吾爾開希的流亡筆記

 

In the standoff between the United States
and Europe over lifting the Tiananmen Massacre
arms embargo on China,
I find myself on the side of George W. Bush, even if my reasons for being there
differ from his. President Bush’s interests are, of course, those of the
world’s leading superpower. Mine are those of a Chinese student leader who,
after more than 15 years in exile, is still waiting to be allowed to go home.

 

The U.S. position is well summed up by
Peter Brookes, senior fellow for national security affairs and director of
Asian Studies at the Heritage Foundation, who wrote recently: “Lifting the
embargo would endanger U.S.
interests, accelerate China’s
military build-up, undermine stability in the Pacific and send the wrong signal
to repressive regimes everywhere.” These are legitimate concerns, and I see no
reason to contest them. China–currently
second only to the U.S.
in terms of arms spending–is clearly seeking to extend its influence in Southeast Asia and into the Pacific via the sea lanes
controlled by U.S.
allies Japan
and Taiwan.
And, yes, China
continues to be a repressive state, and to kowtow now would send the wrong
message to similarly repressive regimes.

 

But, as an exiled Chinese citizen who has lived in
Paris and the U.S.,
before settling in Taiwan,
I would add to Peter Brookes’ list the objection that lifting the embargo now
makes a mockery of the Europe’s decision to
put it in place to begin with.

 

Perhaps from the worldly, sophisticated perspective
of the Europeans, I am taking things too personally. But if Europe
does go ahead–as it says it will–and lifts the embargo shortly after the
British elections, expected around May 5, I do have to wonder just what China has done
to deserve the favor. To be sure, China is richer and more powerful
than it was when I was forced to leave in 1989. But have human rights improved?
Have there been substantive moves towards participatory politics? Is there
greater freedom of speech? Can I go home? The answer is “no” every time.

 

And then there is the question of Taiwan, which I
also happen to take a personal interest in because it is now my home. Europe’s decision takes place as China puts into
place a so-called anti-secession law. This in effect legitimizes the use of
force to take over a liberal democracy and the world’s 15th largest trading
economy. From where I stand, I cannot help but be reminded of Tiananmen
Square. In 1989, as a leader of a movement that is thought to have
brought up to 100 million people onto the streets China-wide, I saw the ugly
face of Chinese Communist Party rule. Here in Taiwan in 2005 I worry that before
long, I will see it again.

 

This is precisely what I mean when I say
that lifting the embargo now makes a mockery of the decision to put it in
place. When China
turned its troops and tanks on its citizens in Tiananmen
Square, the world recoiled in horror and imposed sanctions.
Sixteen years later, as China
embarks on a massive military build-up aimed at enforcing a disputed territorial
claim on Taiwan,
Europe decides that the best course of action
is to supply it with the high-tech weaponry to do so. I’m afraid the logic of
this defies me.

 

It could be argued, of course, that Chinese
leader Hu Jintao, who just succeeded Jiang Zemin as chairman of the State
Military Commission, gave a relatively measured–if not conciliatory–speech to
the National People’s Congress on the subject of Taiwan late last week. Proof, Europe might say, that China is doing everything it can to
resolve the Taiwan
problem peacefully. It would only use the weapons we are selling them, Europeans
might say, if Taiwan
did something rash like enshrining independence in a new constitution or,
heaven forbid, allowing the island’s 23 million people to cast a vote one way
or another, for or against: unification on some mutually tolerable grounds, or
independence.  

 

It is a disingenuous argument. Firstly, we
are asked to believe that the Chinese leadership can be counted on to be
reasonable, and I know for a fact that this is a naïve and dangerous assumption–I
have been guilty of making it myself once before, with disastrous consequences.
And secondly, we are asked to ignore the fact that China’s military arms purchases are
aimed as much at denying its own people and the Taiwanese the right to
self-determination as they are to national self-defense.

 

In short, whatever the strategic aims of
its China
policy, in terms of my personal engagement with the Chinese government, Europe’s position is morally flawed and intellectually
absurd. I may not have the advantage of a European education, but I say that
when the Europeans tell us that one plus one do not equal two, that the
advanced weapons it has for sale will never be turned on the Taiwanese people,
I say they are wrong. When the Europeans tell us it’s time to forget Tiananmen,
I say I am sorry but until I hear an apology I cannot even begin to forget. And
when the Europeans say, China
has improved, I say, does that mean I can return to my homeland and visit my
ageing parents without going to jail?

