the White Terror, that is a martial law that was decreed in May 1949 and was lifted in July 1987.

The military rule was according to the teachings of Sun Yat-sen, who had imagined three stages of rebuilding China under his Kuomingtang: a military rule that would unite China by force, a phase of political tutelage and finally the democratic rule of the people.

Since the White Terror the party that built the republic was prejudiced and it took it decades to come back to power.

Even under these conditions, Republic of China developed at an amazing rate, being in the 1970s, the country with the most rapid growth in Asia after Japan.

Since it returned to the democratic rule, in early 1980s, Republic of China was deemed as one of the Asian miracles along with Hong Kong, Singapore and South Korea.

The rising of People’s Republic of China poses a problem to the growth of Taiwan, since the assets that made possible the Taiwanese miracle can now be found in the Communist state: crafty people, cheap labor force.

Mainland China allowed Taiwanese invest in the Chinese economy since 1990s, which made many investors search for a broader cooperation between the two countries.

Still, a mere comparison between the gross domestic product per capita will show the difference in the life style of Chinese on both sides of Taiwan Strait. Thus while Republic of China has a $18,300 per capita, being the 37th in the world on the 2010 estimation, while the People’s Republic of China has a $4,382 per capita, being the 94th country in the world according to the same 2010 estimation.

As the People’s Republic of China is rising mostly because of the immense number of people living in it and working hard in very difficult conditions, and will soon be the leader of the world, Republic of China remains the “orphan state” of the world, with prospects of having its statehood recognized by the same United Nations that received it with open arms in the 1940s slimmer than the Palestinian state.

People’s Republic of China claims that Taiwan is a Chinese province, whereas the Taiwanese consider that mainland China is their territory. Anything could happen, from a peaceful reunification, to a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. There is even the possibility that the Kuomingtang be inspirational for a future political party in mainland China, if the people decide they want more than one party in their country.

At the end of the day, there is probably one China with two interpretations of it. Question is: Which one will win in the long run?