The Presidential Office announced with much fanfare on Wednesday that former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Lien Chan (連戰) would represent President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) at the APEC leaders summit in Peru next month.
The trumpets were out because, as a former vice president, Lien will be the highest-ranking former official to represent Taiwan at the annual forum.
Ma told the Central News Agency in an interview last week that he would do “whatever he could” to raise the level of Taiwan’s representation at APEC. Lien’s acceptance by China will no doubt be touted by the Presidential Office as another success in its policy of engaging Beijing.
Back in October 2001, when former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) chose former vice president Li Yuan-zu (李元簇), Li was flatly rejected by China on the grounds that his appointment bucked APEC protocol: Taiwan’s representative had to be a finance or economic official.
China seems to have moved the goalposts on this occasion, as Lien hardly qualifies as an economic expert, but the government and pro-unification press will no doubt sweep this inconvenience under the carpet.
In selecting Lien, the Presidential Office clearly resorted to the safest option, as there was little chance that China would reject him given his Machiavellian past.
Lien is China’s man. He has shown on many occasions in the past that he is all too willing to toe the line of Beijing’s united-front policy and denigrate Taiwan’s sovereignty. It was Lien who put Taiwan’s sovereignty on its current slippery slope when in 2005 he undermined the authority of the Chen government by traveling to China and meeting Chinese officials.
Another inconvenient fact for the Presidential Office is that Lien is not a government official and will attend the summit in his capacity of chairman of the National Policy Foundation, a KMT-affiliated think tank.
What this means is that China has ensured that the cross-strait relationship remains on a strictly party-to-party basis in line with Beijing’s “one China” policy and nullifies Ma’s claim that he is raising the level of Taiwan’s representation.
One could even suggest that Lien was perhaps Beijing’s — and not Taipei’s — choice. Given the shady communication channels that exist between the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party, it would not be surprising if the two parties reached a secret deal on Taipei’s representation.
In the few months since the Ma government began its policy of rapprochement with China, it has become increasingly adept at grasping straws when it comes to identifying Beijing’s acts of “goodwill.”
Lien’s attendance in Lima will no doubt be spun as the latest indicator of China’s benevolence, but in reality most people couldn’t care less who represents Ma at this inconsequential annual gabfest.
They care more about Taiwan’s entry to the WHO or the UN, goals that look like a lost cause following China’s outright dismissal of Ma’s “pragmatic” UN bid last month.
The Ma administration may have perfected the art of taking China’s snubs and spinning them in a positive fashion, but as last Saturday’s 600,000-strong anti-government protest showed, people’s reserves of goodwill for Ma and his cross-strait strategy are at a critical low.
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