The Republic of China has many obvious reasons to distrust the People’s Republic of China. So the Taiwanese must know, especially given the history of China’s treatment of Hong Kong, that it would be foolhardy to accept any official assurances that as long as they submit without a murmur to the PRC’s demand for union (on the PRC’s terms), all will be swell for the newly attached and subjugated people (South China Morning Post, March 8, 2025).
Taiwan may lose the previously offered high degree of autonomy under Beijing’s rule, if it is reunited [sic] with the mainland by force, a deputy to China’s national legislature has warned.
The warning was issued on Friday by National People’s Congress deputy Li Yihu, who is also a leading Taiwan affairs specialist at Peking University, during Beijing’s most important annual political gathering, known as the “two sessions”.
“If it is a peaceful reunification [sic]…the arrangements may be more flexible than those of the special administrative regions [Hong Kong and Macau],” Li told the Hong Kong-based China Review News Agency.
“If Taiwan moves towards separation or resists reunification, and the mainland government still needs to complete reunification, the arrangement may be downgraded, even to the level of Taiwan province,” Li added.
Mainland leaders have long argued that the “one country, two systems” model, first applied when Hong Kong returned to mainland rule, would allow Taiwan to retain its existing system and enjoy a high degree of autonomy after unification with the mainland.
If China were interested in being flexible in its arrangements with the Republic of China, it could of course simply leave the Taiwanese people alone.
Meanwhile, a spokesman for the People’s Liberation Army, Wu Qian, is saying that “the more rampant ‘Taiwan independence’ separatists become, the tighter the noose around their necks and the sharper the sword hanging over their heads will be.”
The ROC president, William Ching-te Lai, has said that there is no need to pursue de jure independence for the Republic of China or Taiwan and that it is “not necessary to declare independence.” He has also said that his country is “already independent,” the kind of assertion of the obvious that makes him a “separatist” in the eyes of the Chinese Communist Party—a type that the Chinese government says it is justified in executing.
The South China Morning Post plays along with Party propaganda when it asserts that Hong Kong and Macau “retain separate legislative and judicial systems.” Separate how? Nominally, formerly, and not actually don’t count.
The PRC did agree that Hong Kong would enjoy its own political system after the handover—then immediately began to violate this agreement. By 2020, with the imposition of the National Security Law, the job of stripping Hong Kong’s second system of democratic and rights-protecting features was largely complete.
A former Republic of China would not get twenty-four months, let alone twenty-four years, of fragile second-system status after being attached to the People’s Republic of China. Maybe not even twenty-four hours.
