{"id":1638902,"date":"2022-09-12T06:00:41","date_gmt":"2022-09-12T10:00:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1638902"},"modified":"2022-09-12T06:21:04","modified_gmt":"2022-09-12T10:21:04","slug":"whats-in-a-name-three-words-between-taiwan-and-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/whats-in-a-name-three-words-between-taiwan-and-war\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s in a name? Three words between Taiwan and war"},"content":{"rendered":"<aside class=\"mashsb-container mashsb-main mashsb-stretched\"><div class=\"mashsb-box\"><div class=\"mashsb-count mash-medium\" style=\"&quot;\"><div class=\"counts mashsbcount\">20<\/div><span class=\"mashsb-sharetext\">SHARES<\/span><\/div><div class=\"mashsb-buttons\"><a class=\"mashicon-facebook mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.conservativenewsdaily.net%2Fbreaking-news%2Fwhats-in-a-name-three-words-between-taiwan-and-war%2F\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Facebook<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-twitter mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/intent\/tweet?text=&amp;url=https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/?p=1638902&amp;via=ConservNewsDly\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Twitter<\/span><\/a><a class=\"mashicon-subscribe mash-medium mash-nomargin mashsb-noshadow\" href=\"#\" target=\"_top\" rel=\"nofollow\"><span class=\"icon\"><\/span><span class=\"text\">Subscribe<\/span><\/a><div class=\"onoffswitch2 mash-medium mashsb-noshadow\" style=\"display:none\"><\/div><\/div>\n            <\/div>\n                <div style=\"clear:both\"><\/div><\/aside>\n            <!-- Share buttons by mashshare.net - Version: 4.0.47--><div><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/cndimages.nyc3.digitaloceanspaces.com\/breaking-news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/09\/12062051\/90-268\" class=\"ff-og-image-inserted\" alt=\"image\" \/><\/div>\n<div class=\"RichTextArticleBody\">\n<div class=\"RichTextArticleBody-body\">\n<div class=\"Enhancement\">\n<div class=\"Enhancement-item\"><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<p><b>TAIPEI, Taiwan<\/b> \u2014 Chinese General Secretary <a class=\"Link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/xi-jinping\">Xi Jinping<\/a> would invade <a class=\"Link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/taiwan\">Taiwan<\/a> if authorities in Taipei stop referring to their government as the Republic of China, analysts and Taiwanese officials believe.<\/p>\n<p>Those three small words have proven capacious enough to accommodate both the Chinese <a class=\"Link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/communist-party\">Communist Party&#8217;s<\/a> intention to subjugate Taiwan and the aspirations of a Taiwanese political movement hostile to rulers from Beijing \u2014 be they communist or nationalist ROC forces led to Taiwan by Chiang Kai-shek after the Chinese Communist victory in 1949. The paradoxical importance that both sides now attach to that defeated power\u2019s name is crucial to preserving a so-called status quo and avoiding a conflict that could trigger an unprecedented clash between the <a class=\"Link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/united-states\">United States<\/a> and a nuclear-armed adversary.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Taiwan, with the formal name of the Republic of China, and People\u2019s Republic of China \u2014 you know, the other side \u2014 are not subordinated to each other,\u201d Taiwan\u2019s Catherine Y. M. Hsu, who leads her Ministry of Foreign Affairs\u2019s international information services department, told reporters. \u201cThe policy of the government is not moving towards an immediate declaration of Taiwan independence.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That near-doublethink is in the mold of Taiwanese President <a class=\"Link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/tsai-ing-wen\">Tsai Ing-wen<\/a>\u2019s statement following her reelection in 2020. &#8220;We don\u2019t have a need to declare ourselves an independent state. We are an independent country already, and we call ourselves the Republic of China, Taiwan. We have a separate identity, and we\u2019re a country of our own. We deserve respect from China,&#8221; she <a class=\"Link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/policy\/defense-national-security\/china-could-attack-taiwan-perhaps\">said<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><b><a class=\"Link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/policy\/defense-national-security\/taiwan-semiconductor-production-china-threats\">BARGAINING CHIP: TAIWAN PLANS TO RETAIN MOST SEMICONDUCTOR PRODUCTION<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n<p>That statement attempts to strike an artful balance between the political heritage of the Democratic Progressive Party that powered Tsai\u2019s rise to high office and the danger posed by the regime across the strait.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere are a series of red lines, but the clearest one is a de jure declaration of independence,\u201d the American Enterprise Institute\u2019s Zack Cooper said.\u201cWhat China wants is to have this option for &#8216;peaceful reunification,&#8217; as they would call it. So that has to mean that Taiwan can&#8217;t be formally independent, or else, things would be going the wrong direction.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Chinese Communist officials claim sovereignty over Taiwan despite never having ruled there.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThey had a civil war, they formed the PRC, but they didn&#8217;t wipe out [the] ROC,\u201d as another senior Taiwanese official, speaking on condition of anonymity, put it. \u201cSo we&#8217;re still here.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Their survival has depended, in part, on assistance from the U.S. through a period of official and \u201cunofficial\u201d relations. The Republic of China was formed in 1912, one year after the collapse of the imperial Qing dynasty. The ROC and the U.S. formed an alliance against <a class=\"Link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.washingtonexaminer.com\/tag\/japan\">Japan<\/a> during World War II, which continued for decades after Chiang withdrew to Taiwan.