Organizer: Vivienne Shue, Cornell University
Chair: Brantly Womack, University of Virginia
China's Neglect of Taiwan: From Shimonoseki Treaty to Cairo Declaration
Edward I-Te Chen, Bowling Green State University
Far from being a "renegade province" as China calls Taiwan today, Taiwan desperately tried to remain as a part of the Chinese Empire but was abandoned by China a hundred years ago. In agreeing to the terms of the Treaty of Shimonoseki with Japan in 1895, the Beijing Government apparently concluded that the loss of the island, remote and still very primitive, was a worthwhile sacrifice to save Beijing from the occupation of the Japanese army. In the next fifty years, the island was ruled by Japan as a colony.
The aim of this paper is threefold. First, it will show how determined China was in disassociating itself from Taiwan when the latter mounted a desperate resistance against the Japanese occupation. China totally shunned the short-lived Republic of Taiwan (May-October 1895) lest the Taiwanese resistance should lead to the resumption of the war with Japan.
Secondly, the paper will reveal how little sentiment, which favored the reunification of Taiwan with China, existed among the people on both sides of the Taiwan Straits during the 50 years of the Japanese occupation of the island. The survey of mass political movements organized on both China and Taiwan during the period in question will be the base of such a conclusion.
Finally, the paper will investigate the views of four distinguished Chinese leaders on the future of Taiwan during the 1895-1945 period. They were Liang Qichao, Sun Yat-sen, Mao Zedong, and Chiang Kai-shek. The paper will find that they were either totally uninterested in regaining the lost territory or grossly misinformed about Taiwan. Mao Zedong even favored the independence of Taiwan (from Japan).
The paper will conclude that China's interest in the unification of Taiwan was first aroused by the Cairo Declaration of 1943 when the Allies promised to restore to China all the territories "Japan stole from China." Until then, China, both her leaders and people, were too preoccupied with matters requiring their immediate attention to show even a desire for unification of Taiwan.
Living at the Edge: China's Ethnic Minorities
Shelly K. Habel, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
The national minorities of the People's Republic of China (PRC) inhabit regions of China which are characterized by low overall socioeconomic development. Generally, the central government's development policies have successively failed to bring much progress to these areas, thus increasing socioeconomic stratification. The state is therefore reviewing ways to alleviate poverty and to decrease dependence in these areas upon state subsidies. Since the implementation of the "Open Door Policy," tourism has increased dramatically and is currently viewed as an important source of valued foreign exchange. These policies, however, are viewed with mixed feelings by the national minorities, who are skeptical that poverty and discrimination will actually decrease. The national minorities are particularly concerned with the central government's intent to develop and establish tourism in areas largely inhabited by national minorities. Recognizing the economic and political motivation behind the state's development of China's tourism industry, "ethnic tourism" is perhaps more likely to aggravate the national minorities' current situation than help it.
This paper discusses various aspects of tourism development in China and focuses on possible repercussions for China's national minorities. As a result of the domination found in Chinese society, multiple levels of discrimination exist and can be explained through power-conflict theory. The state's role in establishing and maintaining the power differential is discussed as a key component in continued discrimination. The analysis is therefore based on the premise that state-governed ethnic tourism contributes to entrenchment and exacerbates discrimination and marginalization of these ethnic groups in Chinese society.
Environmental Symbolism and Contemporary Policy in North China
Dee Mack Williams, East-West Center
For centuries, the Chinese literati viewed and described neighboring semi-nomadic peoples and their native homelands in the most disparaging terms. Land and people were perceived in reciprocal images of savagery. The power of pejorative language played a significant role in both motivating and rationalizing Han colonial incursions into Inner Mongolia over the last century. In some regards, traditional Confucian attitudes were only strengthened by Marxist orthodoxy after 1949, so that the same negative stereotypes are still alive in the reform era and actively inform the grassland policies of today.
The government of China considers the mobile Mongol herders of Eastern Inner Mongolia and their desert steppe environment to be long-standing obstacles in the path of national progress, scientific rationalism, and economic development. To contemporary officials and scientists, they are a land and people "in the way" of modernization. Recent "grassland construction" policies are designed to wage ideological battle as much as they are designed to control the environment. They reproduce an ancient national discourse concerning the northern frontier that affirms fundamental assumptions about the accomplishments of the reform era, the benevolence of the Chinese state, and the superiority of Han civilization.
But local residents have traditionally perceived their environment, their land use, and their economic situation rather differently from the Han. Many of these different perceptions still exist today and frustrate the intentions of central government policy.
One Country, Two Legal Cultures: The Difficulties of Creating a Coherent, Unitary
Legal System in Post-1997 Hong Kong
Ann Jordan, Chinese University of Hong Kong
As the 1997 handover of Hong Kong to China approaches, it is becoming increasing apparent that Hong Kong's legal system will not survive intact. Hong Kong's common law legal system will be subjected to unprecedented and problematic challenges from China's socialist civil law system. The Basic Law itself contains many of those challenges as it contemplates the creation of a common/civil/socialist legal system. Other challenges will certainly be mounted after 1997 by Chinese legal scholars and government officials who are not well-versed in common law traditions. Equally problematic is the fact that most of Hong Kong's common law scholars and practitioners are untrained in the socialist civil law system, which limits their ability to respond to the socialist civil law challenges except in terms that resonate within the common law tradition. It is the thesis of the paper that the main threat to the stability of Hong Kong's legal system will arise from the inevitable dissonance of these competing discourses.
This paper will investigate various points of contention that have already surfaced (e.g., the recently-settled debate over the number of foreign judges permitted to sit on the post-1997 Court of Final Appeal) and others that will surely appear after 1997 (e.g., the effect of economic provisions in the Basic Law upon existing legislation and common law rules).