China's leaders at Zhongnanhai have always looked for ways to influence Taiwanese politics. In the past, China has used military threats, held war games during Taiwan's election campaigns in an attempt to unsettle people's minds, and attacked those candidates it disliked and promoted those it favored.
Such tactics, however, have never yielded the effects that China desired, but instead have proved counterproductive.
China has adopted a different tactic this year. Their new two-pronged approach involves the use of a Taiwanese spy case to broadside President Chen Shui-bian (
Apparently, the Chinese leaders are getting better at manipulating Taiwan's elections. China no longer stages military exercises or fires missiles to scare Taiwan. Instead, it is focusing its attack on Chen.
It is very hard to claim that Chen's remarks about Chinese missiles led to the recent arrests of Taiwanese businesspeople. The spy uproar was an attack against Chen's reputation as well as an attempt to constrain Taiwan's government by holding Taiwanese businesspeople hostage.
Meanwhile, the meeting with Hu -- a "soft offensive" aimed at Taiwanese businesspeople -- was unprecedented in the history of the Chinese leadership. During the meeting, Hu reiterated Beijing's opposition to "Taiwan independence" and put the blame for the failure to establish links at the feet of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government.
The timing of Hu's meeting with Taiwanese businesspeople, just before the holiday season, apparently had to do with the aborted plan for chartered flights to take them back to Taiwan for annual family reunions during the Lunar New Year holidays. China wants to blame the failure to establish direct links on "the destruction of cross-strait relations by Taiwan's leaders and their deliberate platform and policy of splitting the motherland."
China is trying to hurt the DPP's election chances by taking advantage of businesspeople's desire for direct links.
The offensive began when the State Council's Taiwan Affairs Office issued a policy paper earlier this month, followed by remarks from officials at China's transportation ministry, civil aviation administration and trade bodies explaining the content of the policy paper. Now China has brought Taiwanese businesspeople to Beijing to hear Hu's lecture on direct links.
China claims that it wants direct links with Taiwan, but in reality it has ignored the many goodwill gestures made by the Taiwanese government. Beijing's plan is to not let Chen's administration gain any brownie points on cross-strait relations. Taiwan has made all the preparations it can for direct links -- including the three-stage plan for cross-strait links proposed by Chen and the new measures announced by the Mainland Affairs Council in September to expedite cross-strait cargo flights.
The Legislative Yuan has also amended regulations governing cross-strait relations, allowing the government to commission non-governmental organizations other than the Straits Exchange Foundation to negotiate with Beijing. A mechanism for negotiations on direct cargo flights has also been set up.
Beijing, however, has refused to cooperate on even the Lunar New Year charters, which were successfully carried out for the first time last year.
That Beijing's political intentions are overriding economic objectives is obvious. Beijing is saying one thing and doing something entirely different.
Taiwan and the rest of the world should listen to what China says and observe what it does. They should see Beijing's motives for what they are and not be duped.
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,
RSS