 

——Published 2005.03.16,  Wall Street Journal Europe.

 

      The death of former Chinese Communist Party
Secretary-General Zhao Ziyang does
not mark the end of an era, but is rather a reminder of unfinished business.
That business is the democratic reforms and the end to official corruption we
students protested for in Tiananmen Square in
the summer of 1989. Nearly 16 years on, and from my exile in Taiwan, I
cannot but see Zhao’s lonely death as
further evidence that that the protests I helped lead won China neither
democratic reform nor an end to official corruption.

      The
obituaries for Zhao, whom I recall
as a humble, grey-haired scholarly man who spoke Mandarin with a folksy Henan burr, have made
much of his last public appearance. He had already been stripped of his
position by Deng Xiaoping when he came to us in Tiananmen
Square on May 19 with the words “I’m late, too late. Sorry.” Zhao’s arrival was unannounced and discrete, and like
most of the students in the square that day–less than three weeks before the
tanks and troops would clear us out–I wasn’t even aware that the man was
amongst us uttering those historic words. But, if I missed the opportunity to
be present when he spoke, I have often thought those words in the years since.

      Above all,
today it strikes me that the words, “I was too late,” might well serve as the
epitaph of a man who ended his life a tragic figure, who was offered a historic
opportunity to embrace reform but who did not come to the square and offer any
support until he had been stripped of his rank. Until the last of his days he
was a living symbol of much that is wrong in China today.

      In death
that symbol becomes all the more potent, which is why China this week
is in such a heightened state of alert, and why there will be no state funeral
service. It is also why former Zhao
aide, Bao Tong, who recently accused the state of trying to erase Zhao from history, was not allowed to pay his
respects, and Public Security Bureau thugs injured Mr. Bao’s 73-year-old wife while
pushing her into an elevator. That act of violence alone is a reminder that
while much has changed in China,
much also has not. Wracked by social unrest born of the world’s widest wealth
divide, China
is still a place where the response to dissent is sharp and brutal. It can be
no other way, because all dissent in China is a reminder that, despite
the economic changes that have swept the nation since Tiananmen, reform on all
other fronts is on hold.

      This, of
course, is the tragedy of modern China. The Chinese way is to
systematically banish all agents of reform. My generation of student leaders
lives in exile or in imprisonment, and Zhao
Ziyang passed his remaining days after being stripped of his job under police
supervision. I’ve often wondered where his thoughts led him when they turned to
the events of 1989. Many of us who survived the Tiananmen protests are haunted
by a sense of failure for not having accomplished what we set out to do, and by
feelings of guilt for the lives of those who perished in the effort. To my
mind, it’s hard not to imagine that Zhao
must have had similar feelings and have spent much of his “retirement”
wondering whether he could have done it differently.

      In my
thinking–and this has haunted me for close on 16 years–he could have. It’s
impossible for me to forget that spring and summer of 1989, when I was a
student barely into my twenties and I took the streets of Beijing. To be sure, I was idealistic, and
perhaps in some ways naïve, but like so many others in those heady days I only
took to the streets because I thought there was a real opportunity for change.
We would never have taken the chances we did if we hadn’t thought that what we
were demanding was possible. And we saw the possibility in reformist elements
in the government, chief among whom is the man China is quietly mourning this
week.

I say to history that at any time before he was
stripped of his position, particularly in the days after we started our hunger
strike on May 13, Zhao, as the
nation’s most powerful title holder, could have come to the square, or gone on
national TV, to at least acknowledge that we students had just cause for
complaint. It would have put him and other reformists in control of the
situation. Instead, he attended a meeting of the standing members of the
Politburo in Deng Xiaoping’s private residence in which he was stripped of his
rank. He did come to the square too late.

      To this
day, I cannot help but see Zhao as defined by that moment He missed his
historic opportunity, and in the end his most notable achievement was that he
did nothing. On this week of his death, my thoughts go out to his family and
all who loved him, and I say may he rest in peace. But at the same time I
cannot but wonder, as I have all these years, what if.

——Published  2005.01.20.  Asia Wall Street Journal

Not long after he was released from prison
in 1998, Wang Dan visited me in Taiwan. It was the first meeting of China’s two
most-wanted Tiananmen student leaders in nearly a decade, and we had a lot to
talk about. We were still talking the next day when the sun came up.

