NON-FICTION: TAIWAN'S PATHETIC INDEPENDENCE

I had always heard about how China wanted to control Taiwan.


It's the kind of thing that we know dictatorships do. At least four generations of Americans have spent their lives knowing China to be a gigantic mob of evil bent on storming our shores and extinguishing our leading light of liberty.


The American media generally focuses on China's claims towards Taiwan. But they don't portray this policy as what it actually is, a continuation and imitation of Taiwan's policy toward the Mainland back when it was The China.


Before Nixon and Carter shifted recognition towards the Peoples of Republic of China, and the ruling Communist Party, most western countries regarded The Republic of China as the legitimate government of China. This map shows the territory that the ROC (Taiwan) claimed control over.

The one China Policy is consistent with the Chinese system as recognized by the US and other western countries, there were not two separate countries until the US was forced to recognize the PRC, which had been ruling China, except Macao, Hong Kong, and Taiwan.

The idea now that Taiwan is not part of China is hypocritical and indicative of the sort of mystical thinking reserved for the nobility of Nationhood.

Taiwan's main Languages, both the national language, guoyu, or Mandarin, and Taiwanese, Minnanhua, which has close relatives across the way on the Mainland province Fujian, are undeniably Chinese languages, part of the system that includes all the varieties of Cantonese, the different types of Shanghainese, and the hundreds of other dialect groups.

The ruling class in Taiwan came from all over the Mainland, the food is Chinese, the culture is Chinese, and I can't think of many aspects of Taiwan that are not closely tied to the rest of China.

I know there are differences, linguistically and culturally, but they are not likely to be that much more than those between people from Shanghai and Beijing, from Shandong and Guangxi, from Emigre Chinese communities and the mainland.

The perspective that dominates the most prevalent discussion of China-Taiwan relations is that of possible victim with possible victimizer, the question to be argued for or against being: Is the US government not being hard enough on China for it's aggressive, domineering posture towards Taiwan?

This is not to say that the similarity between Taiwan's and China's rulers are denied or covered up, but the dominant perspective is generally aggressor versus aggressee.

The democratic perspective would see that both Countries, for that is what they have been from the time the Guomindang/KMT fled the mainland, are governed by authoritarian regimes, where Taiwan's One Party Rule has recently given way to a less autocratic state, and both Countries achieved rapid economic growth and industrial modernization under One Party, dictatorial governments.

But the democratic perspective in American popular discourse is used more for criticizing bad guys, usually those who we are supposed to be condemning, or whom our government supports, rather than seeking an accurate objective description of the political affairs of other nations.

The simple, stupid fact is that two places that have different ruling bodies, and correspondingly different legal and economic systems, are, in fact, different countries.

Spain and Portugal are different countries, but Catalan, though linguistically and culturally different from the rest of the country, is part of Spain. Portugal is closer linguistically and culturally than the Basque region, but Portugal is a separate country. Kurdish Iraq is separate linguistically and culturally, but still part of the Country Iraq. What kind of idiots would debate whether or not the Kurdish region 'belongs' to Iraq? What sort of magical possession exceeds both physicality, observability, and delineation?

The idiots who would even debate the question of whether or not Taiwan is a separate country are so incredibly stupid that they would neglect the very definition of 'country.'

Instead they throw around conflations of politics and culture, replacing description; i.e. is Taiwan in fact a separate political entity, with prescriptions, i.e. should Taiwan be independent, or should it 'return' to China, and evaluations of similarity, i.e. are Mainlanders and Taiwanese culturally the same, ethnically the same.

Again, if the ubiquitous outrage at antidemocratic regimes and practices were to actually correspond with actual analysis from a presumption of the validity of democratic government, than we would merely say that Taiwan is a separate country insofar as the people in Taiwan choose so, and then we would face the discomforting prospect of applying that same logic to Texas.

The idea that we can decide if it is part of China, and if China should have it, or, god forbid, whether either country is good or bad, is just another manifestation of the dominant trend in our intellectual realms to conflate description and prescription, our opinions with the will of some other country's citizens, and the context of history.

The pathetic thing about the current Taiwanese independence is that it coincides with the failure of the ROC. When the theologians of The State decided that China was not Taiwan, and the rest of the world forgot that it ever had been, the Taiwanese government set off on a hobble towards independence, with policies like the "Four Wants, One Without," "Special State to State Relation," "Taiwanization," and the "Four Stages of Taiwan" All of these are rationalizations of the failure of Taiwan as a political entity.

Set up by Japan and the US to counter the will of the Chinese people, who wanted a communist revolution, and in order to counter that revolution with militaristic Nationalism, Taiwan now clings to the opposite zeitgeist, the primacy of democratic ideals.