Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
starts it; neither Taiwan nor the United States will strike the first blow.
Mainland China will be viewed worldwide as the aggressor and will
be condemned both in history and in international public opinion.
Mainland China needs to understand that Taiwan does not find
immediate reunification attractive because it finds the undemocratic,
authoritarian colossus across the Taiwan Strait repulsive. The people
of Taiwan have now tasted freedom and democracy, and they are not
going to turn or look back. Many public opinion polls conducted in
Taiwan over the past few years have shown that absent any military
threat from the mainland, a majority of Taiwan's population would
opt for formalizing and openly, joyously affirming its present indepen-
dence from mainland Chinese control. In such an event, Taiwan's cur-
rent status as an abnormal and largely unrecognized independent
state that hesitates to provoke Beijing with too much talk or action as
a sovereign entity would become an oddity or curiosity in the history
topics, where it belongs.
Taiwan was clearly and unambiguously an integral part of Chinese
territory from 1683 to 1895, but time and experience since the late nine-
teenth century have given the people of Taiwan a very real sense of
distance and separateness from the mainland. If mainland China truly
longs for reunification with Taiwan, the best thing it can do is to stop
threatening Taiwan and start democratizing itself. The longer main-
land China postpones its democratization, the more difficult peaceful
reunification will be. And for peaceful reunification to be viable and
enduring, the people of Taiwan must be openly and democratically
consulted about it. Reunification accomplished in any other way will
smack of brutal annexation and will poison mainlander/Taiwanese
intercommunal relations in a way that may well make February 28,
1947, and its decades-long repercussions look sedate by comparison.
