It may seem premature to assess the benefits for Taiwan that the US presidential candidates may offer after gaining office. Yet there are hints of things to come from the Democrats based on the written word.
An article by Jeffrey Bader and Richard Bush of the Brookings Institution released this week suggests that if Democratic Senator Barack Obama were president, then Taiwanese who value democracy have reason to be even more nervous than they are now.
Taiwan has long been a crucible for American think tank staffers and academics, whose fantasies of an enlightened Chinese state and theories of cultivatible goodwill among China’s leaders continue to astonish us with their naivete.
Bader and Richard Bush’s article may be the first signal that Taiwanese democrats will have no choice but to support Republican Senator John McCain’s presidential candidacy before he has even made a move on China policy.
The authors are reportedly awaiting senior positions in an Obama administration, which lends weight to these fears. In Richard Bush’s case, the article is particularly disappointing: As a former American Institute in Taiwan chairman, he was well placed to understand that the situation in China is far more complex than the article’s banal allusions to the Chinese psyche might admit.
Their argument is that China deserves to be treated with kid gloves because this achieves results. What those results are and who the recipients might be is not presented in a comprehensive fashion, leaving the reader to assume that — in China, at any rate — economic growth conquers all and that China’s “poor” rights record is defensible in a historical context.
“China’s human rights record is poor, but its people are much freer than were their parents under Mao [Zedong, 毛澤東],” the authors argue, a fatuous argument similar to that of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger in a hagiography of Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) in Time magazine several months ago.
China’s beneficiaries are probably those who remind the authors of themselves: the elite, the wealthy, the urban, the eloquent, the successful, the educated and the upwardly mobile. Most Chinese, however, are none of these and never will be; what property rights the peasantry gained after Mao’s demise have proven worthless in the face of predatory local governments, Beijing’s grandiose infrastructural projects and colossal environmental ruin.
The suggestion that Washington’s dealings with China “should be offered in the spirit of trying to help them help themselves, not in order to judge them as morally deficient” is even harder to sustain given that the Chinese government is morally deficient. Such a government — with its litany of abuses of the weakest members of its society and its morally vacuous conduct in the international sphere, most recently seen in protecting Zimbabwe from UN sanctions and even in its humiliation of the International Olympic Committee — cannot be trusted to “help itself” when it already considers itself beyond Washington’s reproach, or anyone’s reproach, for that matter.
Worst of all is the authors’ argument that China should not be “condemned” on anything it does, no matter how atrocious, provocative or illegal.
If this kind of rationalization of Chinese misrule, aggression and disingenuousness fairly reflects an Obama administration’s take on US-China relations, there will be no “change we can believe in” as far as Taiwanese are concerned. Instead, there will only be cause for despair as the pro-China network settles in for yet another term, comfortable in the knowledge that Obama will have neither the incentive nor the intellectual support to help Taiwan recover the ground that it is losing.
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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