Just like the previous 12 attempts, the General Committee of the UN's General Assembly has blocked Taiwan's thirteenth attempt to gain UN membership. For Taiwan, this result is but another temporary setback in the ongoing process toward achieving its ultimate goal. Taiwan will not stop trying to gain entry into the UN until it opens its doors.
Unlike the previous bids, the government this year also put forward a proposal aiming to maintain peace across the Taiwan Strait. The proposal cautions all UN member states that China has 700-plus ballistic missiles targeted at Taiwan, and alerts it to the fact that all nations in the region are concerned about this.
It also urges the UN to demonstrate its deep concern over China's tendency to use military force, by showing solidarity with Taiwan's universal wish for peace. Although the Swedish President of the General Assembly, Jan Eliasson, concluded following the debate that Taiwan's proposals would not be included in the General Assembly's agenda due to a lack of consensus on both issues, that approach has caused the international community to take heed of the cross-strait situation and Taiwan's status. Although Taiwan yet has to succeed in its bid, this has indeed meant some progress in the matter.
China is a permanent member of the UN's Security Council, with veto powers and great influence, so it isn't very surprising that both of Taiwan's proposals were blocked. It should be noted that China's representative saw the visits to China by Taiwan's opposition leaders as helpful in furthering China's international propaganda, saying that those visits showed the international community that there is no cross-strait tension and that UN membership for Taiwan is a non-issue.
China thus used diverging opinions among Taiwan's political parties as a tool for attacking Taiwan's pursuit of UN membership. The fact that China can use Taiwan's opposition parties in its propaganda is a national tragedy.
In the past, former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan (
Now, however, they are acting as the vanguard for China-friendly agents and going against the interests of the whole population of Taiwan to further their own political interest, as a result of their resentment over President Chen Shui-bian's (
When China's President Hu Jintao (
The fact that Taiwan's politicians have failed to reach a basic consensus on major national goals and unite in their dealings with the international community gives China's united front approach chance after chance to attack Taiwan.
The fact is, the biggest problem with Taiwan's UN bid is Taiwan, not China. Past opinion polls showed more than 80 percent of Taiwanese support the government's UN bid, yet politicians' shortsighted actions neglect public opinion to promote their individual and their parties' interests, and this has become the biggest obstacle in making a bid for UN membership.
The government should therefore hold a referendum on the bid, together with the year-end elections. Apart from showing the people's determination, it would also restrain politicians in words and deeds. Whoever opposes the bid would then be considered a public enemy.
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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