Notwithstanding these sentiments, the Chinese government acted with caution and moderation; but as Chinese power in the region grows, the relationship between the China and the overseas Chinese – who wield exceptional economic power in virtually every ASEAN country, [964] and whose self-confidence, status and position will be greatly enhanced by China ’s rise – will become a growing factor in these countries. [965] Emboldened by the rise of China, the local Chinese may seek to take advantage of their improved bargaining position in order to enhance their power, while governments in these countries are likely to be increasingly cautious about the way they handle their Chinese minorities for fear of upsetting Beijing. The historian Wang Gungwu argues that the overseas Chinese share many characteristics with other ethnic minorities: ‘But where the “Chinese” are totally different is [that] their “mother country” is near Southeast Asia, very large and populous, potentially powerful and traditionally contemptuous of the peoples and cultures of the region.’ [966]
There have been two great exceptions to the new turn in China ’s regional policy. One is China ’s most important ‘lost territory’, namely Taiwan, and the other her regional colonizer and greatest adversary, Japan. While China has pursued a strategy of engagement, accommodation and compromise with virtually every other country in the region since the turn of the century, that cannot be said of its attitude towards Japan or, at least until recently, Taiwan. [967]
China’s attitude towards Taiwan is fraught not only because it regards the island as one of its lost territories, and therefore as historically part of China; there is an extra charge because Taiwan became a bone of contention after the civil war between the Chinese Communist Party and the nationalist Kuomintang, with the flight of Chiang Kai-shek and his forces to the island and the declaration that it was now the Republic of China, claiming sovereignty over the whole of China. As a consequence, Taiwan represents unfinished business, the only incomplete item on the Party’s civil war agenda. This is why the return of Taiwan to Chinese sovereignty is the ultimate non-negotiable for the present regime and, given the strength of Chinese public opinion on the issue, probably for any other regime one could imagine as well. [968] The road since 1949 has been tortuous, from the pariah status bestowed upon China by the West and its recognition of Taiwan rather than the People’s Republic of China as the true China, to the American volte-face after the Nixon-Mao rapprochement, and then the steady international isolation of Taiwan over the last four decades. But China ’s ultimate objective, namely reunification, has proved beyond reach because the Taiwanese themselves have remained firmly opposed to it, with the tacit support of the Americans.
Indeed, China ’s hopes were to be thwarted by a most unexpected development, a growing sense of Taiwanese identity culminating in the electoral defeat of the Kuomintang (KMT), which, in principle at least, had always supported a one-China policy, and the victory of the pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). After the election of the DPP’s Chen Shui-bian as president in 2000, Taiwan pursued a policy of desinicization and increasingly assertive nationalism. This happened to coincide with growing economic interdependence between China and Taiwan, which, though resisted for a period by Chen and his predecessor as president, Lee Teng-hui, [969] has accelerated to the point where, by 2003, half of the top 1,000 Taiwanese firms, including all the major computer companies, had invested in the mainland, usually in manufacturing subsidiaries. Around three-quarters of Taiwanese foreign direct investment presently goes to China, and there are hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese living and working in the Shanghai region and Guangdong province. The Chinese market now accounts for around 40 per cent of Taiwanese exports, a huge increase on just a few years ago. [970] Will growing economic interdependence mean that the two countries are drawn irresistibly closer together, resulting in some kind of political arrangement between them? Or will the sense of difference that clearly informs Taiwanese consciousness close off that option and lead to a growing desire for de jure, and not just de facto, independence?
