An Empirical Study on the 1992 Consensus, China’s Favour-Granting Policies and Taiwanese Identification with China

Ever since Taiwan implemented the lifting of martial law and China initiated its policy of reform and opening up, both sides of the Taiwan Strait and their officials and private sectors have set up unprecedented exchanges and interactions. The literature covering the issue of cross-strait identity has become an integral part of the development of such relations, but as the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) of Taiwan denies the existence of the 1992 Consensus, current cross-strait talks have fallen into a deadlock. Communist Party of China (CPC) authorities have perhaps noticed that it is difficult to force Taiwan to negotiate over the 1992 Consensus and have determined that the DPP government will never provide a satisfactory answer to the issue of national sovereignty. For this reason, CPC leaders have deemed that it is no longer necessary to engage in interactions at the official level. They have decided to bypass the Taiwan government and directly carry out unilateral work with the private sectors by proposing favour-granting policies with the expectation of using economic and cultural means to influence Taiwanese people to identify themselves with China. Taiwanese people’s identification with China is actually a political identification, which is an expression of political feelings as well as a political value or a political value orientation. Therefore, it is not necessarily rational thinking nor choice. The American scholar Ronald Inglehart has presented long-term observations on the relationship between European economic development and political and cultural changes and indicated that the former is an important variable affecting political culture, while political culture also shapes political identity. Therefore, this study focuses on Inglehart’s logical inferences and uses quantitative empirical methods for a discussion of cross-strait issues. This study obtains data from 1,237 samples through the distribution of questionnaires and applies Model 1 of Andrew F. Hayes’ process statistical analysis in SPSS statistical software to analyse the correlations among research variables in order to establish a well-rounded model including the 1992 Consensus, China’s favour-granting policies and Taiwanese identification with China. The research results show that: (a) China’s favour-granting policies have a positive effect on Taiwanese identification with China; (b) the 1992 Consensus has a positive effect on Taiwanese identification with China; but (c) the 1992 Consensus negatively influences China’s favour-granting policies and Taiwanese identification with China.