During a recent meeting with foreign guests, President Chen Shui-bian (
Chen also said the referendums are a universal value, a basic human right and a God-given right that cannot be deprived or restricted.
Chen's argument is not empty talk. After all, as early as 1895 China wanted to stop Japan from taking over Taiwan when Li Hongzhang (
China was in fact the first country to come up with the idea of following the precedent set by Western countries and holding a referendum in Taiwan without any legal basis in order to resist the invading Japanese regime. If China could do it back then, why is it now trying to stop a referendum in Taiwan by way of threats?
Japan was successful in its Meiji reformation program and became an Eastern power, and it also gained tacit support from some powerful nations for its intent to annex Taiwan. China lost the Sino-Japanese war in 1895 and Li was unable to resist Japanese pressure. This eventually led to the Shimonoseki Treaty. The Qing court was shocked by the news.
According to a book on Taiwan's history by Chi Chia-lin (
Zhang immediately issued an order to Taiwan's governer Tang Jingsong (
However, because China and Japan already exchanged treaty documents in Shandong Province, China's ceding Taiwan to Japan was irreversible. The idea of a referendum in Taiwan died before it was born. After gaining an understanding with the Chinese government, the authorities in Taiwan started to seek independence and established the short-lived Taiwan Republic.
China wanted to use a referendum to give voice to the Taiwanese people's objection to Japanese rule, thereby seeking international sympathy and garnering the power of international justice. Unfortunately, international justice was no match for the international law of the jungle. Japan still took over Taiwan by force.
Today, the people of Taiwan want to hold referendums and yet they have come under vicious accusations and unreasonable suppression from Beijing. What inspiration can people gain from the past?
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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