Hong Kong’s resistance offers lessons for Taiwan
What happens on Hong Kong Island does not stay there. The ongoing tsunami of discontent washes over this island, which, like Hong Kong, is navigating the choppy waters of relations with the same large and menacing mainland neighbor. This nation — which is such psychologically, if not in diplomatic nomenclature — has a presidential election in January that seems certain to be influenced by alarm about Hong Kong’s current unhappy experience with the legalistic fudge of “one country, two systems,” which the incumbent president, Tsai Ing-wen, rejects.
Hong Kong is officially a “special administrative region” of the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Taiwan is, officially and with varying degrees of pugnacity, the independent — and determined to stay that way — Republic of China (ROC). This is a reality the PRC denies with fluctuating, but currently intensifying, truculence.
The increase probably derives from the PRC’S decreasing economic vigor. The regime, meaning the Chinese Communist Party , has presented this non-negotiable bargain to Hong Kong’s 7.5 million subjects: You will be obedient and we will make you prosperous. Now, however, prosperity is becoming attenuated, partly because of the corruption that riddles thoroughly politicized economies, partly because any government-“managed” economy will be badly managed, and partly because of the trade war between the world’s two largest economies.
Essentially no one in Taiwan believes the PRC’S economic statistics, which claim that China’s growth has slowed but only to a still-brisk 6% rate. Officials in Taiwan think the real rate could be 3% or even negative. And they discern an inverse relationship between the PRC’S economic vigor and the regime’s resort to bellicose nationalism to rally or distract the nation. So, Beijing presents Hong Kong’s demonstrations against Beijing’s encroachments on established liberties as an attempt to dismember China.
This year, which has featured PRC pressure to “mainlandize” Hong Kong, began for Taiwan with a Jan. 2 speech in which PRC President Xi Jinping impudently addressed his supposed “Taiwan compatriots.” Xi said “Chinese do not fight Chinese.” They do, however, kidnap and torture them.
Xi seems obsessed, as the weak often are, with projecting strength. He has, however, many enemies from his anti-corruption campaign, and rising economic dissatisfaction, so he has an incentive to harp on China’s “century of humiliation” — from the 1839 Opium War to Mao Zedong’s 1949 victory in China’s civil war.
It ended with Chiang Kaishek’s losing forces driven to this island. In Taiwan, Chiang ruled as dictator through the Kuomintang (KMT), until his death in 1975. Democracy began to be established in 1987.
Today, the KMT’S presidential candidate, Han Kuo-yu, is a populist who favors more Beijingfriendly policies. Terry Gou, founder of Foxconn, one of Apple’s principal suppliers, has, for now, opted not to run, perhaps because of conflicts of interest: With more than one million employees on the mainland, Foxconn is the largest private-sector employer there. He illustrates the extent to which Taiwan and the mainland are economically melded: about 30% of Taiwan’s exports go to the PRC, where per capita income is one-third that of Taiwan; half a million Taiwanese work in the PRC.
Taiwan lives with a condition Hong Kong does not have: 1,500 PRC missiles pointed at it. Xi says Taiwan’s unification with the PRC is “the great trend of history.” Taiwan, however, represents resistance to two supposed historical inevitabilities.
During the Cold War, “Finlandization” denoted the process by which a small, civilized nation could be compelled to accommodate a large, coarse one. The fact of Taiwan refutes the theory that such accommodation is inevitable. And also refutes the theory that democracy must bring the kind of disorder that has come to Thailand and the Philippines.
People in Taiwan are amused that a new film adaptation of Winnie the Pooh, along with images of the famous cartoon bear, were blocked by Xi’s censors because people have noted a resemblance of the bear’s face to Xi’s. Some strongman.
George F. Will writes a twiceweekly column on politics and domestic and foreign affairs.