The citizens of Taiwan continue to suffer from the misrepresentation of history and the threat of becoming another Tibet or to suffer as the Uiguar people or to join Hong Kong with promises forgotten, denied or postponed.
It is clear that Taiwan is not and never has been China and that aborigine Taiwanese have lived in Taiwan for 5,000 years. Many are the Hakka and other ‘Chinese’ peoples who over several hundred years fled China looking for freedom and opportunity.
The civil war in China is not a recent event but began with the fall of the Manchu (Qing) Dynasty in 1911 and continued on and off until Mao’s eventual defeat of Chiang Kai-Shek even as Chiang maintained that the real China was now being governed from Taiwan.
At the end of World War II and the defeat of the Japanese, the civil war heated up. On one hand Russia supported Mao’ s Communist Party of China (COC) and his Peoples’ Republic of China (PRC). On the other side the West supported the Kuomintang (KMT) and its claim to be the ‘Republic of China’ (ROC).
By 1946 Chiang began to move troops and supplies to Taiwan from where he could prepare an attack on the forces of Mao. In 1947 after only sixteen months, the people of Taiwan who had originally welcomed the KMT revolted against the plundering of their country to support the KMT in the China civil war. People turned against the corruption, nepotism, economic hardship, abusive taxation and especially lack of political freedom. The unarmed Taiwanese were no match for the thousands of troops sent from ‘the mainland’ by Chiang Kai-Shek and the result was between 10,000 and 30,000 people were brutally murdered.
This was the famous ‘two-two-eight incident’ (er-er-ba) which was quickly followed by martial law, the continuation of one party government and the white terror that drove many Taiwanese out of their country. This event was not publically acknowledged until 1987 and it was only in 1996 that people were free to elect their own government.
With the 1945 defeat of the Japanese the allies left Taiwan’s political situation largely unresolved despite the outdated Cairo Conference of 1943 while the United Nations mandated the care of Taiwan in the hands of China. Taiwan had become modernized in the fifty years of Japanese occupation and were ready to vote for their status among the nations. In 1971 the UN China seat was given to the PRC while Taiwan’s KMT government refused a seat under the name Taiwan. In 1979 the United States in a now often referred to document agreed that Taiwan’s political situation was unresolved but it acknowledged that Beijing held that there was but one China. (So there is but the Taiwanese argue that it doesn’t include Taiwan.)
As I write this Bob Dylan along with many other artists has been barred from performing in China. Google has moved out of China because it refuses to be an agent of repression and a party to the jailing of dissidents. The Dalai Lama is not only forbidden to return to his home in Tibet but other nations are threatened should they meet with him. China, despite its accomplishments is way behind Taiwan in political freedom, in cultural openness, in human rights, in the spread of wealth, in social protection, in life style opportunities. Taiwan is constantly threatened and bullied by present Chinese leadership that promotes a one party, no dissension state.
Admittedly my connections are mainly church connections, a church that has continued to suffer and serve on behalf of the people of Taiwan, but whenever I have asked: Where would you rather live, China or Taiwan? The answer, for many good reasons, is always: Taiwan.
The role of the church in society is not so difficult. We are to speak the good news, good news for God’s people, good news in the face of tyranny and injustice. Give to Caesar the things that are Caesars and though we know that Caesar claims body and soul, everything that is and will be belongs to God.
Thank God for the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan and the many who have been jailed and persecuted in the name of God and for the sake of the Taiwanese people. China is China and Taiwan is Taiwan; if you don’t believe me believe the great majority of Taiwan’s twenty-three million people.
