On Monday, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice began her first trip to Asia after taking up her new post in late January. Besides the issue of peace between India and Pakistan, another likely focus of Rice's trip will be the current unstable situation in East Asia. The two most dangerous hotspots in the region are caused by two Stalinist regimes -- North Korea and China -- which threaten regional peace.
After former US president Richard Nixon opened the door to China in 1972, the US' China policy -- under the guidance of national security adviser Henry Kissinger -- became enthralled by a romantic, even mystical view of China's potential. That led to the mistaken belief that this socialist regime with so-called "Chinese characteristics" would be different from other such regimes. The striped-pants set at the US State Department convinced itself that patience and gentle prodding would create economic development, the appearance of a middle class and the peaceful transformation of China into a stable society. This, despite the fact that the Communist regime had just killed 20 million of its own people during the Cultural Revolution.
We hope that on her trip through Asia, Rice will discern the true face of China's communist government. There are some signs this has already happened. Why else would the US have used unusually strong language in its human rights report published on Feb. 28 to condemn China's violations, including the use of the US-led war on terror as a pretext for brutally suppressing Uygurs and Muslims in China's northwestern Xinjiang Province? The report points out that in 2003, China imprisoned hundreds of thousands of its own people without trial. This is evidence that the result of China's growing economic prosperity and national power has merely been to let a small, corrupt clutch of leaders and their families enjoy the fruits of reform and deregulation, while the Communist Party's monopoly on power and willful disregard for human rights remains unchanged.
If former Chinese president Jiang Zemin (
Furthermore, there was no need for Jiang's successors Hu Jintao (
Rice should see through Beijing's two-faced strategy and realize that in China's repressive regime, there is no such a thing as an enlightened leader. They are all a bunch of thugs whose paramount interest is to preserve the CCP's stranglehold on power. Beijing's autocrats will not risk losing their cherished monopoly on power by introducing a democratic electoral system.
The US State Department used to harbor the wishful view that China could be peacefully transformed. The belligerent content of the "anti-secession" law shows just how naive and preposterous that idea really is.
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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