I am here in my mold/But I'm a million different people from one day to the next/I can't change my mold.
To better understand the phantasm that is the cross-strait "status quo," one need only consider these lyrics from Bittersweet Symphony by The Verve. The term "status quo" is used so often, so unquestioningly, and means different things to so many people, that it is surprising few subject its reification to critical scrutiny.
"Status quo" can be defined as "no change" or "maintaining the current situation." But this is not what is taking place in the Taiwan Strait. Thus, the different conceptions of "status quo" are like melodies, sometimes in harmony, but increasingly not.
To the Democratic Progressive Party government, the status quo is a rhetorical weapon to justify hardening cross-strait policy, comforted in the knowledge that time is China's enemy, and that an impatient Beijing must place more pressure on Taipei. To the DPP, this vindicates warnings of ill will from China, and Beijing's inability to abide by the status quo.
To Washington, or at least that part of Washington that backs Taiwan, the status quo is a fire blanket that keeps the parties underneath from combusting. One day, it is hoped, the parties will have cooled sufficiently for Washington to lift the blanket and peek inside, where it will witness a democratizing China that has abandoned militant feelings and can co-exist with the lone superpower.
To China, the status quo prevents Taipei acting unilaterally until such time that the signal is given and Beijing can act according to its own agenda. In the meantime, China can dot its coastline with as many missiles and troops as it wants. In other times and places, such arming of a frontier would precipitate and probably justify a pre-emptive attack by the threatened party. But in China's case, saying "status quo" frequently enough is an opiate -- this time for foreign consumption -- that lulls other starry-eyed states into a preposterous sense of security.
To Chairman Ma Ying-jeou's (
And to the Taiwanese public? Ever pragmatic, the status quo is code for "We're more interested in making a living than ideology and starting fights. Let's worry about this later." Yet deep inside there is an awareness that pragmatism will only work as long as space for it exists, and that constriction of space from every direction will lead to a day of reckoning.
These different conceptions thread in and out of each other in a rambling counterpoint that serves to confuse and numb through repetition until the expression is left flailing as a mantra, a three-syllable nonsense invoked to comfort without recourse to content. It is a cypher, and like The Verve's Richard Ashcroft in the video for Bittersweet Symphony, it marches forward, barely responsive to what is happening around it, unconscious of the pain and anger of the people it offends. But when a large vehicle appears and is big enough to block its path, it stops, looking vacantly inside as if it could negotiate.
The "status quo" is viable because of a balance of forces from different directions. Some of these are unpredictable and growing weaker. The critical question, therefore, is not how to keep the "status quo" alive, but rather how and when it will fall apart and how prepared this government and the population will be at that very moment to defend themselves against a storm of Chinese sociopathy.
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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