The more one looks at it, the clearer it becomes that the Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) administration’s “peace” bid with Beijing is all about The Process.
Participants in this endeavor are so fixed on the goal, so enthralled by the historic possibilities, that anything that departs from The Process or threatens to throw it off course is met with the swift blade of the state apparatus. What we are presented with, therefore, is a classic case of the end justifying the means.
When a state embraces such an ideology, the little man inevitably gets trampled on, as we saw in the former Soviet Union, Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) China and under other undemocratic systems. Under such conditions, the state, believing it knows what is best for the citizenry, will not hesitate to abrogate people’s rights or, at the extreme, to use the tool of terror, which leads to untold abuse. There’s a word for this: authoritarianism.
There are indications — police brutality, infringements on people’s rights and the ostensible politicization of the judiciary — that the Ma administration is veering toward authoritarianism in its quest to achieve “peace” in the Taiwan Strait.
Another telltale sign that Taiwan has been hypnotized by dreams of the goal is its warped perception of reality. The clearest indication that this is happening came from the mouth of Taipei Mayor Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌), who on Sunday said that the rights of the two giant pandas China has offered as a gift to Taiwan should be respected. Hau was referring to the pandas’ names, which he said could not be changed without violating the animals’ rights.
By no means does this newspaper advocate undermining the rights of animals. But the poor Tuan Tuan (團團) and Yuan Yuan (圓圓), political tools if ever there was one, certainly shouldn’t rank higher than human beings when it comes to respecting rights — unless, of course, they are part of The Process.
Under this regime, the rights of Taiwanese to not be detained without charge, to display symbols of nationhood or to demonstrate against a controversial visit by a Chinese envoy — and to do so without suffering police brutality — can apparently be broken, all in the name of The Process. A request by a venerable spiritual leader like the Dalai Lama to visit Taiwan, or for his supporters to welcome him, can be denied if it endangers The Process.
Worse, the right of Wo Weihan (伍維漢) — accused of spying for Taiwan and executed by Beijing last month — to a fair trial, or of the dozens of activists jailed and drugged by Chinese authorities on Human Rights Day, to express their opinion, can be curtailed as long as doing so ensures a smooth process.
In this political burlesque, government officials harp on the rights of pandas and request a police motorcade to ensure a smooth drive from the airport to Taipei Zoo. Limbs of Taiwanese can be broken, blood of Taiwanese can be spilled, Tibetans can be spirited to the hills of Neihu (內湖) in the dead of night, but the pandas must be comfortable. