As Taiwan’s Vice President Annette Lu argues (this writer had interviewed her in 2001), “the real key to territorial relationship between Taiwan and China can be found in the San Francisco Treaty of 1951. The Treaty’s purpose was for the victorious Allies to deal with the unresolved issues left over from the World War II. Japan agreed to relinquish sovereignty over Taiwan and the Pescadore islands, but the question of which entity would control Taiwan was left unanswered. The status of Taiwan was intentionally left out of the Treaty, because the Korean War had broken out a year before and the Communist China was blamed for goading North Korea into invading the South.
Accordingly, the US President Harry Truman declared that the legal status of Taiwan has yet to be determined. Under the San Francisco Treaty, Japan was censured for having been one of the parties that instigated World War II and was thus forced to hand over Taiwan. But handing Taiwan over to Communist China would have amounted to rewarding an instigator of yet another war (Korean War). In short, the eruption of the Korean War was followed by a hot debate over the status of Taiwan, prompting Truman to declare Taiwan’s legal status unsettled”.
“¦tremendous scope for economic and technological cooperation between India and Taiwan, which is not making much progress because of New Delhis slowness in the conclusion”¦
It is against this background that Lu says that given the regularity of elections these days in Taiwan, the Taiwanese people have democratically asserted that theirs is virtually an independent and sovereign state. Incidentally the present DPP government has taken some significant policy decisions to do away with the concept of “One-China”. From the Indian point of view, the change in Taiwan’s attitude towards Tibet may be quite interesting. It may be noted that under the KMT rule, there was no difference between Beijing and Taipei as far as the position on Tibet and Inner Mongolia was concerned. After all, the KMT, which claimed to represent the real government of the Chinese people, shared with the Communist rulers in Beijing the same hard-line stance on foreign and defence policies.
So much so that the government at Taipei had Special Commissions on Tibet and Mongolia and the Interior Ministry had separate sections dealing with them. Tibetans and Mongolians coming to Taiwan were treated as if they were citizens of the country and the Interior Ministry handled their visits. Therefore when His Holiness Dalai Lama visited Taiwan in March 1997, he was just treated as a religious leader, and the nitty-gritty of his trip, namely the travel documents and living arrangements, was looked after by the Interior Ministry.
However, with the DPP assuming office in 2000, the above policy has lost its sheen. The Special Commission on Tibet and Mongolia has been abolished. The divisions on them in the Interior Ministry exist now on paper only. As a result, when the Dalai Lama made his second trip to Taiwan in April 2001, he was virtually given the treatment of a Head of State. His entire visit, during which he met President Chen and former President Lee Teng-Hui of the KMT, was handled by Taiwan’s Foreign Ministry.
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The point that emerges from all this is very simple. That is the fact that Taiwan is going to exist with its own system and features, at least much longer than what the Chinese would like us to believe. The KMT may believe in the One-China principle, but party leaders like Joanna Lei (Kuomintang legislator and a prominent theorist in the party’s younger generation) are on record as having said that the path of pragmatism is to maintain the status quo with China, that is, “have increased economic integration with the mainland but absolute preservation of participatory democracy in Taiwan must thrive”.
In fact, some Taiwanese intellectuals and business executives are also studying the concept of a Chinese commonwealth, modeled after the British commonwealth, as a way of integrating Taiwan economically while overcoming its political and diplomatic isolation. This being the case, it does not make sense why a power like India cannot have a healthy relationship with Taiwan, even within the constraints of the lack of diplomatic relations, when the rest of the world is managing that. It is time, therefore, India stopped seeing Taiwan through the prism of China.
Conclusion
It is well known that China has always sought to marginalize India as a “South Asian power” and block its ambition of playing a major role in the Asia-Pacific, not to speak of the world at large. By fanning the India-Pakistan conflict, it has contained India within the subcontinent. By transferring nuclear weapons, missiles and other equipment to Islamabad, it has skillfully transformed the India-China nuclear debate into an India-Pakistan contest. Additionally, Beijing covertly (with the help of the intelligence services of Pakistan and North Korea) funded Nepal’s Maoist rebellion, which is inimical to Indian interests. It is not exactly a happy development for India that the Maoists now effectively rule Nepal and threaten to “liberate” the so-called Nepalese areas, including Darjeeling and parts of Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal and Sikkim, “under illegal possession of India.”
China is leaving no stone unturned to encircle India with enough pressure-points so that it does not exercise its legitimate influence outside the subcontinent”¦
Beijing intends to create a new surrogate in Bangladesh; it has already signed a defense pact with Bangladesh without making the contents public. China is about to enter the crucial Indian Ocean (from India’s point of view) in a big way:as can be seen by the manner of its marking its presence in Myanmar’s Coco Island on the one hand and Pakistan’s Gwadar port in the volatile Baloochistan province on the other. China is leaving no stone unturned to encircle India with enough pressure-points so that it does not exercise its legitimate influence outside the subcontinent, not to speak of the world at large.
Viewed thus, finding a supporter in Taiwan in the Asia-Pacific region, the region which is going to determine the contour of 21st century world politics and which is the focus of India’s “Look-East policy”, is a big plus for Indian strategic policy in the world. But then, there is a limit beyond which India may find it difficult to go in this courtship. And ironically, China, again, happens to be the limiting factor, though in a different way. China, undoubtedly, is India’s principal strategic competitor in the world; but of late, the economic interactions between the two have grown manifold.
The annual trade between the two countries has reached the 20 billion dollar mark. In contrast, the annual Indo-Taiwan trade is worth about 3 billion dollars (although this figure has more than doubled; the figure was only 1.2 billion dollars in 2002). All told, Taiwan’s investments in India are only about 114 million dollars, whereas its investments in China are around 200 billion dollars. Even in Vietnam, Taiwan’s investments amount to 15 billion dollars, not to speak of countries like Indonesia where the figure is 10 billion dollars.
That means, in order to create a strong constituency in India, Taiwan has to invest much more in India than what it is at the moment. If Asean countries, Japan and the US are sympathetic towards Taiwan, it is essentially due to the fact that they have vested interests, considering their economic and technological links with the island nation. And it is precisely these links that need to be strengthened when one talks of the Indo-Taiwan courtship. In fact, the fate of the courtship is dependent on these links. And in developing them, it is Taiwan that needs to do a little more work than what is the case at present.
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