Strategic News Internatinal
Date: October 26, 2019
By: Surya Gangadharan
NEW DELHI: If the Nationalists were ruling China today, would the border issues with India and so
Taiwan’s envoy to India Chung Kwang Tien (extreme left) interacting with foreign affairs correspondents in New Delhi earlier this week.
“Territorial issues are very difficult to resolve,” admits Taiwan’s Ambassador to India Chung Kwang Tien (official designation is Representative since India sees Taiwan as part of China). But he also believes Taiwan would have managed the issue differently. “Our way is to shelve it and do other things but China is using muscle to resolve its territorial issues,” he said during an interaction organised by the Association of Foreign Affairs Correspondents in New Delhi recently.
Ironically, the “Eleven Dot Line” on the South China Sea, declared by the Nationalist government ruling Taiwan in 1947, closely matches the 9-Dash Line of the Communist government that overthrew the Nationalists in 1949. The Taiwanese claim at that time apparently raised no eyebrows in the region partly because colonial powers still ruled in south-east Asia and also partly because the Nationalist government did not seek to militarily assert those claims.
When the communists under Mao Dzedong seized power in 1949, they appeared content with the Eleven Dot Line for many years until the 1950s, when two dots were removed. This was to assuage the communist comrades in Vietnam about their sovereignty over the Gulf of Tonkin. The dots also became dashes. But China began to flex muscle in the 1970s when its forces expelled the South Vietnamese from the Paracel Islands. In the 1980s and 1990s, China seized seven of the 200 reefs in the Spratly chain of islands and in 2012, they occupied Scarborough Shoal which belongs to the Philippines. [FULL STORY]
