Taiwan Leader Junks Unification Council

Taiwanese President Chen Shui-bian on Monday scrapped a policy panel on unification with mainland China and declared a 15-year-old guideline on an eventual reunion with Beijing obsolete.

The provocative move defied warnings a day earlier from Beijing, which considers Taiwan an inseparable part of the motherland. In a statement reported today by the official New China News Agency, Beijing said Chen’s action would only “bring disaster to Taiwan society.”

Chen, who has often asserted the island’s status as a separate nation, chose his words carefully.

Instead of saying he was abolishing the National Unification Council and the unification guidelines, he announced that the government body had “ceased to function” and the guidelines had “ceased to apply.”

Analysts say Chen’s distinction is a semantic attempt to appear strong domestically while placating Washington, which prefers that neither side threaten stability in the region.

“The fact that the National Unification Council is ceasing its function ... does not involve changing the status quo,” Chen said after a meeting with his top national security advisors. “As long as the free will of Taiwanese to determine their future is respected, we will not exclude any possible form of future development of cross-strait relations.”

Analysts say Chen is aiming to bolster his party’s reputation after a crushing defeat in local elections in December, and boost his own slipping approval ratings.

“There is a crisis of leadership in the ruling party -- he’s looking for something to consolidate his leadership and rally his supporters,” said Andrew Yang, secretary-general of the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, an independent think tank in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital. “I don’t think this will create immediate military reaction from China. But China will take this as the beginning of the challenge to the status quo. It will put pressure on Washington to do more preventive diplomacy.”

Though largely symbolic, the guidelines and the creation of a unification council, adopted in 1991, had reassured China that unification was a shared goal and set the basis for dialogue. Substantively speaking, however, a wide breach separates the two governments. Among other things, one of Taiwan’s conditions for unification requires Beijing to renounce communism and embrace democracy.

Chen had vowed during his 2000 inaugural speech not to do away with the guidelines or the council. But he signaled a change of mind recently and began calling them “absurd products of an absurd era.”

Two years ago, Chen riled Beijing by proposing to hold a referendum on Taiwanese independence. As a preemptive strike, Beijing passed a controversial anti-secession law last year, enabling the mainland to use force as a last resort should Taiwan declare independence.

Since his reelection in 2004, Chen has been pushing for constitutional reforms, which Beijing considers a de facto timetable for independence.

Beijing sees the move to do away with the reunification council as part of that agenda.

An editorial in the official China Daily this weekend called Chen “a die-hard secessionist member who has no credibility.”

In a joint statement today, the Taiwan Work Office of the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee and the Taiwan Affairs Office of the State Council said, “His real intention is to cheat the Taiwan public and the world.”