Human suffering caused by authoritarianism in Myanmar has transfixed the world this week in a way that far bloodier conflicts in, say, Sudan, have failed to achieve.
With world leaders waxing with stolid determination at the UN, threatening wordy resolutions and toothless sanctions against the Myanmar junta, the argument is once again being made that only Beijing -- the closest thing Myanmar has to an ally -- could bring enough pressure to bear on the regime to make it halt its repression.
While this option provides a convenient cop-out for states intent on shirking their responsibilities, it also comes with an old caveat, one that was heard before when Beijing's diplomatic arm twisting was focused on North Korea: In order for Beijing to do what it must, concessions will have to be made.
And that concession, of course, is Taiwan, which the nation's representative in Washington, Joseph Wu (
But the comparison between North Korea and Myanmar has its limits, for despite the common suffering of the people under authoritarian regimes, there is a stark difference: In Myanmar's case, the world is getting images. Thanks to photographers who risk -- and lose -- their lives, the world has access to startling testimonies of the situation on the ground. Beyond that are the blurry but no less haunting Web transmissions made by Burmese themselves.
North Korean suffering may be no less severe, but sadly for them, state control over information there is airtight, which means that the population's tribulations -- from repeated famine to everything entailed in living in a police state -- can only be imagined by the rest of the world most of the time.
Human emotional reactions are far more powerful when the stimuli are concrete and visual rather than abstract and hinted at -- and what we've seen coming out of Yangon in recent days has nothing of a "hint" about it.
What this means, therefore, is that should Beijing be called upon to play a role in Myanmar similar to the one it played in North Korea, this time around it may have much less room to maneuver, for the pressure will be on to make the violence end now and will only abate once the world stops seeing monks being beaten, shot at and abused by security forces.
Less room to wriggle, ultimately, means that Bei-jing will have difficulty playing the Taiwan card. The states that lean on China to do something are themselves getting pressure from their lawmakers and constituents to make the horror go away.
Myanmar will likely be only a transient source of concern, one that will eventually be pushed aside when another catastrophe, man-made or natural, strikes.
But in the here and now, the world is connecting emotionally with Burmese people in a way that North Koreans can only dream about. A self-serving Beijing expecting to get something in return for intervention will get far less international patience than it has received for its past efforts.
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