The naive faith that a pan-green failure to secure a legislative majority two Saturdays ago would lead to relaxed relations with China didn't even last a week. That this was the mantra adopted by the foreign media in its entirety after the elections just goes to show how the collective fascination with a rising China seems to lobotomize commentators who should know better.
China is in the grip of a raging nationalism based on a virulent sense of historical wrong. It has the imperial ambitions of Wilhelmine Germany with the sense of historical victimhood of the Third Reich. "Relax" isn't a word in China's diplomatic lexicon.
The message China received was that intimidation works. It ignores -- probably is entirely ignorant of -- the pork-barrel nature of Taiwan's legislative election campaigns, and therefore President Chen Shui-bian's (
Thus we can expect at the weekend China's rubber stamp parliament to pass the "anti-secession law," whose purpose is to forbid the secession of any part of what China considers its national territory. Its purpose is to mandate military attack on Taiwan should it declare independence; or, according to some speculation in the Hong Kong papers, remember that no draft of the law has been released yet -- even if it fails to reunify by a certain date.
There are a number of things that might be said about this law. The first is that it is absurd; whoever heard of one country making laws for another?
The second is that, absurd though it might be, it is clearly indicative of China's hegemonic intentions.
China is determined to be master of the Western Pacific, something it cannot be while it does not control Taiwan. Those with strategic interests in the region, the US and Japan, need to wake up to the fact that China's intention to take over Taiwan is not based on some nonsense about the inalienability of historically Chinese-controlled territory -- note that China has made no claim to Outer Mongolia.
China wants Taiwan because it wants regional dominance, for which the "unsinkable aircraft carrier" is the key. There is a lot more at stake here than questions of Taiwanese identity.
Since the US has been so critical of Chen "proposing to change the status quo," it will be interesting to see if they rap China's knuckles in the same way.
It is hard not to see yesterday's news that serving military officers are to be stationed here for the first time since 1979 as anything other than a response to China's plans, though the US move was probably planned long beforehand.
The new law might have the benefit of waking the US up to how it has let itself be hopelessly manipulated by Beijing for the last year or so into putting pressure on Taiwan and working against its better, strategic interests.
But the important message that has to be understood in Washington and broadcast to Beijing is that the new law will be a disaster for any kind of cross-strait dialogue. Taiwan has been willing to talk for a long time. It simply wants to do so without preposterous preconditions which nobody could possibly find acceptable.
This leaves the ball in Beijing's court to soften its stance and allow talks to take place. Actually Beijing needs an internal debate about how best to woo Taiwan. But all the regime understands is pressure. It thinks pressure works and it is about to go some way toward criminalizing the suggestion that pressure should be abandoned. This is a great and dangerous leap backwards.
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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