Wang Dan and I studied at different
universities, and we didn’t meet until the early days of the Tiananmen
protests. It had been 10 years since the killings in Beijing on June 4 1989 had
set our lives on different trajectories. He had spent his time as a political
prisoner; I had spent mine living the good life in France, the U.S. and finally
Taiwan. That didn’t mean we didn’t have a lot of things to talk about. We did. Above
all, we had to talk about whether we had done the right thing. Neither of us could
be completely sure we had.

It was a difficult night, and it was a
particularly difficult because, among the many things that came up, we talked
about Ding Zilin. On the night of June 3, 1989, when I had already begun a
flight to freedom that would take me to Hong Kong within a month, Ding Zilin’s
17-year-old son, Jiang Jielan, joined the protests on the streets of Beijing,
even though his mother had begged him to stay home. I was one of the leaders of
those protests, and so was Wang Dan. Three hours later Ding Zilin’s son was
shot dead.

So much of what happened that night and
early the next day is still a mystery. We don’t know, for example, how many
Beijing students and citizens were shot dead like Ding Zilin’s son—hundreds,
thousands; you choose. I don’t think we ever will. But Ding Zilin, at least, has
spent the last 15 years bravely reminding us that it happened. She does still, by
persuading other families to stand up and count the ones they lost. She gets
arrested on a regular basis, especially as June 4 approaches, but she continues
to remind us—as she put it five years after she lost her son—that the
“blood-splattered streets of Beijing have been paved over with a new
concrete—brand-named ‘economic progress.’” As the head of the Tiananmen Mothers
Campaign, which calls on the Beijing government to accept accountability for
the bloodshed, she has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and in a braver,
more honest world she would get it.

When her name came up that night with Wang
Dan, I felt a lot of things, but mostly I felt guilty. I felt guilty about
having survived and having made it to France and the U.S. when so many others
died. I felt guilty that I had not stayed behind and gone to jail like Wang Dan.
I felt guilty that I had not done enough to remind the world that the China I
had failed to change had got no better since I left. I felt guilty that perhaps
I was in some way responsible for the death of Ding Zilin’s son.

I felt so guilty that I suggested to Wang
Dan that we make a telephone call that I had put off making for far too long.
Wang Dan—who had her number—made the call, and after a few words of greeting, he
said: “Wu’er Kaixi is with me, and he has something he wants to say to you.”

I took the phone and said to Ding Zilin the
only thing that could be said.

“Sorry,” I said to her. “I can’t even ask
you for forgiveness.”

“I’m just happy that you finally called,”
Ding Zilin said back.

All three of us began to cry, and I said:
“We can’t replace the son you lost, but Wang Dan and I want you to think of us as
your sons.”

That happened more than six years ago, and
the 15th anniversary of Tiananmen is upon us already—15 years in exile for me,
a decade in and out of prison followed by five years of exile for Wang Dan, and
15 years mourning a son for Ding Zilin. Some of my pain lifted when I spoke to
Ding Zilin that night, but not all of it—I will spend the rest of my life regretting
the lives that were lost in 1989. I am taking this occasion to say it publicly
to Ding Zilin and to everybody who lost someone they loved.

Wang Dan and I were young men who thought
we could change the world, and we inadvertently led a lot of people to their
deaths. That has caused a lot of pain to a lot of people, and an apology is a
first step towards healing that pain. However, it should not be forgotten that
the most important apology—the apology that would allow my exiled generation to
go home—is still to come. That apology belongs to the men who ordered the
shootings.

I have spent months thinking about how the
15th anniversary of Tiananmen should be marked. It has been difficult to decide.
The world has changed. These, in so many ways, are less idealistic times than
those giddy days before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and before freedom came to
the Eastern Bloc and Nelson Mandela emerged from jail—when anything briefly seemed
possible. But, if, for just one day, we could return to that idealism, in the
spirit of the students who took to the streets of Beijing in 1989, I would ask
the world to spend it looking hard at the China with which it has struck its
business deals, and remembering that the mothers of Beijing are still waiting
for their apology. Until it comes, China will remain a dark place where a
mourning mother who challenges the official monopoly on the truth faces summary
arrest, and where idealistic young students who seek democratic change are
forced into exile.

Without that apology, China’s progress of
the past 15 years is an illusion. The introduction of the economic freedoms
that has brought prosperity to urban China since Tiananmen is an
acknowledgement by the Chinese people that students of my generation had a
right to protest. But the lack of an apology is a reminder that China’s new
prosperity continues at the expense of freedom of expression and democratic participation.
An apology, in short, would signal the long-suppressed next stage of
Tiananmen’s unfinished revolution.

