Excluding Taiwan from the World’s View

Amazingly, the UN Human Development Report 2002 doesn't even mention the word "Taiwan," despite the fact that the report's major theme is "deepening democracy in a fragmented world."

Taiwan is democratic, but Beijing's rulers forbid UN agencies from writing honestly about Taiwan's experience.

The reason is that Beijing wants to end Taiwan's democratic autonomy and annex it as a "special administrative region" (SAR) akin to Hong Kong. To respect China's desires, UN researchers even avoid naming the country that some specialists have called "the freest in Asia."

Taiwan's exclusion from the UN and from international society more generally is a 30-year-old outrage that results in at least three destructive consequences:

First, it restricts the ways other countries can study Taiwan's successes, which are rare and precious. Excluding Taiwan constrains the range of experiences other countries can draw upon as they seek to chart their own developmental courses.

Second, it makes it more difficult for other countries to learn from Taiwan's failures, which include persistent corruption, a sometime-irresponsible media and environmental degradation. No country is perfect, and the Taiwanese would be the first to admit that theirs is in need of improvement. Yet their efforts to learn from the examples of other countries and exchange experiences are needlessly hampered.

Third, and more abstractly, when international society ostracizes the freest country in Asia, international society itself is exposed as enamored of power politics and lacking the courage to stand up for what is right.

For far too many years now, international society's best values and possibilities have been warped and blunted by an unseemly eagerness to kowtow to the blustering, self-regarding, arrogant authoritarianism of Beijing -- not because the Chinese Communists provide anything of moral and ethical value to the international community, but simply because they control wealth and power.

Nuclear weapons, a large army, a gigantic market, and exploitable cheap labor all make the world melt in China's presence. People who should know better talk as if the Chinese state actually represents the Chinese people, who by implication must be enamored of authoritarianism and bristling with nationalism.

In fact, this is just a myth perpetrated by China's rulers and the pampered urban elites who derive benefits from dictatorship -- a myth that, amazingly, numerous foreigners happily champion. Yet the Chinese people are surely quite similar to the Taiwanese people in their simple desire for prosperity, peace and freedom. They don't like authoritarianism and most are not jingoistic.

The international community sweeps these facts under the rug in a craven desire to cater to China by ostracizing Taiwan and even forbidding UN researchers from using the country's name. The implication is simple: International society's core principles reflect the law of the jungle.

Beijing insists Taiwan could rejoin the international community as a Chinese SAR. Would this solve the problem? Obviously not, because if Taiwan were annexed into the Chinese empire, it would no longer be democratic.

Sadly, many international leaders would celebrate Taiwan's unification by attending the gala Taipei handover ceremony, just as they flocked to Hong Kong in 1997. People from business, government and academia would all toast China's satisfaction of yet another irredentist demand.

It's time for the US and its partners to face this situation and find a way to welcome Taiwan back into the family of nations. The result would be good for Taiwan, good for the people of China, and good for the development of norms that would create a more just society.