It seemed like a welcome shift last week when Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (
Even Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) presidential candidate Frank Hsieh (
Whether this rhetorical shift is heartfelt -- a coming out of sorts, a la former president Lee Teng-hui (
And in Taiwan, the center is the "status quo." However uncomfortable it is, the "status quo" is, ironically, quite comfortable. It is the invisible enemy we know rather than the unknown of a sudden shift. It's also a vote-winner, as maintaining that comfortable level of uncertainty seems to be what Taiwanese of all stripes want most.
Welcome as Ma's "determination to defend Taiwan's sovereignty" might be -- and let us assume, for the sake of argument, that he means what he said -- his vow to create friendly cross-strait relations might be more difficult to achieve than he thinks. For upon hearing his comments, Beijing could be forgiven for accusing Ma of himself "heightening cross-strait tensions," in similar fashion to what Ma in the same breath accused the DPP of doing over the past eight years.
Should Ma decide to go down this path, he would soon find -- as every other president before him has found -- that peace across the Taiwan Strait, or its absence, is not in the hands of Taiwanese and their leaders, but in those of the regime in Beijing, which seems to think that time is on its side and that the annexation of Taiwan is inevitable.
In recent years, Beijing had placed its hopes in the KMT, which it saw as a surrogate, a backdoor entry to Taiwan. If Ma shuts that door, it will be 1996 all over again, with the additional layer of 12 years of budding Taiwanese consciousness. Should that happen, all that talk about a common market, of small, medium and big links and friendlier ties will mean very little.
If Ma becomes president, he will soon find out why his predecessors Lee and Chen Shui-bian (
And soon enough, following his rude awakening, life would go back to normal, back to the "status quo." The economy would be no better, no worse, and the main question Ma would need to answer would be the one Lee and Chen had to juggle: How to defend Taiwan against a giant whose pride has yet again been hurt, and who is realizing that the longer the "status quo" prevails, the more time is on Taiwan's side.
Ultimately, Beijing's eyesight is blurry. Lee, Chen, Ma -- for all it cares, Taiwanese on Saturday will be voting for "Ma Teng-bian" or "Hsieh Ying-hui." It doesn't care who is in power in Taiwan. What Beijing covets is real estate, all 35,980km2 of it.
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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