——This article is published at the Wall Street Journal, June 4th, 2004.  15th Anniversay of the Tiananmen Massacre.

 

By Wu’er Kaixi
& Shen Tong

 

When the retired military
doctor who blew the lid on China’s attempts to cover up the full extent of SARS infections in Beijing last year recently
spoke out again, I was moved by his courage.

 

In China, even today, few people have
the strength of conviction to send a letter to the National Assembly – as Jiang Yanyong did on February 24 – suggesting that the Chinese Communist Party’s assessment of a historical event demands reappraisal. They cannot be
blamed. That Jiang’s letter made international
headlines after appearing on a Hong Kong
website is a sign not of Chinese timidity but of Jiang’s boldness.

 

Jiang’s letter
concerns the Tiananmen crackdown of June 4, 1989, a democratic student movement that led to
the exile, imprisonment and death of many of my fellow students. The “1989 counter-revolutionary riots” have now come to be known as
the “1989 political disturbances,” he notes. He then asks: “If they were ‘political disturbances,’ did they really need to be suppressed
by mobilizing several hundred-thousand troops? How it was necessary to use guns
and tanks to brutally kill ordinary people?” His
response: “I suggest Tiananmen be renamed
the 1989 patriotic student movement.”

 

I applaud Dr. Jiang’s courage, and say to him, I agree such
an assessment is long overdue. We who participated in the protests against
official corruption, in favor of China opening up to the West and in
support of increased democratic
participation – those of us who are still
living – did so because we cared. We were young and we wanted to make China a better
place. And, while we failed in some ways, we did not fail entirely. China has
indeed become a better place. Students of today – students who
are the same age I was when I was driven into exile – have
prospects my generation could only dream of. And they have those prospects, at
least in part, because the student movement of 1989 compelled the Chinese
government to make sweeping reforms that allowed private entrepreneurship to
flourish.

 

But let us not forget that
Jiang’s letter is also a reminder of just how the student movement failed, of
how China
has not changed, of how little freedom Chinese have to speak out. And, let us
not forget that the publication of Jiang’s letter on
the Internet – it has reportedly circulated
widely in China
– is a reminder too that Beijing
continues to repress freedom of speech at its own risk. As Jiang himself puts
it: “People should always be able to speak – and to speak
the truth.”

 

A popular line of thinking
propagated by the Chinese government, and followed by some China watchers
and most business leaders with an eye to investment in the world’s largest growing market, is that in a country as large, as populous and
as potentially unstable as China,
stability must come first. There is a great deal of truth to this – until stability becomes an excuse for oppression. Arguing that a
reassessment of Tiananmen is simply a means of expressing the will of the
people, Jiang points out towards the end of this letter, “When so-called stability oppresses everything, it can only result in even greater instability.”

 

Jiang writes movingly of his
own memories, of treating victims of the People’s Liberation
Army at Beijing’s PLA No. 301 Hospital, where he was a surgeon
on the night of June 3, saying that in all his years as a doctor he had never
seen injuries like them and that they haunt him to this day. He writes of Nobel
Peace Prize nominee Ding Zilin, who lost her 17 year-old-son that night, and
has campaigned tirelessly ever since for the government to take responsibility
for its actions. “So far,” he writes, “we have not had a word in answer,”

 

Jiang writes with the
conviction of a man who feels that Tiananmen is a wound in the psyche of modern
China
that has not healed because it has been ignored for too long.

 

A nationally respected surgeon, Chinese Communist Party member and a
veteran of the People’s Liberation Army, he also
tells us that these feelings are shared amongst Party members in far higher
positions than his own. His letter records a 1998 meeting with former president
Yang Shangkun, in which Yang called the Tiananmen Incident “historically, the Party’s biggest mistake,” adding that “in the future” it would “definitely be reassessed.”

 

As we approach the 15th
anniversary of Tiananmen, I pray that Yang’s vision of
the future and the rightful outcome of Jiang’s plea are at
hand. I say this not only because I think it is time my generation were allowed
to come home, but also because I agree with Jiang that, in a China that buries
its past and exiles and imprisons those who dare to speak what others only
bottle up inside, stability is merely an illusion.

