May 20, 2005
A small step on the road to peace
China to allow mainlanders to visit Taiwan
China is to lift a decades-old ban on mainland tourists visiting political rival Taiwan, state media reported on Friday, a move that could further ease tension after visits to China by two of the island’s opposition leaders.
China has restricted visits by its citizens to Taiwan ever since 1949 when the Nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek fled to the island at the end of the Chinese civil war. A limited number of mainlanders have been able to travel there on business.
Ultimately, however, it is up to the Taiwan government under independence-leaning President Chen Shui-bian to decide whether the floodgates should be opened. Taiwan has its own tough rules restricting mainland visitors.
“Basically we welcome the announcement by the mainland, but it involves many issues and the scope is broad,” said Taiwan transport minister Lin Ling-san, whose ministry oversees tourism.
I’ve said before that the game being played between these two countries is predicatable, and meaningless, sabre-rattling. This sort of thing goes on in the world of international power politics all the time, much like the US threatening to withhold funds from the UN, which is something I plan to talk about later.
China and Taiwan are two nations with a very close cultural and historical relationship. The dominant people in Taiwanese culture either lived in China before the revolution (if they’re old enough), or descended from Chinese mainlanders who fled during the revolution. While the economic differences between the Taiwanese and mainland Chinese are large, due to the 55-year stagnation that Communism wrought, those are slowly diminishing. And in the grand scheme of things, their situation is much like that between the US and Britian. Sure, we fought them to win our independence, but the cultural similarities are so broad that one little revolution couldn’t keep us apart long.
For this reason, I’ve been saying for a long time that China and Taiwan are going to slowly make amends. I don’t know whether reunification will ever occur. But much like reunification of Germany was a result of the Soviet Union collapsing, the possibility of reunification between China and Taiwan will be due to changes in China, not Taiwan. China is on the rise in the world, as you might expect from any large country with 1.2 billion citizens, as they start to liberalize their economic policies.
Further, I don’t see an inevitable shooting war coming from this situation, either between China and Taiwan, or China and us. I think the slow fall of communism in China has forced the lesson on them that they can gain much more from Taiwan or the USA as trading partners than by attempted conquest. China needs Taiwan, and as the relationship builds, Taiwan will only further increase their investment in the mainland. Likewise, China needs us, and our investment in their manufacturing enriches both us and them.
So I applaud the inroads that we are seeing. They have recently opened commercial flights between Taiwan and the mainland, and now they are working to allow tourism. A friendship developing between China and Taiwan will only improve both nations, and be one step closer to a friendship between China and the USA. And striking that friendship will be very important for world stability, because China might soon return us to a dual-superpower world. Perhaps it’s simply my optimism speaking, but I think we’re well on our way to forging that friendship.
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