Changing the nation's anachronistic name to better reflect its current reality is a reasonable action the government could take. Until recently President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) led us to believe that he agreed. In last year's election he stated as much. Now he believes such a desire is "delusional."
I wonder what else he would define in the same way? Is drafting a national Constitution that reflects the nation's political reality now deemed by Chen to be delusional? Or what about holding in one's heart a patriotic love for one's country, if that country is Taiwan?
It makes you wonder. In Chen's "new Taiwan," apparently any action, belief or statement that offends or upsets China is now to be considered in much the same way.
Yet isn't it Chen who is being delusional? He is deceiving himself and the people of Taiwan if he thinks appeasement and expressions of goodwill toward China will produce anything but more intense hostility, more vitriolic condemnation and preparations for war.
Dictatorships always interpret conciliatory actions by democratic states as signs of weakness to be exploited ruthlessly. It's almost a natural law.
Has Chen forgotten what China is capable of? The statistics on genocide are readily available. Victims of the Nazis: 17 million; of the Chinese Nationalists: 10.2 million; of the former Soviet Union: a staggering 61.9 million; and of the Chinese Communist Party: 38.7 million and counting.
I don't believe China can be dissuaded from attacking Taiwan. It has gone beyond that point. It certainly is not about preventing independence -- not any more. It's about punishing Taiwan for the humiliation and insults China believes it has suffered.
R.J. Rummel, in China's Bloody Century, argues that the root cause of genocide is "arbitrary, undisciplined power in the hands of tyrants, and where such power is centralized and unchecked, the possibility exists that it will be used to kill in unprecedented numbers in pursuit of the goals of ethnic-racial purity, or national unity, or greater national glory."
The "Greater China" vision and Chinese national stability and unity have been the mantra in China for more than 30 years. Although the Chinese regime's manic obsession with Taiwan is unlikely to reach the extent of genocide, its meaning has become undeniable.
For China it is simple: Taiwan must be punished.
And Chen's pathetic, white-flag "10 point consensus" has virtually guaranteed that this will occur.
Stephen Carter
Taichung
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,
RSS