 

—— Published March 12^th  2004, By Asian Wall Street Journal

At the age of 21, I was swept into the leading ranks of a
popular, student-led movement urging the government of China to
undertake democratic reforms. That movement was brutally put down by troops and
tanks in Tiananmen Square and nearby Chang’an Avenue on June 4, 1989. I and a
generation of fellow student leaders have been in exile ever since.

 

Fifteen years on, when I look at my homeland from Taiwan, where I
live, and from Hong Kong, which I was recently
allowed to visit, I wonder at how little has changed. True, public
demonstrations for more democratic freedoms in Hong Kong
have not been suppressed by troops
and tanks. But Taiwan’s
democratic freedoms are thus threatened. Meanwhile, Falungong practitioners
continue to be arrested in China,
as are “bad” political elements, and my generation of student leaders
cannot go home.

 

China may well be the world’s miracle economy–the sleeping giant that
has awoken. But let us not forget either that China’s problems are immense. The
future of its 1.3 billion consumers
is bedevilled by outrageous extremes of wealth and poverty; unemployment in China’s former
iron rice-bowl hinterland is dangerously high (unofficial sources put the
national level at around 15%); and China’s banking system is teetering
on the brink of bankruptcy. Add to these problems a noisy democracy across the
Taiwan Strait that is clamouring for the ultimate democratic
freedom–self-determination–and
Hong Kong’s demands that China genuinely subscribe
to the spirit of the Basic Law in its administration of the former British
colony. These are not problems that I believe can be solved by totalitarian
central power.

 

When I look at Taiwan, I am struck by how smooth
the transition from totalitarianism to democracy has been. That accomplishment
is at least in part due to the long-serving Kuomintang, which realized the
necessity for dialogue, and the necessity of allowing democratic reforms that
eventually handed governance to the people. By allowing dialogue in Taiwan, the KMT
allowed the emergence of a rational political environment. Indeed, democracy
begins with understanding the importance of dialogue.

 

Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s recent visit to the United States
resulted in a cautiously worded
rebuke by President George W. Bush to President Chen Shui-bian for his plans to
hold a referendum during Taiwan’s
March 20 presidential elections. The next day, Chen responded publicly by
asking: “What is the Taiwan
problem?” And he answered that question: “The Taiwan problem
is China’s
inability to accept democracy, freedom of speech and human rights.”

 

However we see Chen’s plans to hold a referendum, it is
impossible to deny that he has truth on his side. Taiwan needs China
economically, and culturally it has much in common with the mainland. But
politically, China’s
failure to engage in even-handed dialogue with Taiwan and respect the democratic
desires of the island’s people has made China itself the obstacle in
achieving reunification. Its intransigence, its preference for threats before
dialogue, have produced radicalized opposition in Taiwan, so that now even its
long-time ally in the goal of reunification, the KMT, has turned its back on China and
accepts the Democratic Progressive Party’s formulation of “one country on
either side of the strait.”

 

Mao Zedong once said that power comes from the barrel of a
gun. Beijing
used that gun on my fellow students in 1989; it now suggests
it is ready to use it again on the people of Taiwan. Thus, I find myself facing
the same oppressor today that I faced 15 years ago. And 15 years on, I find
that my thinking has not changed. The solution to China’s vast problems begins with
that seed of democracy: dialogue. Out of dialogue come ideas, inspiration and
solutions. Out of dialogue come rational opposition and a rational political
landscape.

 

When I arrived in Hong Kong
in January, I concluded a brief speech at the airport by saying to Beijing, by saying to
President Hu Jintao, “Let us come home.” I repeat that request. At
the youthful age of 21 I led a peaceful movement embraced by an estimated 100
million people across the country. In the course of that movement we repeatedly
called on the Beijing
government for dialogue and were denied.

 

We called for it then in Tiananmen
Square; I call for it now in exile. Too many voices have been
exiled and for too long. It is time they came home. It is time Beijing accepted an alternative to the barrel
of the gun.

 

——This article was publishes on the Far Eastern Economic Review, Issue
cover-dated February 05, 2004.

President George W. Bush’s censure of Taiwan’s
President Chen Shui-bian for unilaterally moving toward changing the status quo
between the US, China and Taiwan was for some here a slap to
the face. Given the increasing political polarization of the island, it will
variously be read as comeuppance and as an affront to the island’s dignity.

