WHY shouldn’t Taiwan be independent? It’s a self-governing island, its pluralistic, it’s pro-Western, after all — so why not?

Some of these arguments have been addressed in previous articles — Taiwan on its own simply cannot be considered without understanding its political and historical links with the rest of China.

The current Taiwanese leader, the LSE-educated Tsai Ing-Wen, has argued that Taiwan is already a sovereign country. In her 2022 new year address, Tsai said: “We will uphold our sovereignty and values of freedom and democracy, defend our territorial sovereignty and national security, and work to ensure peace and stability in the Indo-Pacific region.”  

Territorial sovereignty is indeed a key issue in understating the Taiwan Straits crisis.

Today, in some Western states, there are growing and clearly well-funded caucuses of political elites working to legitimise Taiwan, officially titled the Republic of China (ROC), as an entity distinct from China (ie the PRC or People’s Republic of China, established by the Communist Party of China in 1949).

In the British Labour Party voices have been heard in support of Taiwanese separatism and for military intervention. Unsurprisingly, these are echoes of Britain’s state-directed NGOs and militarist think tanks, such as Chatham House, the British Foreign Policy Group, the revived Royal United Services Institute and more directly, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

The Blairite New Diplomacy Project (NDP) is one such newly founded group, deriving key members from some of the above-mentioned organisations. Its mission statement says that: “Our experienced network of foreign policy researchers is working pro bono to provide expert advice to Labour MPs and peers, from real-time reaction to global events to in-depth briefing on complex areas of foreign policy.”

Without taxing non-Latin reading Morning Star readers too much, “pro bono” means for free. However, the more important Latin maxim in this case would be “cui bono” — who benefits? Since, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, who’s feeding at Taiwan’s trough?

One of the NDP’s researchers, the martially named Gray Sergeant, urged Labour’s leadership to be ready for war: “Labour should start to think about what Britain can meaningfully contribute should the worst happen to Taiwan — be that in the form of military aid to the Taiwanese or direct assistance alongside the US and other allies.”

Aside from his previous work at the Henry Jackson Society, Free Tibet and Hong Kong Watch campaigns, Sergeant is also working for the Taipei-funded Taiwan Foundation for Democracy.

Labour Party members might want to look further into the NDP. Ed Miliband, David Lammy and Stephen Kinnock are among its supporters — a full list is available at www.newdiplomacy.uk. Is it possible that senior Labour Party MPs might be unwittingly receiving briefings from those working with agencies of foreign governments?

However, aside from its paid-for clients, the clamour for Taiwanese recognition is not only absent from the West, but from most of the global South. Not a single Asian state and none of its neighbours recognises Taiwan as a sovereign country. Why is this?

Take the Mongolian republic as an example. Established in 1921 in the aftermath of the Soviet revolution, the Mongolian People’s Republic (MPR) was the second socialist state after the USSR. It abandoned its socialist orientation in the 1990s and took a new name.  

However, the Mongolian population was already divided into two territories. These were usually identified as Inner and Outer Mongolia, the first part belonging to the Chinese empire, the second existing under tsarist domination and then as an independent socialist republic (MPR), closely allied to the Soviet Union.  

Therefore, it may come as some surprise to critics of Chinese expansionism, to find that the authorities in Taipei continue to claim sovereignty over all of Mongolia, both the independent state and the mainland Chinese region.

For fans of the Tibetan theocrat, currently awaiting his next reincarnation in India, Tibet is Chinese too.

It was the Mongol Yuan dynasty that formally attached the Tibetan regions to China, creating a politico-religious vassal to maintain imperial dominance, which they called the Dalai Lama (Dalai is a Mongolian, not Tibetan nor Chinese, term).  

The authorities in Taipei continue to claim jurisdiction over all of the Tibetan regions, as Taiwan’s constitution makes clear. The relevant Mongolian and Tibetan sections in the Taiwanese constitution are articles 26, 64, 91, 119 and 120.

In 2017, a year after the wannabe-separatist leader Tsai Ing-wen took office in Taipei, Taiwan’s Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs Commission, which had existed under various names since 1928, during various Chinese Nationalist governments, was “reorganised” as the Mongolian and Tibetan Cultural Centre. The centre was allocated to Taipei’s ministry of culture “to carry on the duties of the now defunct” commission.

One the one hand, the move was a very belated recognition of the reality that Taipei had no effective authority over any inch of Mongolian or Tibetan territory. In fact, the previous commission had laughably operated under Taiwan’s ministry of the interior, essentially Taipei’s home office. But how could it “carry on the duties” under an entirely different remit?

Essentially, this was a cosmetic move by Tsai and her supporters to distance her authority from the traditional territorial claims of Taiwan, which was in itself arguably a violation of the amended 2005 Taiwanese constitution (Article 4), while allowing Taipei to continue to interfere in China’s Mongolian and Tibetan regions under the guise of cultural concerns.

Taipei’s other multiple territorial claims with its neighbours — Russia, Afghanistan, India, Bhutan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Burma, Japan, both Korean states, and more — go so far into the realms of fantasy that they are never mentioned in British media coverage, which is otherwise anxious to play up the idea of Chinese (exclusively PRC) expansionism.

Even when it comes to indisputably Chinese territory itself, the Western media falls over itself to denigrate the PRC’s sovereignty claims while ignoring Taiwanese positions.

In 2019, when violent protests erupted in Hong Kong, Western media bent over backwards to question the legitimacy of the Chinese central government’s ultimate jurisdiction over the city as a special administrative region (SAR).

While Tsai’s electoral fortunes temporarily benefited from the Hong Kong turmoil, Taipei also maintains that Hong Kong is indeed a Chinese city.  

Today, Covid restrictions notwithstanding, visitors to Taipei from the Chinese mainland and the two SARs of Hong Kong and Macau must join special immigration queues, unless they are citizens of another jurisdiction. “One country, two systems” has already been partially implemented, at least at border controls.

Despite the huff-and-bluff over the PRC’s claims to disputed islands and islets in the South China Sea, no Western country is provocatively using the argument of maritime rights of passage by sailing warships off the coast of Taiping Island, an Taiwanese military base located a couple of hundred miles from the Philippines shoreline, which the Filipinos and others call Itu Aba.

Taiwan’s claims in the South China Sea, based on imperial and republican Chinese precedent, have largely been accepted by the PRC, yet it is only the PRC that is accused of aggression.

The Taiwan conflict is not based on national differences, as some on the left mistakenly argue. There are Chinese people on both sides of the Taiwan Strait. The fundamental divide is a political, not ethnic one. This needs to be looked at in greater depth in future articles.