PDF(2.7mb) - 國家政策研究基金會

160 Taiwan Development Perspectives 2009
tonomy which comes with the status as dominion be
withheld, Tibet would rebel again and again. The People’s
Republic has to allocate an increasingly large defense
and internal security spending in Xinjiang as well.
If the Uighur Moslems were allowed to found a dominion,
Beijing would not have to deploy half a dozen
divisions in Xinjiang, while continuing to enjoy all the
economic benefits from that oil rich region. Inner
Mongolia may merge with Outer Mongolia, and join
the Chinese commonwealth of nations. Hong Kong
may also be given similar status. Singapore, with its
largely Chinese population, may consider joining the
new federation. So may Sarawak. As a matter of fact,
the commonwealth is an open-ended scheme to phase
out the Chinese empire once and for all.
Japan invaded China in 1937 to protect its national
economic interests. It started the Pacific War four years
later to insure its economic prosperity. It created the
Great East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere to protect and
promote its national interests. All the countries in
Southeast Asia now and China under Wang Ching-wei’s
rule were members of the Japanese-sponsored economic
community. Burma and India under Chandra
Bose also joined that organization. Japan’s economic
community project, backed by its military conquest of
the region, failed to bear any economic fruit. But it
reaped a much greater economic harvest in Southeast
Asia after World War II. It dominates the whole region
economically. It has achieved peacefully what it failed
to achieve by the use of force of arms during the last
world war. Revisionist historians are now wondering
who have won the Pacific War. The People’s Republic
of China will fare just as well as post-war Japan has, if
a Chinese commonwealth comes into being.
China is a cultural entity. It has never been a nation
state. Any peoples acculturated in China have become
part of the Chinese nation. That is the reason why
the Chinese empire had always been a benign empire
before Mao Zedong proclaimed the People’s Republic
in 1949. China used to be a benign suzerain to all its
vassal states. The Asia where China imposed its Pax
Sinica for centuries, in fact, appeared more like the
Commonwealth of Nations.
Change is taking place on the other side of the
Taiwan Strait. Ma Ying-jeou, a former Kuomintang
chairman, was elected president on March 22, 2008.
Unlike Chen Shui-bian, a native Taiwan islander whom
he succeeded, Ma is the son of a Hunanese Kuomintang
apparatchik. He knows well of his original sin of being
Chinese-born in Taiwan. Because of the Incident of
February 28 of 1947, in which at least 20,000 innocent
islanders were massacred by government troops sent
from China, mainlanders like Ma would not have had a
chance to get elected but for President Chen Shui-bian’s
truly disastrous misgovernment over the past eight
years. That is why Ma continues to insist that no reunification
with China will ever take place during his lifetime.
He does not want to antagonize the great majority
of Taiwan’s islanders. But he knows China will be
united in the end, though not in the not-too-distant future.
Paradoxically, Chiang Kai-shek’s indoctrination of
one China on the people of Taiwan has spawned a new
nationalism on the island. Most of the people – in fact,
except a handful of independence idealists – know they
are ethnically and culturally Chinese and identify
themselves with China, albeit they want to have their
own national identity. They wish their homeland would
be a truly independent, sovereign state. They know it is
impossible. Their second best choice is commonwealth
status or a close equivalent for Taiwan. They can be
won over as Taiwan keeps on relying increasingly
heavily on China for its survival as a prosperous
economy.
Texas is an example of the economic woes compelling
an independent, sovereign state to give up sovereignty.
It declared independence in 1836 during a
revolution against Mexico. The Republic of Texas had a
very difficult 10-year life. Financing proved critical,
and efforts to secure loans from foreign countries were
unsuccessful. Protection against the raids from Mexico
and occasional attacks by Indians required a mobile