Taiwan has a ‘delegation’ at China’s National People’s Congress

China’s Nationwide Folks’s Congress wrapped up its annual session on Monday with its extremely choreographed present of assist for ruling Communist Occasion chief Xi Jinping’s imaginative and prescient for the nation.

The extent to which the occasion was extremely scripted and thoroughly stage-managed was highlighted specifically by the presence of a “provincial delegation” from democratic Taiwan, the place nearly all of folks reject Beijing’s territorial claims on their nation.

U.S.-based veteran journalist and political commentator Hu Ping takes a more in-depth have a look at what he describes as an “absurdist drama”: 

Among the many practically 3,000 delegates to China’s Nationwide Folks’s Congress, which simply concluded its annual session in Beijing, have been seats for 13 “provincial delegates from Taiwan.”

The group was a bit of completely different to the opposite groupings of regional delegates from, say, Beijing or Sichuan province.

Whereas elections in China aren’t strictly worthy of the title, delegates from locations like Beijing or Sichuan would nonetheless essentially be chosen by folks in these locations, and they’d be residents of these locations.

However the 13 “Taiwanese” delegates weren’t even from Taiwan. They do not maintain Taiwanese passports, nor are they residents of the 1911 Republic of China authorities which has ruled the democratic island since World Warfare II in a single type or one other. Some have distant household connections.

Maintaining the pretense

They are not truly Taiwanese in any respect, however Chinese language residents chosen by Taiwanese nationals residing in mainland China.

The official web site of the Nationwide Folks’s Congress says the delegates have been “elected following consultative election conferences composed of compatriots with Taiwanese nationality throughout China’s provinces, autonomous areas, municipalities, businesses of the central authorities, and the Folks Liberation Military.”

They’re principally fakes.

The Chinese language Communist Occasion leaders aren’t silly. They know these 13 Taiwanese delegates are faux. However they must sustain the pretense all the identical.

In keeping with Beijing, the Folks’s Republic of China is the one professional authorities of China, which — in accordance with them — consists of Taiwan.

There’s at present no method to have the folks of Taiwan elect their very own delegates to China’s Nationwide Folks’s Congress.

So it has to rope in some Chinese language nationals to get elected by folks in China as an alternative.

The absurdity calls to thoughts a state of affairs in the course of the 1966-1976 Cultural Revolution, throughout which there was successfully a coup throughout which main Communist Occasion and authorities our bodies have been taken over by a brand new leftist regime within the type of “revolutionary committees,” which popped up throughout the nation.

The Revolutionary Committee of the Tibet Autonomous Area was proclaimed within the fall of 1968, finishing the takeover by revolutionary committees in 29 Chinese language provinces and cities.

The Folks’s Every day put out an editorial, titled “The entire nation turns purple,” and the Ministry of Submit and Telecommunications issued a particular 8-cent stamp to commemorate the occasion utilizing the identical title.

Absurdist dramas

The stamp’s design featured a map of the Folks’s Republic of China coloured in vibrant purple, except for Taiwan.

Maybe some conscientious individual noticed an issue and wrote in to the central authorities saying that there was no revolutionary committee but in Taiwan, as a result of the island hadn’t but been “liberated.”

Maybe they made the purpose that it could not be claimed that the entire nation had turned purple, as a result of that might be tantamount to saying that Taiwan is not a part of China.

Both approach, it will need to have all of a sudden dawned on the central authorities, as a result of they issued a secret order to have all the commemorative stamps withdrawn and instantly destroyed.

However they could not destroy all of them, as a result of some had already been bought.

The incident turned the “Entire Nation is Crimson” commemorative stamp into one of the sought-after and costly in post-1949 China.

To at the present time, the Chinese language Communist Occasion hasn’t publicly corrected its declare that “the entire nation has turned purple,” as a result of it does not need to draw public consideration to the implications.

The Nationwide Folks’s Congress’ “Taiwan provincial delegation” is one other instance of those absurdist dramas that play out underneath Chinese language Communist Occasion rule.

Hu Ping is the chief editor of the New York-based month-to-month journal Beijing Spring, and is on the Board of Administrators of the NGO Human Rights in China. The views expressed listed below are his personal and don’t mirror the place of Radio Free Asia.

Translated by Luisetta Mudie.