hardboiled

Searching for Peace

Students Dialogue Across the Taiwan Strait Innovative Ideas to Break the Strait Deadlock and Build Peace

It was over three decades ago when Taiwanese folk singer Li Shuangze held up a Coca-Cola bottle at a performance and said, "Everybody [in Taiwan] is drinking Coca-Cola and singing English songs. Where are our own songs?" Li lent new meaning to the term "Cocacolonialism," a word generally used to denote U.S. corporate imperialism in a developing country, and illuminated a key conflict in Taiwanese society at the time: the struggle to define a Taiwanese identity with unique cultural and historic roots. This was the topic that UC Berkeley Professor Andrew Jones spoke about on Day 3 of the Strait Talk Symposium, a week long series of events on Cross-Strait relations between China, Taiwan and the U.S. The Symposium featured speaker panels throughout the week with professors specializing in topics concerning Cross-Strait relations, and hosted 15 student delegates from the three countries who came together to work on building peace, trust and reconciliation across the Strait.

Years of deadlock in constructive dialogue have frustrated efforts for a peaceful resolution of the Cross-Strait conflict. Chinese who favor reunification wait for the day that the 'renegade province' of Taiwan returns to the mainland, and they can present a united face as 'One China' to the world. Many Chinese mainlanders reject the idea that the Taiwanese people would not want to rejoin with the motherland and instead want to split ways and construct their own identity. Supporters of Taiwanese independence see Taiwan as a country that has struggled under decades of colonialism, variously under Dutch, Japanese and American forces. The Taiwan they see has a culture, history and flavor that is uniquely Taiwanese, and distinct from that of mainland China. Today, these pro-independence Taiwanese articulate a vision for a strong, independent Taiwan that is fully able to assert itself as an equal nation on the world stage. A growing segment of the Taiwanese population, a large number of them youth, are identifying as purely "Taiwanese," an identity different from past associations as "Taiwanese and Chinese" or just "Chinese." The search for a voice and form of expression that is uniquely Taiwanese has led to the emergence of folk singers like Li Shuangze, who uphold Taiwanese identity by shunning outside influences, especially American and Chinese pop culture. Strait Talk is one of a few efforts to bring both sides of the Strait together to critically address the problems facing China, Taiwan and the U.S. without infringing on the identity or voice of either side.

The Strait Talk Symposium, a brainchild of a group of undergraduates at Brown University, started in 2005 and takes an innovative approach to the controversial Strait issue by engaging students from the three sides in Interactive Conflict Resolution (ICR) sessions and generating creative ideas to build peace. ICR is a framework for conflict resolution that is based on building trust across conflict lines, and helps participants move beyond disagreeing with different views to understanding the other's perspective and recognizing the basic needs of all sides. Throughout the week of dialogue, the delegates create Peace Project proposals they will implement in their home countries, and an official Consensus Report that has recommendations to their countries in the political, economic, and civil society realms on improving Cross-Strait relations. The report is to be published and circulated among scholars and policy think tanks in the U.S and Asia.

Delegates formed cross-cultural teams to brainstorm their Peace Project proposals, and the finished plans were presented to the public toward the end of the Symposium. The Cross-Strait Young Leadership Plan (CYLP) group based their project on the belief that the root of conflict stems not necessarily from history, but from a lack of communication and isolation. CYLP's proposal is based on increasing communication and contact between students on both sides of the Strait, who will then work together to discuss Strait issues. Their three-step plan begins with the recruitment of students from China and Taiwan to set up a social network for initial contact, then meeting up in an online conference to visually discuss Strait issues (through a medium such as Skype), and finally to a face-to-face direct exchange. CYLP emphasizes that children in Taiwan and mainland China were often brought up in environments of hatred and misunderstanding toward the other side, and communication and cultural exchange are key to breaking these barriers.

A second group, the Women's Peace Ambassadors Blog, believes that women's voices were too often neglected in Strait discussions. The group proposed the creation of the "Strait Talkin' Honeys" blog as a way to empower and inspire women from the three sides to get involved in the peacebuilding process. They hope the blog will become a medium for women to share stories, ideas and solutions to common problems. A third team, the Relieving Forgotten Memories group, emphasizes dispelling bias at the governmental and civil level by bringing a human element into political and confrontational dialogue. Their project involves collecting and recording people's personal stories and histories and sharing them with the public to show the human suffering on both sides of the Strait, and get people to form their own opinions outside of government rhetoric. The last group, Peace Seeds, believes that excessive growth and overdevelopment is an issue that needs to be addressed alongside the Strait conflict. The team proposed groups of people from China and Taiwan to come together and work side-by-side on a farm to promote sustainable environmental practices while at the same time building bonds of friendship and exchanging ideas on the conflict. Peace Seeds holds that not every problem has a political solution, and that human experiences are crucial to mediating a conflict.

Yang Liu, a delegate from mainland China, witnessed the effect that increased communication and interaction with Taiwanese had on her through the conference. Before coming to the conference, Yang mentions, she held her family's traditional Chinese view on Taiwan, namely that it should re-unite with China because it has the same culture and history. After working with several Taiwanese delegates throughout the week, Liu says, "I realized how Taiwanese feel about themselves. They want to have the right to choose what they want to be." Yang says the most impressive thing coming out of the conference for her was that she saw "How Taiwanese people see themselves, " and that "They want to decide what Taiwan will be in the future. " Adam Collardey, a delegate from the U.S., had a decidedly more mixed perspective. Collardey lived in Taiwan for five years, and before moving there, he was avidly pro-Taiwanese independence. During his stay in Taiwan, Collardey's views shifted to a reunification stance. After coming out of the conference, Collardey's views have changed again, and he says, "It will take at least a month for me to process everything I learned from this conference, and readjust my view." However, the most significant thing for Collardey about Strait Talk was that, "It moved us away from the binary of Chinese vs. Tawianese. We focused on the process of building peace instead of just the outcome. "

Strait Talk ended with students returning to their home countries with Peace Projects and lasting connections to other students around the world. As delegate Howe Wong from mainland China stated, Strait Talk was set up so that "Future leaders can have peaceful perspectives."