Asia
Why Beijing cares about tiny Nauru
Published 20 September 2007
Economically, China has changed beyond re cognition, but Mao Zedong's heirs remain in power, and for them Taiwan is still an essential cause
Rarely is St Kitts and Nevis (pop: 39,382), not to mention St Vincent and the Grenadines (pop: 125,882), at the centre of a titanic diplomatic struggle. But no nation is too tiny for China and Taiwan to squabble over.
As world leaders gather in New York for the United Nations General Assembly, a delegation from the foreign ministry in Taipei is in the Caribbean trying to convince these tiny statelets to maintain diplomatic recognition.
Last year, after he switched allegiance for a second time, President Ludwig Scotty of the Pacific island state of Nauru (pop: 11,424) was allegedly accosted by a horde of screaming Chinese officials who tried to drag him on to a plane to Beijing just as he was boarding one bound for Taipei.
You could be forgiven for wondering what the fuss is about. Taipei has an active lobby in Washington, not least from defence companies that sell billions of dollars' worth of weapons to the Tai wanese. The US is bound by treaty to defend it should China attack but, in Europe, Taiwan is scarcely mentioned. It is a diplomatic anomaly, an unhemmed ragged edge of history.
When Mao Zedong's Communists won the civil war in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek's defeated Nationalist forces, known as the Kuomintang, fled to the island of Taiwan, where they set up a separate administration. Both sides claimed they were China's legitimate government, and until the 1970s anti-communist countries, including the United States, resisted the inevitable. When China became a power to be reckoned with, however, Taiwan gave an embarrassed cough and sent diplomatic missions to Beijing.
Taiwan has ended up in what one senior US state department official has called "a unique pol itical position". The US arms Taiwan but does not give it diplomatic recognition; it praises Taiwan's democracy, but condemns as "needlessly provocative behaviour" the idea of the Taiwan ese voting on declaring independence.
China still regards Taiwan as a "renegade pro vince" that it will one day reclaim. Every year, Taiwan applies for UN membership and is rejected by an ever larger majority; small countries are important because each has a vote. This year, the issue is even more fraught because the government of President Chen Shui-bian is applying to join not as the Republic of China, but as "Taiwan" - a new, independent state.
This past weekend President Chen's governing party held a 300,000-strong rally in support of a referendum on the issue. The Chinese respon ded with an air-raid drill in Shanghai, a strong hint that any such declaration would be met by force. In a lengthy essay reproduced by the Chinese state news agency, Xinhua, a supposedly objective scholar described Chen as a corrupt and "infamous power fanatic".
What the Chinese really hate is democracy. It may well be true that Chen's referendum is an attempt to drum up popular support and distract voters from corruption allegations - that's the kind of thing politicians do in democracies, and it's the voters' job to see through it. The government in Beijing has floated the idea of "one country, two systems", like for Hong Kong, but Taiwan's democracy is too advanced for that.
Like Kashmir, the Taiwan Strait used to be talked of as a "flashpoint" that could accidentally spark World War III. If China attacked, America would respond and the conflict could rapidly go nuclear. In recent years, Taiwanese firms have invested massively in China, reproducing on the mainland their early success back home. Diplomats relaxed, hoping that everyone would be too busy making money together to fight. But China is building up its military capacity, especially in "informatised" warfare, which will give it the ability to interfere with US communications systems that could detect an attack on Taiwan.
Economically, China has changed beyond re cognition, but Mao Zedong's heirs remain in power, and for them Taiwan is still an essential cause. They may be biding their time, until not a single little country recognises the upstart alternative to the People's Republic, and the American and Chinese economies are so integrated that there is no question of Washington risking everything to defend a leftover bit of history.
Lindsey Hilsum is China correspondent for Channel 4 News
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