A march originally scheduled for yesterday to promote a name change for Taiwan was rescheduled for September due to the SARS epidemic. However, Taiwan's continuing exclusion from the World Health Organization (WHO) and the difficulty of containing the SARS outbreak have once again highlighted China's thuggish political maneuvers against this country -- and why Taiwan needs a name change.
To break through China's diplomatic blockade and push for the country's participation in international organizations, President Chen Shui-bian (
Unfortunately, despite its efforts Taiwan has not overcome the prevailing hegemonic and self-
interested attitudes in international politics. Year after year, the question of Taiwan's observership has been excluded from the agenda of World Health Assembly meetings.
This year's WHA meeting is scheduled for May 19. Over the past month, the international media as well as the legislatures in the US, Japan and Europe have publicly stressed the importance of letting this country into the WHO. In an article published in the Washington Post last Friday, Chen stressed that the international community should not exclude Taiwan from the WHO because this is not only against the spirit of humanitarianism but can also create a loophole in the global health care network, thereby endangering the entire world.
It is unfortunate that the Chinese leadership in the Zhongnanhai is still unable to understand how it is letting down the Taiwanese people at this crucial moment, as they have done so many times in the past. Just when Taiwan urgently needs help from the international community, Beijing's leaders continue to spout the "one China principle" and do whatever they can to block this nation's entry into the WHO.
The "one China" discourse has always been the foundation of Beijing's diplomatic blockade against Taiwan. The government certainly will not vie with Beijing for the right to represent "China." Speaking at a fundraising event last month, former president Lee Teng-hui (
But the name-change movement is not something that can yield results in the short term. The DPP government is already pushing for some changes, such as adding the word "Taiwan" to passport covers and changing the names of the nation's representative offices overseas. But these are merely tactical moves. To win support from other countries in the diplomatic arena, Taiwan needs strategic thinking.
To join international organizations, the government needs to emerge from the "one China" rut and use "Taiwan" as its name. Only by pushing for a name change can the country build itself as a polity and thereby establish a national identity.
Joining the WHO under the name "Taiwan" this year is unlikely -- but there should be no let-up in the push for a name change. The people should have no doubt that Taiwan is the name of our country.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus in the Legislative Yuan has made an internal decision to freeze NT$1.8 billion (US$54.7 million) of the indigenous submarine project’s NT$2 billion budget. This means that up to 90 percent of the budget cannot be utilized. It would only be accessible if the legislature agrees to lift the freeze sometime in the future. However, for Taiwan to construct its own submarines, it must rely on foreign support for several key pieces of equipment and technology. These foreign supporters would also be forced to endure significant pressure, infiltration and influence from Beijing. In other words,
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