On Monday, Chiang Pin-kun (
After arriving in Guangzhou, Chiang told reporters that the primary purpose of the trip was to discuss direct links and passenger and freight services across the Taiwan Strait. He said that the results of these discussions would be passed on to the government for implementation. Another object for this delegation is to pave the way for KMT Chairman Lien Chan's (
The arrangements for Lien's visit to China is an internal matter for the KMT. However, the delegation arrived in China two days after hundreds of thousands of Taiwanese took to the streets of Taipei to protest Beijing's passage of the "Anti-Secession" Law. Therefore, the timing of the KMT's visit to China seems calculated to soothe China's embarrassment over the rally and to misdirect world opinion into believing that the people of Taiwan do not object to the law's passage. The visit has therefore drawn criticism from pan-green legislators and civic groups.
It seems that the KMT deliberately timed its visit to China for this most inappropriate time and that it has ambitions of playing the peacekeeper. Perhaps it believes that walking a political tightrope is the best way to break the deadlock in cross-strait relations. But this risky strategy could just as easily destroy the KMT altogether if it fails.
Chiang told the media that "if there is anything that the government is unwilling to do or cannot do, let the KMT, the largest opposition party in Taiwan, take over and complete the mission." Clearly, the KMT has ambitions of taking over the government's role in cross-strait relations by playing a more active part. Whether the KMT can win over the general public with its ambitions will be seen in future elections.
Beijing seeks to use the opposition to disrupt the government. Such tactics are hardly surprising. Having been defeated in two consecutive national elections, the KMT is now actively seeking to improve its relations with China. Are they really so naive that they will willingly walk into a trap laid for them by Beijing, accepting the task of helping to disrupt Taiwan's political environment? This is something that those KMT members who claim to love Taiwan should be wary of.
If we look at the results of the two previous peace talks between the Nationalists and the Communists, we can see that on both occasions the Nationalists emerged as losers, which is why Chiang Kai-shek (
But if this is the path that the KMT has chosen, then they should at least take the opportunity during this visit to make Beijing understand Taiwan's opposition to the "Anti-Secession" Law. At all costs they must avoid pandering to Beijing's views, forgetting their own position as a result. Otherwise, the KMT will already have lost its self-confidence and dignity before the peace talks can even get off the ground, and they will be despised by China for allowing that to happen.
Former KMT chairman and president Lee Teng-hui (
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,
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
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
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