It is ironic that yesterday, at the end of the week of the Chen-Soong 10-point consensus, President Chen Shui-bian (
The cunning of triangulation is that it leaves the betrayed with nowhere to go. In its devastating, yet effective cynicism it assumes that party faithful who feel betrayed will nevertheless continue to support the party if only because the alternatives are appalling. Clinton therefore could betray black voters knowing that the chance of them voting Republican was slim. Chen has decided that he can betray the greens because they are highly unlikely to vote blue to show their disapproval.
There is also with Chen the issue of his own legacy; he does not want his presidency to be seen as eight wasted years, so he is prepared to sup with the devil himself if it will gild his lackluster record.
Chen is, as Winston Churchill said of Clement Atlee, "a modest little man with a lot to be modest about." And if signing the sellout with People First Party Chairman James Soong (
The question Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) supporters now have to ask themselves is where do they go from here. The anger over the "10-point betrayal" as it should henceforth be called, is palpable, so much so that some even say Chen should somehow be impeached. After all, he is in the Presidential Office under false pretenses, having chopped up and burned every plank of his re-election platform on the fire of "inter-party reconciliation."
Certainly Chen deserves to be tossed ignominiously out of office. But then what? Chen might be an apostate but at least, as the Americans would say, he is our apostate. Surely nobody prefers Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairman Lien Chan (
In answering this question it is at least important to know how much of Chen's sellout is backed by the DPP. There are of course toadies who will call it a move of subtle wisdom. But the rank and file have to be as bitterly disillusioned as we are. What happened to their party? How did it get hijacked by the appeasers, by those who have buried their sense of justice under self-serving expediency? How the DPP might return to its roots and to some kind of moral rectitude is something needing serious thought.
Should we turn to the Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU), then? The problem with the TSU is, however, that it entirely dependent on former president Lee Teng-hui's (
What we perhaps need is another organization, outside political parties and electoral politics, which can unite greens behind a coherent ideology and which can serve as a check on both green apostasy and rising blue assertiveness, a grassroots civic organization which can be above party politics and yet can articulate Taiwanese nationalism in a way that parties cannot ignore, rather as the Christian Coalition operates in US politics. If readers will forgive us the mixture of doctrinal metaphors, Taiwanese nationalism needs its Church Militant now more than ever.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
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