Hong Kong and Taiwanese demonstrators gather and hold slogans to support pro-democracy protests taking place in Hong Kong at the Liberty Square in front of Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall in Taipei, Taiwan
With protesters in Hong Kong settling for talks with the government rather than immediate political concessions, it looks like China has won – or at least averted disaster – and without sending in the tanks.
Yet this short-term success only underscores Chinese President Xi Jinping’s long-term challenge in realizing his goal of a “great national rejuvenation.”
Restoring China to the stature it enjoyed before the 19th century Opium Wars means more than controlling Hong Kong; it requires eventual reunification with Taiwan.
In the aftermath of the “Umbrella Revolution,” however, Beijing is farther from recovering Taiwan, which it considers part of the mainland, than it was a decade ago. For all of China’s economic achievements, the mainland’s political system repels many it aspires to govern.
“I don’t want Taiwan to be like China, where you have to use a VPN to see the outside world and where the economy is directed by the government,” said Mei Chen, 35, a sales executive in Taipei, referring to the virtual private networks used to circumvent mainland censorship.
China’s rulers have long sought to recover national territory lost during what the government calls the era of “humiliation” that preceded Communist rule.
Xi, the most powerful Chinese leader in a generation, has brought a new urgency to China’s long game. Since taking command of the Communist Party in 2012, he has promoted his “China Dream” of a prosperous nation for Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait.
“The China Dream is China completely reunified,” says Douglas Paal, former head of the American Institute in Taiwan, the U.S. outpost on the island.
China lost Taiwan in 1895. Fifty-four years later, supporters of ousted nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek fled there at the end of the civil war with the Communists.
On Sept. 26, even as thousands of students in Hong Kong protested Chinese rule, Xi was telling visitors that the “one country, two systems” formula China uses to govern the city should apply to Taiwan. Within hours, Taiwan President Ma Ying-jeou had flatly rejected the idea.
Chinese leaders pride themselves on a longer-term horizon than their foreign counterparts, routinely measuring policy goals in decades while boasting of a 5,000-year civilizational history. It was such patience that returned Hong Kong to the national fold, as emperors, presidents and general secretaries waited 156 years for the end of British colonial rule in 1997.
China already has waited more than six decades to recover Taiwan. Along with patience, modern leaders have relied on economic incentives to woo the Taiwanese.
“The economics are on Beijing’s side, but the politics can get in the way,” says Jessica Chen Weiss, author of “Powerful Patriots: Nationalist Protest in China’s Foreign Relations.” “And right now, the politics are getting in the way in Hong Kong.”
Over the past decade, as China’s economy more than quadrupled in real terms, Beijing drew Taiwan into an ever-tighter web of commercial ties. Trade across the Taiwan Strait last year totaled USD197 billion, almost five times the 2002 figure. Through May, Taiwanese investors this year had poured more than $2 billion into China, more than the U.S. and Germany combined.
If China’s growing prosperity all but erased the economic border with Taiwan, in Hong Kong the effects were equally dramatic. The city’s distinctive culture was diluted by legions of mainland tourists – 41 million last year alone or almost six for every resident. The city’s relative economic importance also ebbed as rival centers such as Shanghai flowered.
Hong Kong’s gross domestic product now equals 3 percent of the mainland’s economy, down from about 19 percent when China regained sovereignty.
“Xi Jinping may see Hong Kong in the future as just another big Chinese city,” says Jon Huntsman, who was U.S. ambassador to Beijing from 2009 to 2011. “Hong Kong is always comparing itself relative to Shanghai; that didn’t exist before. Hong Kong stood alone.”
The central government may get little credit for its relative success in Hong Kong. Beijing solved a problem – public unrest over limits on democracy – that was entirely of its own making. In August, the central government limited candidates for election in 2017 as chief executive of the territory to those approved by a nominating panel that Hong Kong protesters believe will be pro-Beijing.
Xi showed he had learned the lessons of the 1989 crackdown in Tiananmen Square, allowing local pro-Beijing officials to restore order without using force. Yet massacre avoidance is no recipe for winning hearts and minds.
“World leaders applaud China for not killing anyone yet,” read a recent headline on the satirical “Ministry of Harmony” website, which bills itself as the Onion for China.
Likewise, China’s reliance upon economic development while deferring issues of political identity has only made those problems more intractable.
Though Xi calls the Taiwanese “brothers,” many residents of the island feel little affinity for the mainland Chinese.
“There are six people in my family and five of them have lived in China,” says Chen, the Taipei sales executive. “My father still lives there. My own work is still related to China and I lived in Shanghai for seven years. I must depend on China for a living; I have to make renminbi. But one-country, two-systems is impossible.”
A year ago, Xi urged Taiwanese officials to agree to political talks with Beijing so the current impasse wouldn’t be “passed on from generation to generation.”
Little progress has been made and even economic cooperation is mired in controversy. In March, a proposed services trade deal ignited a furor over growing Chinese influence in Taiwan. The deal, which would have opened dozens of sectors to Chinese investment, foundered after student protesters occupied the legislature in Taipei.
“Winning over Taiwanese constituencies through economic attractiveness has been thwarted,” said Paal. “That’s not as much the avenue to reunification as it was thought to be a year ago.”
Support for eventual unification with the mainland this year fell to 8.4 percent, less than half the 21.4 percent found in a 2000 survey by Taiwan’s Mainland Affairs Council, a government body responsible for relations with China.
Fewer Hong Kong residents today identify with China than at the time of the 1997 handover. In a June 2014 Hong Kong University survey, more than 67 percent of residents selected a primarily Hong Kong-related identity compared with 31 percent identifying as Chinese.
In 1997, shortly after the handover ceremony, almost 39 percent selected a primarily Chinese identity when asked by pollsters.
The atmosphere could sour further. Xi faces a daunting array of problems on the mainland – the slowest economic growth in 24 years; ethnic unrest that China blames on Muslim separatists in the province of Xinjiang; an anti-corruption drive that has rattled party and military officials. He has little appetite for turmoil on China’s periphery.
“This is a leadership in Beijing that for a variety of reasons is extremely concerned about domestic political stability,” says Ken Lieberthal of the Brookings Institution, who handled Asia policy in the late 1990s for President Bill Clinton. “The last thing he wants to see is people get the idea that a bottom-up, large-scale movement is going to work.” David J. Lynch, Bloomberg
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