Matt Schiavenza From the Dragon to the Apple- A Sinophile in New York

Kunming to Taipei Direct Flight

GoKunming reports today that China Eastern has launched a weekly flight between Kunming and Taipei, capital of Taiwan. As Chris notes in the post, this news would have been absolutely unthinkable only a few years ago. In fact, when I moved to China the big Taiwan Strait news was China's enactment of an "anti-secessionist" law, which plainly stated that any Taiwanese move toward independence would provoke a military response from the mainland.

So how did relations between the two improve?

The biggest reason is Taiwanese politics. The island, unlike the mainland, is a democracy and has two main parties- the Kuomintang (国民党), and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). This year, the Kuomintang won Taiwan's presidential election after several years of DNC rule. Generally, the Kuomintang is the pro-reunification* party while the DPP is the pro-independence party. Naturally, cross-Strait relations have improved since the March elections.

But wait. Didn't the Kuomintang once fight a war against the Chinese Communist Party? How could the two have warm relations today?

In fact, the Kuomintang was the party of Chiang Kai-Shek, the former ruler of nationalist China and enemy of the Communist Mao Zedong. When Mao defeated Chiang in the Chinese civil war, the latter fled to Taiwan and established the "Republic of China" there with the stated intention of re-taking the mainland.

Obviously, that never happened.

What did happen in Taiwan, though, was eventual democratic reforms. Chiang governed as dictator until his death in 1976 (same year that Mao died, incidentally), at which point his son took over. Reforms started about a decade later, and the island held its first democratic elections in 1996, with the Kuomintang taking power. Talk of "taking over the mainland" slowly faded.

But that doesn't answer the question of how the Kuomintang emerged as the pro-reunification party in Taiwan. Before Chiang ever arrived (carrying much of the Chinese treasury and cultural relics with him), there were already a lot of Chinese people living on the island. These people were, by and large, descendants of Chinese people who had immigrated to Taiwan over the previous three centuries. They weren't altogether happy that the Chinese who had just arrived suddenly took power. In Taiwan's sixty-year incarnation as the Republic of China, thus, there has existed a rivalry between the Johnny-come-lately and the we-were-here-first factions.

By and large, the Kuomintang represent the former group, and the opposition parties the latter. The Taiwanese whose ancestors had been on the island for centuries tend to favor reunification less than the Taiwanese whose parents and grandparents were born on the mainland.

So with the pro-reunification crowd in power, increased transport and trade links come as little surprise. Should the Democratic Nationalists win the next elections, though, expect some of these gains to be reversed. Which means that those of us who would like to visit Taiwan without much transit hassle should act quickly. Anyone have 11,000 RMB to spare for the return ticket?

UPDATE: An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) as the Democratic National Party (DNC). Apologies for the error, and thanks to Pfeffer in the comments.

*By "pro-reunification", I should probably clarify that the Kuomintang do not favor immediate reunification, but rather eventual reunification. At the moment the party is happy to preserve the status-quo.