by Brian Hioe
語言:
English
Photo credit: Screenshot
A RECENT OP-ED in the Australian Financial Times last month by Chinese ambassador to Australia, Xiao Qian, has provoked consternation.
In the article, Xiao repeats a number of commonly repeated claims about Taiwan and China. Xiao frames the DPP as “incremental pro-independence” and suggests that it is the DPP that is ramping up tensions across the Taiwan Strait.
Likewise, Xiao is at odds to assert that Taiwan has belonged to China since time immemorial. Xiao accomplishes by raising the history of Ming dynasty loyalist pirate warlord Koxinga, or Cheng Cheng-gong, framing Koxinga as having taken Taiwan for China.
Xiao attempts to suggest an international consensus on Taiwan that the DPP government is violating. Xiao asserts that an international consensus on Taiwan was arrived at through the Cairo Declaration and UN Resolution 2758.
It is, of course, the Chinese government that threatens Taiwan daily through air incursions and naval activity. This also occurs through China carrying out grey-zone activity aimed at eroding away at Taiwan’s sovereignty even when such incidents risk dangerous escalation.
Koxinga Temple in Taiwan. Photo credit: Public Domain
To this extent, the claim that Taiwan has belonged to China since time immemorial is simply fictitious. For one, Taiwan’s first inhabitants are Indigenous, and Indigenous remember Koxinga as a genocidal Columbus figure. Xiao’s claims are nothing more than Indigenous erasure.
But Koxinga has often been deployed as a figure to justify imperial claims over Taiwan–and not just by China. Koxinga was, of course, also half-Japanese. As a result, the Japanese empire embraced him as a historical figure who would justify their colonization of Taiwan.
Moreover, contemporary China is the People’s Republic of China (PRC), which has never controlled Taiwan in the course of its eighty years of history. The PRC claims to inherit the territorial claims of the Qing dynasty, even if it emerged from political forces involved in the overthrow of the Qing.
But nor was Koxinga loyal to the Qing, if the attempt is to claim that he took Taiwan for China. In this sense, there are a number of ahistorical claims that are embraced in the course of the narrative that Xiao puts forward.
In this way, there is no international consensus on Taiwan’s status. It is simply that China alleges there is an international consensus that accords to its own claims over Taiwan.
For example, the US and China do not share any One China stance on Taiwan. The US One China Policy is different from China’s One China Principle, but China frequently acts as though the two are the same, and seeks to conflate the two in order to suggest that the US is violating its own principles. Each country in the world has a different One China Policy.
Indeed, one also wonders why Chinese claims over Taiwan are so reliant on agreements that the people of Taiwan had no stake in, but in which Taiwan’s fate was dictated by great powers at the disregard of Taiwan’s agency or self-determination. This broadly applies to agreements negotiated by the KMT, as well, before Taiwan’s democratization, such as the purported 1992 Consensus.
Xiao’s claims are par for the course, then. Yet it proves worrisome that these views are framed as valid opinions on Taiwan in forums for international discourse, rather than claims made as part of a factually and historically incorrect nationalist narrative aimed at justifying irredentist claims over Taiwan by the Chinese government.