This week, I wanted to do a piece on President Ma's National Day Address to the (largely unobserving) nation but I didn't fancy the inevitable indigestion and acid reflux it would cause so I am copping out and instead quoting from an eminent and internationally respected blogger who better nails in 1 post what I would take 10 posts to say:
The Cairo Declaration isn't a treaty; it is merely a declaration of intent by the three Powers, which can change as time changes. But as I often note when people mention Cairo, neither the UK nor China nor the US owned Taiwan in 1943; Japan did. None of those powers had the right to give away what they didn't own, andcertainly not without consulting the people of Taiwan.
A function of Chineseness is this discourse of expansion is to provide the rationale, half of which is spoken: we're all Chinese... The other half is assumed: ....so we must be in one country. As the article notes, the real problem isn't ethnicity but the differing political and historical experiences of the two sides.
Ma deploys "Chineseness" as an antidote to the evolution of a democratic identity based on historical and political experience. Again, this is yet another version of the struggle between the KMT's vision of Taiwan as an ethnic Han state in which citizenship is based on "race" vs the DPP's vision of Taiwan as a multicultural nation in which citizenship is defined democratically.
Ma continuously plucks at three strings of the annexation lyre. One is that Taiwan belongs to the ROC via the Cairo Declaration. The second is the unity in "being Chinese". The third is the ROC Constitution. Ma invokes the Constitution because in his discourse it says that Taiwan is part of China, which means there is no need to hold referendum on the subject of Taiwan's status (remember ECFA -- no need to hold a referendum -- same program, different objective).
Of course, the reader might well ask hasn't Ma promised that Taiwan's future will be decided by its 23 million people? There are several fixes for that. One is to follow the ECFA model and simply have the rubber stamp legislature provide some kind of popular cover. Another would be to treat the issue as already decided -- didn't the public implicitly approve the Constitution when they voted for the President of the ROC? I suspect Ma is leaning toward some version of the latter.
Note also that Ma has changed the Status Quo in the Taiwan Strait by moving toward China and rejecting the relationship between Taiwan and China that evolved under the Lee and Chen Administrations. Needless to say, no one will complain about this change in the Status Quo; no one has even mentioned the Status Quo since Ma Ying-jeou came to power in 2008 (bet ya hadn't noticed that it has more or less disappeared from the discourse...). The Status Quo in its dying stages became merely a rhetorical shackles to handcuff Taiwan's growing democratic and independent identity. I'm curious to see whether a DPP President in 2012 will resurrect the Status Quo zombie-like from its grave....More evidence here and here ...
