The legislative elections are fewer than 80 days away, so we might have expected the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) would have come up with something bold in policy to sway those voters who have, under Lien Chan's (
What might we make of this? For a start, let us note that trying to scare people with threats of war is a piece of nonsense that didn't work in the presidential election in 2000 (remember the sonar commercial) -- nor has it worked in any election since. Lien, like the Bourbons, has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
It is hard to know what China's negotiating "on a basis of equality" would mean. For China to see Taiwan as an equal would be to admit either that Taiwan is a sovereign state, or that the PRC is not the successor state to the ROC it claims to be and that the civil war was not in fact decisively won. There is nothing to suggest that Beijing will favor either of those positions. And why 30 years? Why a time limit? This sounds suspiciously like the adoption of the notorious "interim agreement" strategy, where Taiwan is guaranteed peace for a certain period of time on the understanding that it will then open serious negotiations about unification at the end of that period. Since Taiwan's walking out of such negotiations would probably result in war, the interim agreement strategy means buying peace for yourself at the expense of leaving your children to submit to tyranny. From Lien we would expect no better.
But from whom might we expect more? Yesterday's conference came on the heels of last weekend's two-day think-in by the Taiwan New Hope Link, a group of younger KMT members trying to thrash out what, in the absence of any meaningful leadership from the top, their party should stand for. This badly needs doing, so it was sad that the ideas on display made a beauty pageant contestant's wish for world peace seem profound by comparison. Wang Jin-pyng (
Our favorite moments, however, were when academic Hsu Yung-ming (
We think they understood the "significance" very well -- as another indication of the KMT's contempt for voters, its reliance on immoral demagoguery and its utter ethical and intellectual bankruptcy. And nothing has changed yet. The KMT reminds one of an anencephalic baby; that is, a baby that is born with most of its brain missing. One of the telltale signs of anencephaly is that a light shone on the back of such a baby's head will project through its eyes -- there is simply nothing in between. Put the KMT in the media spotlight and you get the same result, for the same reason.
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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