Taiwan is a sovereign state
More than fifty years ago, the Chinese communists defeated the Chinese nationalists and established the People's Republic of China. The defeated Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) regime fled to Taiwan. Instead of showing deep gratitude to Taiwanese for shelter, they imprisoned and shot dead hundreds of thousands of innocent Taiwanese, especially the social elite, for the convenience of its unjust rule.
The so-called Republic of China (ROC) could neither represent China nor Taiwan and finally lost its seat in the UN to the real China in 1971 and the presidential election of 2000 to Chen Shui-bian (
But, alas, a tiny state with only about 20,000 people like Nauru is a member of the UN, while Taiwan, a country of more than 23 million peace-loving and hard-working people, has long been denied admission to the UN simply because of China's impervious blockade.
The UN, which should be a beacon of peace and justice, had to succumb to expediency and the threat of China. No wonder the once-exiled Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn years ago characterized it as "an immoral organization in an immoral world."
For the world today, "Might is right," yet the greatest American president, Abraham Lincoln, was of another opinion when he said, "Right makes might." Taiwan, a free and prosperous state, which can contribute much to some poverty-stricken countries through its material and human resources, does not owe anything to the UN.
On the contrary, the UN and the world at large indeed owe Taiwan justice and its moral support. Like a deserted orphan, Taiwan has long been expecting all your assistance and fair treatment.
Albert Li
National Chengchi
University
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,
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
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
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