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Government grappling with issue of identity
By James Wang 王景弘
The diplomatic truce with China that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his government adhere to has been so successful that they have to use stickers to save Taiwanese businesspeople from further attacks after the recent anti-Chinese protests in Vietnam. The government also has to go all the way to ask the American Institute in Taiwan to issue a letter to prove that Ma is no longer a US resident to help the president solve a personal political problem.
Meanwhile, Premier Jiang Yi-huah (江宜樺), who took such a high-profile approach in suppressing the student-led protests, will have to maintain a low profile when he transits through Los Angeles to attend the inauguration of Salvadorean president-elect Salvador Sanchez Ceren on Sunday.
As for the nation’s representative office in the US, it seems to have nothing better to do to than to bring out relics from the Qing Dynasty — in this case a contract between the Qing and the US dealing with the export of Chinese workers to the US to work on railroad construction — to highlight the long history of Sino-US relations.
Taiwan’s domestic identity crisis is slowly disappearing, but the Ma government’s diplomatic truce with China is intensifying the crisis over the nation’s international status. The differentiation between the status of Taiwan and China is becoming increasingly blurred, and Ma’s policies have only strengthened China’s annexation policy, which is aimed at undermining Taiwan’s international status.
Taiwanese businesspeople in Vietnam have criticized the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, saying it does not understand the situation in Vietnam, and that the stickers with the text: “I am Taiwanese, I come from Taiwan,” are useless.
Still, the fact that the Ma administration has been forced to use stickers in Vietnamese that tells the outside world: “I am Taiwanese” is a progress of sorts.
If the ministry could just enlarge the small English text: “I come from Taiwan” on the stickers and then distribute or display them at Taiwan’s representative offices around the world, that would be helpful to resolving the crisis surrounding the nation’s status. The problem is that the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) regime has never been able to cast off its outdated and confusing China identity.
If the government really wanted to build an unambiguous, independent and autonomous status for Taiwan, representative offices abroad — especially those in the US and Japan — should display the stickers used in Vietnam together with the Treaty of Shimonoseki, the Treaty of Peace with Japan signed in San Francisco and the Taiwan Relations Act, instead of telling stories about the Burlingame Treaty signed by the US and Anson Burlingame, who at the time was heading a Chinese diplomatic mission to the US and the principal European nations.
The Qing emperor signed the Burlingame Treaty, which was an amendment to the Treaty of Tianjin, in 1858, but the Qing Dynasty does not exist anymore, nor does the republic that replaced it. Today, this document, which was brought to Taiwan by late dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), is what Taiwan brings up.
Qing Dynasty Chinese workers and students benefited from the treaty. Overseas Taiwanese in the US today benefit from the Taiwan Relations Act and its separation of the Taiwanese immigration quota from the Chinese. Taiwanese businesspeople in Vietnam were attacked because their status is unclear.
Overseas Taiwanese are eager to display the fact that they are Taiwanese. Instead, Taiwan’s representative office in the US brings out an antiquated Qing Dynasty document talking about Chinese workers. What are these times we are living in?
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Perry Svensson
source: Taipei Times
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