This interminable blather about party-to-party cooperation continues until we are sick of hearing about it. We no longer want to hear anything about it unless something that actually bears scrutiny as a party-to-party deal has been done. But it won't, at least not in the next few months. And yet the endless talking about it, like some Guantanamo-style psychological torture method, is beginning to cause those of us with functioning intelligences acute mental pain.
First we saw the government and the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) flirting with the People First Party (PFP). This was, of course, absurd and everyone knew it to be so, and yet we were told in great earnestness that a deal was just around the corner as soon as PFP Chairman James Soong (
The idea that these two parties could ever find common ground is simply ridiculous. The purpose of the DPP is to retain Taiwan's de facto independent status, and strengthen the identification of the polity with Taiwan, thereby undoing the false consciousness among Taiwanese created by 50 years of the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) colonial rule.
The purpose of the PFP is to engineer the return of Taiwan to China. Its Mainlander supporters would rather be ruled by China than by native Taiwanese -- which is what majority rule in Taiwan really means. There is no overlap of interests between these two parties. Their world views are irreconcilable and the idea of their cooperating, if it was ever earnestly meant, would involve such a cynical abandonment of core values as to make one seriously question the political process it was meant to serve.
It should be obvious that if there is to be any cooperation at all it has to be between parties that are committed to making Taiwan work, not handing it over to a foreign power. There is only one blue-camp contender that fits this description and that is the KMT. But not, unfortunately, all of the KMT. The party is radically split between various Taiwanese and Mainlander factions. To put it simply, most Taiwanese in the KMT want pretty much what the DPP wants -- consolidation of Taiwanese power.
The Mainlanders, on the other hand, don't really know what they want. The more idealistic among them -- the Ma Ying-jeous (
It should be obvious that the pan greens and the Taiwanese KMT have interests in common and could cooperate. But this is impossible while KMT Chairman Lien Chan (
The best thing for Taiwan would be for Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (
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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