Community Softens Line on Taiwan, China

A month ago, the Chinese Consulate in Los Angeles threw its annual bash commemorating the founding of the People’s Republic on Oct. 1, 1949, the day Mao Tse-tung announced: “The Chinese people have stood up.”

Scarcely more than a week later, the de facto Taiwanese diplomatic mission here gave a party to celebrate its own competing National Day, Oct. 10, which marks the start of the 1911 revolution led by Sun Yat-sen to overthrow the Qing Dynasty.

Never mind that both sides chose the same site, the Universal City Hilton, for their dual--or dueling--banquets. More remarkable was that some of the same guests, including several local Chinese American dignitaries, mingled among the nattily dressed crowds at both events, paying their respects to officials from both the behemoth mainland and its tiny, but scrappy, rival across the Taiwan Strait.

“I work with people of Chinese descent, and I work on local issues with people from both sides” of the China-Taiwan divide, said Monterey Park Councilwoman Judy Chu, who attended both gala dinners.

The guest overlap epitomized the shift in attitude toward the two political enemies among Chinese Americans in Southern California--and across the nation--over the past 20 years. Time was when the local ethnic Chinese community, infused with a new crop of immigrants from Taiwan, stood squarely behind the late Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime in Taipei, which was driven out of the mainland by the Communists but recognized for years as the rightful government of China.

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But with President Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to Beijing, the picture blurred. U.S. ties with the mainland were officially established in 1979, and the world’s most populous country slowly opened up to the outside, ending years of isolation--and the black-and-white allegiances of Chinese Americans that had prevailed for so long.

As a result, the community set to greet Chinese President Jiang Zemin at a Beverly Hills town hall meeting today and at a dinner tonight in a downtown hotel will be one more favorably disposed toward mainland China and less militantly pro-Taiwan than at almost any other point in recent history.

It is a community whose members even hoisted the Communist Chinese flag for the first time at an Oct. 1 ceremony in Monterey Park, long a Taiwanese American bastion where the Nationalist banner has flown every Oct. 10 for the past decade.

“The ideological lines are being eroded,” said political scientist James Tong, who co-directs the USC-UCLA Joint Center for East Asian Studies. “We are no longer living in the ‘60s and ‘70s. China is no longer as hard-line Communist as it used to be. Taiwan is no longer as hard-line Nationalist as it used to be.”

One engine of rising pro-Beijing sentiment--and evidence of China’s gradual liberalization--is embedded in the changing makeup of Southern California’s Chinese American community, an estimated 400,000 people.

In Southern California, ethnic Chinese from the mainland now easily outnumber those from Taiwan. According to a Times Poll conducted last spring, 33% said they were born in China, compared with 22% for Taiwan.

True, many of those most fiercely loyal to Taiwan are native Chinese who fled to the U.S. via Taiwan to escape the Communist takeover. But the new wave of immigrants directly from China’s shores has altered the dynamics. More than half of those surveyed in the Times Poll identified Taiwan as part of China.

“There always was a population in the Chinese community that was pro-China,” Chu said. “The difference between then and now is that there are people who have actually come from China and also many people who have business ties with China.”

Even some of those who once counted themselves as staunch backers of Taipei and implacable opponents of Beijing have moderated their positions.

Many have watched closely as the People’s Republic began embracing a market economy in which “to get rich is glorious,” as China’s late “paramount leader,” Deng Xiaoping, famously proclaimed. Many have been reunited with relatives now that the Chinese can move with greater freedom within and across the mainland’s borders. Still others, while condemning China’s authoritarian one-party system, note that the country has instituted low-level popular elections in some rural villages.

At the same time, concern is growing over events in Taiwan, where martial law was lifted only a decade ago and problems long associated with the West, like violent crime, have crept in.

In the wake of such changes, gone are the days when name-calling ruled political conversation, when anti-China rhetoric among Chinese Americans was almost universal and when brawls between pro-Taiwan groups and the tiny minority of pro-China factions sometimes erupted.

“Discussions about this are less emotional now and more reasonable,” said David Lang, a Los Angeles political consultant born in Hong Kong.

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Chinese-language newspapers out of the San Gabriel Valley, once intensely pro-Taiwan, are now providing more tempered coverage of the mainland. One paper, owned by an Indonesian with strong business links to China, has even adopted a pro-Beijing editorial stance, which would have been unthinkable 20 years ago.

China’s expanding economy--and the stake many local Chinese Americans, as well as the U.S., have in it--has pushed people from President Clinton to S.P. Sung of Rowland Heights to a greater, albeit reluctant, acceptance of Beijing.

Now retired, Sung, 67, ran an import-export textile business that for years did business with the mainland. Although China has a long way to go to establish a democratic society that respects human rights, the country “is getting much, much better,” he said.

“We like China,” said Sung, who was just a teenager when he became the only member of his family to escape to Taiwan before the Communists took power.

With California having exported $1.9 billion in goods to China in 1996, economics has had an enormous effect, mostly positive, on local Chinese Americans’ view of the mainland, observers say.

That image make-over, however, was nearly wiped out June 4, 1989, when the Chinese regime ruthlessly crushed pro-democracy protesters in and around Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, killing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of civilians. Residents here were shocked by the display of brutality by Chinese authorities and for a period banished China again to the political, social and economic wilderness.

But “people’s memories are short,” Lang said. “In a few years’ time, they forget what happened.

“Of course, they pray that these kind of things won’t happen again,” he added. “But a lot of people are seeing that the best way to deal with China is through economic ties.”

Despite the enlarged spectrum of views toward China and Taiwan, the Chinese American community is still mindful that the two sides remain at bitter odds, each claiming to be China’s true government. Local charitable groups know that affiliating with one side often means alienating the other. Inviting the de facto Taiwanese consul to your fund-raising dinner means nixing the invitation to the Chinese consul.

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Joseph Chang, president of the Chinese Club of San Marino, which includes 1,000 households, tries to steer clear of the debate. “Because we are a nonprofit organization, we’re not allowed to get involved in politics,” Chang said, although he acknowledges inviting Taiwan’s quasi-consul to his club’s annual banquet Saturday night.

Chu, the Monterey Park official, had to pay close attention to protocol when officials from both sides showed up for her installation as mayor in 1990 and 1994. They sat in the audience, on opposite sides, “right in the front, and [an] equal distance from the podium.”

Impartiality reigned on a visit Chu made to Monterey Park’s sister cities in Taiwan and China. “I made sure I spent five days in both cities,” Chu said. “I made sure everything was equal: the types of gifts we gave, the number of days we spent, the types of activities we had.”

But those are diplomatic concessions to official sensibilities at public events. Privately, more Chinese Americans, like physician Sheng Chang, are now willing to admit that they are receptive to both sides and hope that both China and Taiwan succeed.

“I was definitely against the Communists, against the PRC [People’s Republic of China],” said Chang, 55, an Arcadia councilman who emigrated from Taiwan in 1969.

“But with time, I’ve gotten to know China more and more, and I’ve visited China several times. I saw it changing, I saw people’s living standards elevated, I saw people communicating without fear of being supervised, I saw the economy improving. . . . So, my impression has been changed.”