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.
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
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During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
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