Posted on: Friday, July 13, 2001

Editorial
New wrinkle appears in China-Taiwan feud

Taiwan's main opposition party reportedly is on the verge of endorsing the idea of creating a confederation with China. It's an idea that must strike many Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Strait as ironic in the extreme.

The party is the Kuo-mintang, or Nationalist, Party, which traces its origins to Dr. Sun Yat-sen, who led the overthrow of the last Chinese emperor in 1911.

In 1945, the Kuomintang-led Chinese government under Chiang Kai-shek accepted the return of Taiwan from its Japanese occupation, and its troops promptly looted it of important infrastructure and slaughtered a substantial number Taiwanese.

In 1949, Chiang lost the civil war against Mao Zedong's Communists, and he and his colleagues fled to Taiwan, where Chiang ran a very tough dictatorship until his death in 1975. He never quit claiming to govern all of China.

Mandarin Chinese was imposed as the official language of Taiwan, even though 80 percent of the population spoke a variant of Fujianese and resented being ruled by these minority refugees. Indeed, while the Kuomintang and the Communists were political enemies, they shared more in common culturally than the Kuomintang and the native Taiwanese.

But Chiang's son and successor, Chiang Ching-guo, allowed the changes that brought industrialization and wealth, and he named as his vice president a native Taiwanese, Lee Teng-hui, who succeeded Chiang as the last Kuomintang president of Taiwan. The party's standing had improved enormously by the time Lee apologized for his party's historic abuses against native Taiwanese.

But when term limits brought the end of Lee's rule, a hard-fought campaign saw the Kuomintang candidate badly beaten last year by another native Taiwanese, Chen Shui-bian, who before taking office had been an advocate of outright independence for Taiwan.

China, of course, has promised to invade Taiwan if it should declare independence.

That is dangerous, charges the Kuomintang Party. It warns that keeping Chen as president risks war with China, and it offers itself as the best vehicle for peaceful reunification with the mainland. The irony is that it is the Kuomintang that fought and lost a long and bloody civil war with the Communists.

Opinion surveys have made clear that Taiwan's people want no part of being ruled by China, particularly so long as it is much poorer and far less free than Taiwan. But a harder question to answer is whether Taiwan's people are willing to risk war to remain politically separate. If not, the Kuomintang may have found a formula to regain power in Taiwan.