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Few elections have offered such last-minute drama as Taiwan’s presidential election in March, though whether the drama was a near tragedy, as followers of the victor believe, or a comedy, as his opponents maintain, was not immediately clear. The island is politically divided into two colour-coded blocs, along Byzantine lines. On one side is the ‘pan-Green camp’, comprising two pro-independence forces: the Democratic People’s Party (DPP), in control of the executive since 2000, and its recently created ally, the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU). On the other is the ‘pan-Blue camp’, composed of the Kuomintang (KMT), which ruled the island for half a century after Chiang Kai-shek was driven from the mainland in 1949, and a breakaway faction of it, the People First Party, both identified with a tradition, now attenuated, claiming Taiwan to be the seat of the legitimate government of the whole of China, and still opposed to the idea of Taiwanese independence.

The day before the election, the DPP leader and presidential incumbent, Chen Shui-bian, standard-bearer of the Green camp, was waving regally to his supporters aboard a jeep in his home-town of Tainan. The street was narrow and crowded, and his welcome noisy, firecrackers – de rigueur on such occasions – exploding joyfully on all sides. Nothing untoward appeared to occur. Some hours later, however, it was announced that the candidate had been the victim of a pistol shot, which by a miracle had grazed rather than penetrated his abdomen, and that he was now recovering in hospital. Television showed images of a bullet-hole in the windscreen of the jeep, and Chen, standing and waving beatifically behind the driver, with a pinkish patch on the lower part of the front of his shirt.

All parties cancelled their final rallies, and the next day the Blue camp, which had started with a comfortable lead in the polls, lost by a whisker – some 30,000 votes, or 0.2 per cent of the vote. There was no question about the reason. Estimates differ of the scale of the sympathy vote that the ‘magic bullet’, as supporters of the Green camp would jubilantly come to call it, delivered to Chen, but it is quite clear that he would have been defeated without it. The Blue camp spoke of a put-up job and denounced it with increasing fury. Chen Shui-bian explained that his miraculous triumph showed that God had called him to lead the nation.

Subsequent evidence has left no doubt that Chen was indeed grazed by a home-made bullet, and that another ricocheted harmlessly into padding round the injured knee of his running mate, Annette Lu, sitting beside him on the jeep. But no assailant was noticed at the time, and none has been found since. The deeper mystery is not so much the identity of the marksman, who fired a primitive weapon at very close range, as the motive behind the shots. Who stood to benefit from such an attentat? Certainly not the pan-Blue camp, which, had it not been for the bullet, would have won the election. Could Chen have staged the whole affair himself, to hijack a victory otherwise out of reach? There are precedents for something like this: the fake ambush that Mitterrand is generally believed to have arranged against himself in 1959, when he was trying to refurbish his image as a doughty fighter against the Right, comes to mind. But Chen was wounded, however slightly, in a vulnerable part of his body: would any politician really take the risk of a friendly bullet going astray? A Green conspiracy seems scarcely less improbable than a Blue one.

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Vol. 26 No. 13 · 8 July 2004

Perry Anderson refers to ‘an international pact against recognising’ a breakaway such as the one Taiwan might make from China, ‘since so many states have reason to fear they would be the first to suffer once the precedent was set’ (LRB, 3 June). There is a fundamental principle of international law called the principle of non-fragmentation, which condemns the disruption of the political unity of an existing state when its government represents all people without discrimination within its territory. When a part of the state rebels and separates from the motherland, other states are reluctant to extend diplomatic recognition to the breakaway state. However, it is doubtful if non-fragmentation is applicable to the relationship between China and Taiwan. True, Beijing has long asserted that there is only one China, of which Taiwan is an inseparable part. Yet, rhetoric aside, the reality is that the PRC does not and has never exercised sovereignty or authority over Taiwan. Taiwan has its own government and military. Its authorities do not accept or implement orders from Beijing. One would be hard pressed to find evidence supporting the claim that Taiwan and China are part of a political unity. Since these conditions do not obtain, there can be no secession.

Taiwan’s international status is peculiar. Qing Dynasty China ceded Taiwan to Japan following the Sino-Japanese War in the Treaty of Shimonoseki of 1895. From then through World War Two, Taiwan was a Japanese colony. Anderson wrote, without identifying the relevant document, that the ‘end of the Pacific War returned Taiwan by Allied agreement to China’. In the Cairo Declaration of 1943 the Allies stated their intention to restore to China those territories, including Formosa, that Japan had stolen. In the Potsdam Proclamation issued before the end of the war in 1945, the Allies said that the terms of the Cairo Declaration should be carried out and Japan’s sovereignty limited to the various islands making up Japan. There is no principle of international law, however, that would recognise these statements as conveying Taiwanese sovereignty to China. The San Francisco Peace Treaty of 1951 also failed to convey Taiwanese sovereignty to China. There, Japan renounced ‘all right, title and claim to Formosa’ but did not convey sovereignty to anyone, including China.

Neither the Republic of China nor the People’s Republic of China was party to the San Francisco Peace Treaty. The RoC did enter into a separate treaty with Japan, the Taipei Peace Treaty of 1952. There the parties recognised Japan’s renunciation of its right, title and claim to Taiwan as stated in the San Francisco Peace Treaty, but the parties did not go any further. Japan did not transfer Taiwanese sovereignty to China.

Kenneth Choy
Hong Kong

Perry Anderson claims that the separation of Norway and Sweden in 1905 is one of three peaceful separations of bi-national states. Norway, in fact, was a joint kingdom with Denmark for many centuries. Denmark was forced to give up Norway to Sweden after the Napoleonic Wars as punishment for backing the loser, and to loosen Denmark’s grip on shipping in the Baltic. The union of Sweden and Norway was uneasy, and the eventual separation could be described as peaceful only if one ignored the partial mobilisation of both sides and the many years during which the Norwegian Storting opposed by all means short of armed force the efforts of the Swedes to govern it.

A.J. Caston
Tervuren, Belgium

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