Secession law 'will change the status quo'
Beijing's plan will affect other countries as well as Taiwan, says official
Taiwan yesterday called unacceptable Beijing's plan to enact a controversial 'anti-secession law'.
'It definitely will unilaterally change the status quo of the Taiwan Strait and this is unacceptable to us,' said Chiu Tai-san, vice-chairman and spokesman of the Mainland Affairs Council (MAC), Taiwan's top mainland-policy planning body, on the eve of a National People's Congress Standing Committee meeting to scrutinise the draft.
The Standing Committee will meet from today until Wednesday to deliberate on 20 bills, including the highly controversial anti-secession measure.
Whatever its definition of the status of Taiwan, it would have a wide an impact, Mr Chiu said.
'The logic is simple. If the bill is designed to place Taiwan under the sovereignty of the People's Republic of China instead of the geographically neutral term 'China', an American who, say for example, comes to Taiwan to say he supports us [Taiwan] as a sovereign, independent nation, would most likely be sentenced to jail if he goes to the mainland,' Mr Chiu said.
'So, one way or another, that law will not only affect Taiwan but also other countries.'
He would not say what countermeasures Taiwan would take, since the MAC first needed to know the exact details of the bill.
Mr Chiu said Taipei had no reason to believe the mainland had worked with the US to issue the anti-secession bill as a means of increasing pressure on the island.
'Our information shows that there is no sign of such co-operation,' he said. But he acknowledged the government had information indicating Beijing had informed the US about its plan to institute such a bill before Xinhua reported it last Friday.
An analyst warned the anti-secession law was no bluff.
'The mainland seriously wants to circumvent what it sees as pro-independence moves of the government here,' said Andrew Yang Nien-dzu, secretary-general of the Chinese Council of Advanced Policy Studies, a private think-tank in Taiwan.
He said by using the term 'anti-secession' instead of 'reunification law', Beijing was trying to tell the world it was targeting any attempts by subversive groups to break away from the mainland.
That way, it hoped the bill would be seen as falling in the realm of domestic rather than international affairs, he said.
In a MAC poll of 1,067 Taiwanese, the results of which were released yesterday, 73 per cent of respondents called the anti-secession law unacceptable, against 12.8 per cent who said they would accept it. The poll also showed only one in five Taiwanese support independence.
