When President Chen Shui-bian issued an executive order in late February stating that the National Unification Guidelines would cease to apply and the National Unification Council would cease to function, Beijing accused Taipei of changing the status quo in the uneasy cross-strait relationship and putting a fragile peace at risk through provocative measures.
It is worth taking a closer look to see just what could be so essential about these measures that they could disrupt peace in the Taiwan Strait. The guidelines and the council date back to a time when authority in Taiwan rested with a single party and operated in a top-down manner. They were established in 1991 by Lee Teng-hui to reassure pro-China constituents that Taiwan's first president to have been born in Taiwan would not abandon Nationalist aspirations to return to China. It is important to realize that neither the council nor the guidelines has any constitutional relevance. As an advisory body to the presidential office, the council exists only at the president's pleasure, and the guidelines represent the hopes of an earlier day.
It is no secret that the current president of Taiwan, who places at the top of his list of priorities greater international recognition for Taiwan's de facto sovereignty, harbors a deep distrust of China, and he can be forgiven for finding the council and the guidelines irrelevant and outdated. In 2000, the council's budget was slashed, and since then it has been largely defunct. Is the recent decision then to cease the functioning of a defunct advisory body--with a budget of US$33.45 and a staff of one--and mothball guidelines more relevant to another age really a change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait?
That status quo, so dear to Beijing, is in fact the result of momentous changes. In recent decades, China has abandoned Marxist tenets, discarded revolutionary ideology and adopted market economics. Taiwan meanwhile has evolved beyond the authoritarian politics still practiced in China and developed a lively multiparty democratic system.
China, a vocal critic of Taiwan's democratic politics, has depicted Chen's decision as an impish, partisan act, intended only to appease Taiwan's independence activists. In fact, there is considerably more agreement on the question of relations with China than is sometimes evident in the overheated atmosphere of Taiwan's political campaigns. Even political parties in Taiwan generally described as "pro-China" are against authoritarian government and have already rejected the "one country, two systems" approach offered by Beijing to the people of Taiwan. Even the National Unification Guidelines, which domestic opposition would like to keep, state as their principal aim: "To establish a democratic, free and equitably prosperous China." The guidelines, in other words, were intended to make China more like Taiwan.
Taiwanese, no matter what their aspirations for the future of cross-strait relations, are generally proud of the nation they alone have built and the democratic political system they have chosen. Authoritarian China will not find Taiwan a willing partner for a political Anschluss beneficial at the moment only to China's expansionist ambitions.
Arguments for keeping the council and the guidelines are generally based on historical grounds, but historical precedent will not override the decision-making mechanisms central to Taiwan's democracy. The council is an ossified bit of history, and one must ask just how relevant it is to the future of cross-strait relations. "So very difficult a matter is it," wrote the Greek historian Plutarch, "to trace and find out the truth of anything by history."
Any change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait will be determined not through outdated and unused guidelines or the nominal council that shepherds them, but through the ballot box.