With the 62nd session of the UN General Assembly opening in New York on Tuesday, the General Committee was expected to meet yesterday to finalize the agenda and decide whether Taiwan's UN membership bid should be included as a supplementary item for discussion.
While UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon seemed to give the item a more positive spin yesterday -- he said he hoped the issue would be deliberated on -- it remains unlikely that the assembly will afford due process to Taiwan's application.
After 14 years of failure, this is the first time the government has applied for UN membership under the name "Taiwan," a departure from the practice of using the formal title "Republic of China."
Another bout of disappointment notwithstanding, Taiwan is to some degree better off this year in its pursuit of a UN seat.
For the truth is that national identification among ordinary people has strengthened, and this includes referring to "Taiwan" as a state. This is evident from polls pointing to a comfortable percentage of people identifying themselves with Taiwan and expressing support for a referendum on the nation's UN bid.
As noted by Government Information Office Minister Shieh Jhy-wey (
The more Taiwan speaks to the international community, the better it can demonstrate that it and China are separate countries.
And Chinese officials are welcome to deliver incensed responses. The more ridiculous and strident their comments, the more credibility Taiwan secures and the more unifying the effect on all Taiwanese.
Such was the case in a Danish newspaper report, in which a Chinese diplomat claimed that: "According to the Cairo Declaration [1943] and the Potsdam Proclamation [1945], Taiwan is part of the People's Republic of China." This only ended up drawing the reader's attention to the extraordinary ability of Chinese propagandists to backdate the founding of the People's Republic of China.
Even so, it appears China has had success in driving a wedge between Taiwan and the US by pressuring the latter to oppose the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) government's proposed UN referendum. This opposition came in the shape of a certain US official dismissing Taiwan's statehood.
Some breakthrough, until one considers that the Chinese face enormous problems selling this drivel to the Taiwanese man and woman on the street. Until that time, we can expect the Chinese Foreign Ministry to take comfort from the US State Department's attempts to mute the forces of liberty in Taiwan.
The opposition has criticized the DPP administration for making the issue an electoral gambit.
Be that as it may. For the good of Taiwan's long-term interests, the government should press on and further internationalize the issue.
Let the world see how democratic Taiwan is, and how it differs from an autocratic China. Let the world see first-hand how China bullies those who dare to stand up for themselves -- and how easily the UN will fall into step when required.
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