President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wiped out almost 10 years of progress made under former presidents Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) and Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in one fell swoop last week when he told a Mexican newspaper that the relationship between Taiwan and China “is a special one, but not [one] between two countries.”
By turning back the clock to before Lee’s 1999 “state-to-state relations” declaration, Ma’s statement was a marked departure from his pre-election pledges to defend Taiwan’s sovereignty, a fact the Presidential Office was quick to “clarify.”
In the same interview, Ma also referred once again to the fictitious “1992 consensus,” saying that both sides of the Taiwan Strait had agreed to accept the “one China, different interpretations” model supposedly enshrined in this fabricated agreement.
He was wrong. At no time has Beijing said it subscribes to the so-called “consensus” and China’s outright rejection of the Ma government’s self-
deprecating UN bid two weeks ago is clear proof that Beijing will brook no deviation from its definition of the “one China” policy.
But while the rest of the world recognizes rejection when they hear it, the Presidential Office persists in trying to disguise a failure as a success, dismissing Beijing’s sharp rebuff as an “isolated incident.”
George Orwell could have been talking about the Ma government when, in his influential 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” he wrote “political speech [is] largely the defense of the indefensible and consists largely of ... sheer cloudy vagueness.”
The Ma administration has purposely played word games with national sovereignty in the belief that it can earn mutual goodwill from China. As Ma’s campaign promises were predicated on Beijing’s willingness to throw Taiwan a few crumbs from its economic banquet, the government has had no choice. Yet 100 days on, Ma has nothing to show for his government’s ingratiating behavior.
Although China may not be playing Ma’s game, “progress” on another front — unraveling the Taiwan consciousness that has flourished over the last decade or so — seems to be gathering momentum.
Ma may have promised to follow his “three noes” — no unification, no independence and no use of force — during his presidency, but his policies risk making Taiwan so reliant on its giant neighbor that the nation could eventually have no choice but to strike up some kind of union. No amount of flowery language can obscure the risks involved in the government’s actions.
In his essay, Orwell wrote: “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
Looking back, despite all Ma’s patriotic obfuscation in the lead up to election day, it should have been quite clear to anyone with a basic knowledge of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that Ma and his party consider Taiwan a part of China, albeit the Republic of China and not the People’s Republic of China.
The cuttlefish may have spurted out enough ink to confuse people ahead of the presidential election in March, but with everything going wrong on the policy front, it will take quite a reserve of ink to last another three-and-a-half years.
US$18.278 billion is a simple dollar figure; one that’s illustrative of the first Trump administration’s defense commitment to Taiwan. But what does Donald Trump care for money? During President Trump’s first term, the US defense department approved gross sales of “defense articles and services” to Taiwan of over US$18 billion. In September, the US-Taiwan Business Council compared Trump’s figure to the other four presidential administrations since 1993: President Clinton approved a total of US$8.702 billion from 1993 through 2000. President George W. Bush approved US$15.614 billion in eight years. This total would have been significantly greater had Taiwan’s Kuomintang-controlled Legislative Yuan been cooperative. During
Former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) in recent days was the focus of the media due to his role in arranging a Chinese “student” group to visit Taiwan. While his team defends the visit as friendly, civilized and apolitical, the general impression is that it was a political stunt orchestrated as part of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) propaganda, as its members were mainly young communists or university graduates who speak of a future of a unified country. While Ma lived in Taiwan almost his entire life — except during his early childhood in Hong Kong and student years in the US —
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers on Monday unilaterally passed a preliminary review of proposed amendments to the Public Officers Election and Recall Act (公職人員選罷法) in just one minute, while Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) legislators, government officials and the media were locked out. The hasty and discourteous move — the doors of the Internal Administration Committee chamber were locked and sealed with plastic wrap before the preliminary review meeting began — was a great setback for Taiwan’s democracy. Without any legislative discussion or public witnesses, KMT Legislator Hsu Hsin-ying (徐欣瑩), the committee’s convener, began the meeting at 9am and announced passage of the
In response to a failure to understand the “good intentions” behind the use of the term “motherland,” a professor from China’s Fudan University recklessly claimed that Taiwan used to be a colony, so all it needs is a “good beating.” Such logic is risible. The Central Plains people in China were once colonized by the Mongolians, the Manchus and other foreign peoples — does that mean they also deserve a “good beating?” According to the professor, having been ruled by the Cheng Dynasty — named after its founder, Ming-loyalist Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功, also known as Koxinga) — as the Kingdom of Tungning,
RSS