The “Two States” Theory

In an interview with a German radio station, Deutche Welle, on 9 July 1999, Lee Teng-hui, to the surprise of many, for the first time openly defined the relations between mainland China and Taiwan as “between two countries (guojia), at least special relations between two countries”. With this definition, he abandoned Taiwan's previous position of China and Taiwan being “two equal political entities”, which, according to him, were actually equal to “two countries”. He also noted that there was no need for Taiwan to declare independence again since it (ROC) had always been an independent country since 1912.

Taiwan's Foreign Minister Hu Chih-chiang, SEF chairman, Koo Chen-fu, the MAC chairman, Su Chi, and other high officials immediately confirmed this as the government position. Koo changed his previous position (that he had held in his meeting with Wang Daohan in October 1998) and publicly called cross-strait ties country-to-country (guojia) relations. The MAC was thus instructed to replace its previous reference of “two equal political entities” to that of “two countries (guojia)” in its future government documents, and to completely drop the reference to “one country”. On 12 July, MAC Chairman Su Chi claimed that from then on Taiwan would drop references to the idea of “one China”. Later, the MAC, under pressure, came out with an English version of Lee's such theory of “two countries”. It was translated into “two states of one nation”, avoiding the use of the sensitive word “countries” (guojia in Chinese can be translated into either country, or state, or nation). On 22 July, it changed it to “special state-to-state” relations.

The Presidential Office and a central KMT meeting disclosed that the “two states” concept was the product of a year-long study by the Select Group on Strengthening the Sovereignty Status of the Republic of China, which was headed by the secretary-general of the Presidential Office, Huang Kun-huei.