 

But, however it is interpreted, the
question remains whether Mr. Chen deserved a dressing down. Washington’s
irritation stems from Mr. Chen’s call for a referendum urging China to remove close to 500 missiles aimed at Taiwan.
Those missiles actually exist; China
has recently threatened to use them.

 

Certain U.S. policy makers have criticized
Mr. Chen for having acted “foolishly.” But at least he cannot be accused of
having acted wrongly, or – perhaps more importantly – undemocratically.
However, it would seem – as Mr. Chen has implied in response to the latest
developments – China’s
threatening missiles are a “natural state of affairs.”  At the very least, it would appear that China is free to threaten Taiwan without international
condemnation.

 

This so-called status quo – a small
democratic island militarily threatened by an autocratically governed superpower – is a historical legacy. However, it in
no way represents the interests of or benefits the Taiwanese people today. Its
existence means that Taiwan
– the world’s 14th largest trading nation – is a community in isolation,
humiliated by denial of the right to an international identity, representation
in the United Nations, or almost any other international organization,
including even the World Health Organization.

 

China’s insistence that this status quo be
maintained at all costs has won it no friends here in Taiwan. Its refusal to allow World
Health Organization officials access to the island during the outbreak of SARS
earlier this year, is seen here as simply the latest – if not one of the more
resented – instance in a long litany of humiliations Taiwan has had to accept.
Indeed, Taiwan
is a member of just two international organizations: the World Trade
Organization and the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum. In the WTO, Taiwan is known as the  “Representation of the Separate Customs
Territory of Taiwan, Penghu, Kinmen and Matsu to WTO.” In APEC gatherings, Taiwan’s president is barred from attendance,
while ministerial-level meetings attended by foreign ministers is open only to Taiwan’s
economic minister. Even in that most inclusive of global gatherings, the
Olympic games, Taiwan’ s athletes cannot enter the arena bearing their national
flag, and their team goes under the name Chinese Taipei.

 

This is the status quo, and its
upholders are currently toasting each other in Washington. China’s
stand on Taiwan is no
different from its stand on Tibet
and Xinjiang – both of which can now be safely relied upon not to trouble the
world with troublesome democratic movements and public votes for the right to
self-determination. That stand is
that Taiwan
is an inalienable part of the Motherland, and no movement towards independence
can be tolerated.

 

But if the world recognizes the moral
authority of the Dalai Lama’s efforts to highlight the plight of his people and
find a peaceful end to their oppression, how it can it brand a democracy’s
efforts to choose its own fate “trouble making?” Are Taiwanese to be blamed for
thinking the avowed commitment to democracy that took the U.S. to Iraq
would also bring the U.S. to
the defense of Taiwan?

 

Speaking this week, Mr. Chen said the “Taiwan problem” was China’s inability to accept
“democracy, freedom and human rights.” But the problem is equally a unique
convergence of a historical standoff between the Chinese Communist Party and the
Chinese Nationalist Party, the exigencies of appeasing an emergent modern China, and the complexities of Washington lobbies. In other words, the Taiwan problem is as much the U.S.’s as it is China’s. And, in that sense, the
growing momentum of a democratic movement in Taiwan
that calls for a clearer definition of Taiwan’s
international status is a challenge for both the U.S.
and China.
For China, the challenge is
to resist seeing Taiwan’s
burgeoning democracy as a threat that must be crushed. And, for the U.S.
the challenge is to recognize that to champion democracy is to live with the
outcome of its collective choices.

 

At least one positive emerged in Washington this week: the beginnings of an agreement to
deal with the Taiwan
issue peacefully. Bravo. But let us
not forget that peace should be unconditional; that it should not be achieved
at the expense of justice. To ensure
a peaceful resolution in those conditions, as the world’s leading power, and as
the one nation that should be counted on to say “no” to China when necessary,
the U.S. bears an undeniable responsibility when it comes to Taiwan.

 

The American commitment to justice, democracy and
human rights, demands it assume the
role of an impartial mediator in this standoff. National security may bias it
to maintaining the status quo, but if Taiwan society continues to evolve
to the point where a majority of people realize that a true deepening of
democracy is not compatible with the status quo it will have to recognize that.
It is an open secret here in Taiwan
that a referendum for independence would find little opposition if it could be
carried out free from fear of attack. In this unfair standoff, in which a small
but determined democracy finds itself pitted against a vast totalitarian
regime, it is disappointing not only to see the U.S. take sides, but to take the
wrong one.

 

——Published Dec 16, 2003, Asian Wall Street Journal