<\/p>\n<p>The U.S. cut diplomatic relations with the ROC in 1979, as Cold War priorities heightened the appeal of having an embassy in Beijing, and the Chinese Communist authorities took that diplomatic victory as a boost to their goal of ruling all the territory held by the late Qing dynasty. They outlined a proposal in which \u201cthe ROC would disappear,\u201d as Richard C. Bush has <a class=\"Link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.brookings.edu\/book\/difficult-choices\/\">written<\/a>, subsumed into the PRC, and reserved the right to use military force in service of that objective if Taiwanese officials (Chiang\u2019s military dictatorship, known as the Kuomintang) refused to acquiesce.<\/p>\n<p>In parallel, a \u201cpro-independence\u201d movement of Taiwanese dissidents formed against the Chiang regime and grew over the years into the DPP.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was always there to counter Chiang Kai-shek\u2019s hold on power,\u201d the senior Taiwanese official said, adding that they regarded the ROC autocrat as \u201ca foreigner\u201d to Taiwan. \u201cBut eventually, they became a force, and the KMT had to yield power, and they became a democracy.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The transition to democracy occurred only after a meeting in Hong Kong, then ruled by the United Kingdom, between KMT and Chinese Communist officials that had ambiguous, if not controversial, results. This meeting is the origin of the so-called 1992 Consensus that \u201cthere is only one China,\u201d as KMT officials <a class=\"Link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.everycrsreport.com\/reports\/RL30341.html#fn119\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">acknowledged<\/a>, with the caveat that &#8220;the two sides of the Strait have different opinions as to the meaning of &#8216;one China.'&#8221; For Taipei, that &#8220;one China&#8221; remained the ROC, while Chinese Communist officials took the statement as a watershed acknowledgment that Taiwan ought to be subject to Beijing\u2019s authority.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cTaiwan is an inalienable part of China\u2019s territory, and the Government of the People\u2019s Republic of China is the sole legal government representing the whole of China,\u201d the Chinese Foreign Ministry said on Aug. 2 in a protest of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi\u2019s visit to Taiwan. \u201cThe Taiwan authorities have kept seeking U.S. support for their independence agenda. They refuse to recognize the 1992 Consensus, go all out to push forward \u2018de-sinicization,\u2019 and promote \u2018incremental independence.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p>DPP officials have never accepted the 1992 Consensus. U.S. efforts to avoid a conflict in the Taiwan Strait have involved a balancing act between deterring China, supporting Taiwan\u2019s democracy, and restraining the pro-independence impulses of the DPP. George W. Bush, who <a class=\"Link\" href=\"https:\/\/edition.cnn.com\/2001\/ALLPOLITICS\/04\/24\/bush.taiwan.abc\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">pledged<\/a> in 2001 to do \u201cwhatever it took to help Taiwan defend herself\u201d from a Chinese Communist invasion, nevertheless opposed a DPP-favored referendum to seek membership in the United Nations.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe PRC has always said, \u2018Oh, they\u2019re [separatists]\u2019 \u2014 \u2018they\u2019 meaning the DPP \u2014 because they&#8217;ve always wanted to form a Republic of Taiwan, not [Republic of] China, but Taiwan. But DPP people here have also evolved,\u201d the senior Taiwanese official said. \u201cThe [DPP] notion is that we don&#8217;t really need to declare independence [as] Republic of Taiwan because Taiwan, as Republic of China, is actually already a political entity that is away from mainland China. And by not declaring a new name, it&#8217;s actually pretty safe because we\u2019ve always called ourselves Republic of China.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>So the two sides have competing definitions of the \u201cstatus quo,\u201d but the continued use of the \u201cRepublic of China\u201d name helps enable the Chinese Communist and Taiwanese definitions of the status quo to coexist.<\/p>\n<p><b><a class=\"Link\" href=\"https:\/\/WWW.WASHINGTONEXAMINER.COM\">CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER<\/a><\/b><\/p>\n<p>\u201cThere&#8217;s no good resolution to this. The question is, can you extend the existing status quo so that you avoid a conflict?\u201d said Cooper, the AEI scholar. &#8220;A core part of that status quo is that none of us actually agree on what the status quo is. &#8230; And so, some of this nuanced stuff is actually part of allowing everyone to disagree about the status quo, but not feel like they have to forcibly make the other sides get on the same page.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>TAIPEI, Taiwan \u2014 Chinese General Secretary Xi Jinping would invade Taiwan if authorities in Taipei stop referring to their government as the Republic of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1638904,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mo_disable_npp":"","fifu_image_url":"","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[538],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1638902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-washington-examiner"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1638902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1638902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1638902\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1638904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1638902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1638902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.conservativenewsdaily.net\/breaking-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1638902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}