The tragedy of great personalities is that after they die, people bring up various memories of them, falsely claiming to have been close to them, and then people forget what they were really like. The Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) recent commemoration for former president Chiang Ching-kuo (
KMT Chairman Lien Chan (
Chiang is a complex historical character who went through three distinct stages during his lifetime -- communist, nationalist and liberal democrat.
At age 15, he went to study in the Soviet Union.
He worked as a laborer, a farmer and a soldier. During his 12 years in the Soviet Union, he joined the Communist Party and broke with his father, Chiang Kai-shek (
At age 27, he returned to China, where his father ordered him to read the collected works of Wang Yang-ming (
The elder Chiang wanted to sinicize his son and transform him from a communist into a Chinese nationalist.
Transformed, Chiang Ching-kuo spent 12 years in China before being ushered to Taiwan by Mao Zedong's (
The 39 years he spent in Taiwan amounted to half his life. Most important, it was the stage of his life during which he completed the second transformation, that from nationalist to liberal democrat. This rebirth began the mighty transformation of Taiwan from a military base from which to launch a counterattack on the Communists into a modern liberal democracy.
Taiwan's progress from 300 years of alien rule to becoming a liberal democracy is the result of the long struggle by generations of Taiwanese.
But we cannot deny the influence of Chiang Ching-kuo on this process and the fact that his actions led to a historic breakthrough in the mid-1980s, when Taiwan joined the third wave of democratization and created a success story.
The show put on by Lien, Wang and their followers should bring to life the people's long-dormant memories of Chiang Ching-kuo.
Why did he demote his closest confidante, Wang Sheng, to the corner of the world most remote from Taiwan, Paraguay? And why did he choose as his deputy the person who in the eyes of Wang and his followers was guilty both of being a communist and of promoting Taiwanese independence, and whom they to this day "want to give a good beating"?
Because only Chiang Ching-kuo understood that the transformation of Taiwan from a military base from which to retake China to a Taiwan with the will to renew itself could only be accomplished by relying on a believer in liberal democracy, former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝).
We should remember that 16 years have passed since Wang Sheng -- after Chiang Ching-kuo parted with him and made the most important and the greatest decision of his life, the decision to renew and protect Taiwan -- said in a speech full of indignation that "As one Wang Sheng has fallen, a thousand Wang Shengs shall rise!"
The road to renewal and protection of Taiwan on which Chiang Ching-kuo started is now lined with the gloriously beautiful flower that is liberal democracy.
Chinese nationalist diehards and fogeys young and old have been in hiding for 16 years, waiting for this day to arrive, the day when they finally can rise up and reclaim what they lost to Chiang Ching-kuo and the democratic Taiwan initiated by him.
They have sworn to make a clean break from more than a decade of Taiwanese liberal democracy, to "change everything" and to "create a new opportunity" for the Republic of China. This "new opportunity" is the "one China" that they, whom Lien respectfully called "the older generation," fought to take back. But the "one China" of that era was a unified Republic of China that had eradicated communism, an unrealizable dream of the restoration of their power.
The "one China" of the Liens and the Wang Shengs is a China where they have united with the Communists and are opposing Taiwanese independence, a dream that will lead to the demise of the nation by their relinquishing power and destroying Taiwan.
They do not have the strength to restore themselves to power. Lien's "confederacy through several stages" is but the middle stage on the way to realizing "one country, two systems," and is aimed at duping the people.
The most important things to do when the people of Taiwan commemorate Chiang Ching-kuo are to praise the spirit of liberal democracy that he displayed in his later years and to protect Taiwan's liberal democracy from being changed by Lien and Soong.
The old fogeys and young diehards who betray the spirit of liberal democracy and who want to put an end to the peaceful revolution of democracy and localization are all disqualified from commemorating Chiang Ching-kuo.
Ruan Ming is a visiting professor at Tamkang University and was a special assistant to former Chinese Communist Party secretary-general Hu Yaobang (胡耀邦).
Translated by Perry Svensson
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