WHY CHINA NEEDS TAIWAN TO SURVIVE

2008 is looming large on the world stage, and not just for us here in America-land. Yes, the year looks likely to see the most exciting presidential race in US history, one between Democrat Hillary Clinton and Republican Condoleeza Rice, which Condi will win. (You can get a “Rice2008” bumper sticker at Rice2008 or T-shirt at AmericansForRice )

And yes, the race will electrify the world and gain its rapt attention. Somehow, however, lots of folks in other places will also focus on events of far more personal importance to them – particularly in China and Taiwan.

2008 is the year of Communist China’s coming-out party, when it hosts the Beijing Olympics. The Chicoms intend to use the 2008 Beijing Olympics as did the Nazis in the 1936 Berlin Olympics – as a glorification of their rule and a demand that the world provide it with the prestige it so desperately craves.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post ran a front page article on a riot in Chizhou, a city along the Yangtze River in China’s Anhui province. 10,000 rioters, upset over the city police protecting the bodyguards of a Communist Party-affiliated businessman (after the bodyguards beat up a local boy), set police cars afire and looted a supermarket.

The story quoted China’s Public Security Minister Zhou Yongkang as saying there were some 74,000 “mass incidents” (riots, protests, demonstrations) involving 3.76 million Chinese last year. That’s close to 1,500 a week, over 200 a day – last year. There are more this year, thousands of Chizhous every week. The Post wasn’t reporting anything exceptional. In China right now, such riots are becoming an everyday occurrence – all over China by the hundreds.

The Chicoms can’t wait until 2008. China is well on its way to disintegrate into ungovernable chaos and the collapse of Communist power before then.

2008 is also the year of the next presidential election in Taiwan. After two terms, President Chen Shui-bian cannot run for re-election. How those contending to succeed him will conduct their campaigns may determine the survival of Taiwan – and of China. One campaign may prove critical, that of current Taiwan Prime Minister Frank Hsieh.

We first talked about Frank Hsieh in Sharansky in Taiwan , and his suggestion to replace the hypocritical “One country, two systems” policy to keep up the international pretense that Taiwan isn’t really independent, with “One country, one system” – with that one system being democracy.

Hsieh’s problem is the tricky tightrope he has to walk in advocating this policy – because his critics interpret it as committing Taiwan to reunify with China should China become democratic. Taiwanese want peace andfreedom, and will punish him at the ballot box if they think he would compromise their country’s de facto independence.

Thus Hsieh is going to turn his upcoming presidential campaign into a history lesson, and direct it at the people of mainland China as well as Taiwan.

Up until very recently, Taiwan was a one-party dictatorship just like Communist China. The Kuomintang (KMT) Nationalist Party had exercised a monopoly of power since Chiang Kai-shek’s forces retreated in defeat from Mao’s communists, and established the Republic of China on the island of Taiwan (or Formosa as the Portuguese called it) in 1949.

Any effort to establish an opposition party or publish an opposition magazine, any protest or demand for democratic human rights, was brutally suppressed by the KMT, such as the Kaohsiung Incident of December 10, 1979 (Kaohsiung being Taiwan’s second largest city after the capital of Taipei).

The KMT focused on growing Taiwan’s GDP through exports made with cheap but skilled labor. Any talk of democracy was dismissed with assertions that the people of Taiwan didn’t care about political freedoms; all they cared about was being more prosperous. This is word-for-word how the Chicoms dismiss calls for democracy in China today.

How the opposition DPP – Democrat Progressive Party – struggled through arrests, beatings, torture, and imprisonment of its founders in the 1980s to succeed in forcing the KMT to recognize it is a gripping saga. The achievement of democracy in Taiwan, culminating in the election of DPP presidential candidate Chen Shui-bian in 2000 – the first peaceful elected turnover of state power in 5,000 years of Chinese history – is an accomplishment of which all Taiwanese can be immensely proud.

This saga, this achievement, should also be an immense inspiration to the oppressed people of Communist China – and Frank Hsieh will make sure it is, for he is going to campaign directly to them.

This may turn out to be one of the most brilliant and historical political campaigns of modern times. He will speak to the voters in Taiwan through speaking to those who have no vote in China. By utilizing every means of communication available to penetrate the Chicoms’ wall of censorship, Hsieh will explain to the mainland Chinese:

*Communist Party control of their country is collapsing into ungovernable chaos, and the longer they insist on keeping their monopoly of power, the worse the chaos will grow.

*The Communists’ see their only hope of keeping their power is to create a foreign devil, redirect the peoples’ anger towards it, and say war with the foreign devil – the Taiwanese as “traitors to the motherland” – is necessary.

*The Communists would prefer to wait until after the 2008 Beijing Olympics for this war, just as Hitler waited until after the 1936 Berlin Olympics to start World War II, but they may not have that much time before the hundreds of riots every day now get out of control. So they may decide to have it before 2008, like the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 before the 1980 Moscow Olympics.

*The Communists’ argument against democracy – it will lead to chaos! – is exactly the same argument the KMT used to try and keep its power monopoly. The opposite is true: democracy is the only way for China not to disintegrate into chaos.

*Democracy is also the only way for there to be peace between China and Taiwan. Dictatorships always need enemies and war, democracies don’t. There has never been a war between two democracies. Taiwan has become a true democracy. China can become one as well.

*Democracy is the only path to China’s survival. This means the Communist government in Beijing must allow independent labor unions to organize, opposition political parties to form and run candidates for office in honest elections, independent magazines to be published, people to communicate freely by email – all these and more are democratic freedoms that the people in Taiwan now enjoy and the people of China should.

*The people of Taiwan and their government are no threat to you. The Communists who run your government are. The way to end this threat is for them to become a political party that has to compete for your vote, just as the KMT does now in Taiwan. Once the Communist Party has given up its power monopoly and China gains democratic freedoms, the threat of war between China and Taiwan dissolves, and any issue between them can be resolved peacefully as democracies do.

Frank Hsieh’s campaign for the presidency of Taiwan may be the catalyst for the democratization of China, of preventing impending war (possibly nuclear), and ensuring Taiwan’s independent existence. Let us wish him success.