Since the March election we have become used to interpreting everything the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) says through the filter of Orwellian 1984-style doublespeak -- "war is peace," that sort of thing.
Take KMT Chairman Lien Chan's (
This "don't read my lips" interpretation has recently had heavy usage. For example, readers might remember how in the election's immediate aftermath the riots were predictably called "peaceful protests" by "dissatisfied voters" who actually were blue rent-a-mobs.
We were told that it was of the utmost urgency to speed the recount, so urgent that declaration of a state of emergency was suggested. What this was shown to mean was that the pan-blues would try every gambit they could find to drag their feet on getting the recount under way, even down to the world's richest political party saying it could not afford the NT$60 million bond it had to hand over to the court to make sure it wouldn't default on the case's cost if it were required to pay.
We were told that the pan-blues were only interested in fairness, meaning that they were not interested in fairness but only in making sure that their patrician "right to rule" went unchallenged by the democratic hoi polloi. We were told they wanted to "get to the truth" of the March 19 shooting, only to find out quite clearly that this meant "to believe any wacky conspiracy theory, even in the face of the evidence provided by the specialist whom we ourselves insisted investigate the case."
KMT doublespeak reached its apogee at the inaug-uration. The slogan, remember, was "Taiwan, we continue to move forward," which really meant "We want to go back to the Chiang family dictatorship." In his speech at the pan-blue rally that day, Lien told supporters: "What we care about here is not winning or losing, but about right and wrong," which in Lien-speak means his right to be president and the wrong of anybody else's having the job.
Lien also said he would work to integrate the pan-blues "as one big family," which means that by merging the KMT with the People First Party (PFP) he could keep his job by plying on the widespread loathing in the KMT for the man who would take over if he were toppled: PFP Chairman James "Chung-hsing Bills" Soong (宋「興票」楚瑜). And we were told that the pan-blue meeting was a spontaneous rally of supporters, and of course found that many KMT members only attended because they were ordered to.
So far the "understand the opposite of what is said"tactic has served us well. Even on Saturday, as the party claimed that it had no intention of trying to kick out pro-localization members, we understood that this was exactly what Lien and the KMT leadership had in mind, egged on by the anti-localization PFP.
How then are we to interpret Saturday's remarks by spokeswoman Kuo Su-chun (
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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