A proposal was raised in the legislature on Friday to abolish the Republican (minguo
But nothing escapes the curse of the "Greater China" ideology.
Indeed, one would have been surprised if die-hard pan-blue-camp supporters did not jump up and slam the proposal as evidence of pro-independence sentiment and splittism.
This nation uses a dual-calendar system (not counting the still very relevant lunar calendar), and under the Republican calendar, 2006 is designated as the 95th year of the founding of the Republic of China (ROC).
Therefore, to some, abolishing this calendar is an attack on the very legitimacy, the very dignity, of the ROC, which in turn suggests that Taiwan is not part of China.
Use of the Gregorian calendar would therefore violate the "one China" principle, upsetting Beijing and Washington, despite the fact that China and the US use the Gregorian calendar.
One readily arrives at this prediction by looking at the response to the proposal to abolish the National Unification Council and the unification guidelines, or the proposal to abolish or at least curtail the teaching of classical Chinese in high school.
The council and the guidelines embody tokenism in every way. Very few people can remember when the council last convened (it was in 1999).
And everyone knows that with Taiwan's democratization, unification with China will require the consent of the electorate rather than the imprimatur of the council and its guidelines.
The legislature can hardly be credited with taking the council seriously, allotting the dormant agency an impressive NT$1,000 (US$31) budget.
Still, the proposal has attracted consternation from the US State Department, as well as the standard petulant threats of presidential impeachment from die-hards in the pan-blue camp.
Perhaps the State Department would also care to weigh in on the relevance of classical Chinese to a modernized Taiwan?
After all, much of modern vernacular Chinese is based on the classical form, it's culturally tagged to a pristine past, and -- most importantly -- it clumsily but effectively lends itself to a unificationist take on the status quo.
The beauty of literary Chinese is that it, like Latin, knew when to die.
What a pity the same truth is not self-evident for those who would treasure a government body that is riddled with rigor mortis.
Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that Premier Su Tseng-chang (
But what is most disappointing is that he did not make a firm commitment to the proposal on the spot. Surely he knows that pan-blue lawmakers will have a field day over this.
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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