On Monday, Taiwan's eighth bid to join the World Health Assembly (WHA) was ended by a vote of 133 to 25. But both the US and Japan, after many years of silence, finally spoke out for Taiwan, urging the WHA to exclude political considerations and accept Taiwan as an observer without voting rights on the principle that medical issues transcend national boundaries.
The SARS epidemic hurt Taiwan deeply last year. Although the nation paid considerable social costs in the process of dealing with the disease, its outstanding performance attracted worldwide attention. Taiwan's medical care standards and public health defenses are much better than those of China, which ranks 144th among the 191 WHA member states.
Beijing has been the source of two SARS outbreaks that sent the entire world into a panic. Yet it shamelessly claims that it has provided medical assistance or earthquake emergency aid to Taiwan as a Chinese province.
Is this for real? If the Chinese regime really cherishes the life and property of the Taiwanese people, why would it deploy 500 missiles along its coastline aimed? How is it possible that a country so poor by sanitary and medical standards can offer assistance to a country with relatively better conditions?
History reveals China's claims to be lies. Prior to any Chinese settlement in Taiwan, Portuguese commercial boats arrived in nearby waters. Ever since then, the island, which was originally inhabited by Aboriginal people, has been tangled in world politics. The Dutch landed and started developing Tainan in 1624. The Spanish later occupied the north with an official ceremony on today's Hoping Island in Keelung.
China's political influence did not reach Taiwan until 1661, when Koxinga (
As these historical facts demonstrate, Taiwan has never been an inherent part of China's territory. Instead, it is an island that other powers have fought over since the 17th century. When the People's Republic of China was founded on Oct. 1, 1949, the Republic of China set up its central government in Taiwan separate from China's. One capital was in Beijing, the other in Taipei. The long standoff has produced "one country on each side" of the Taiwan Strait. It's absurd to claim Taiwan to be part of China's integral territory or as a breakaway province.
Beijing keeps pressing the international community to accept its twisted logic and historical claims, most recently in forcing Taiwan to be excluded once again from the WHA's list of observers. Such Chinese suppression will only further irritate the Taiwanese and will block this nation from contributing its medical aid and lending its experience to needy countries.
Although Taiwan's national dignity was damaged again, those who will suffer the most from this exclusion may be poor countries in need of medical aid, along with the principle of fair distribution of medical resources, which the WHA is supposed to uphold.
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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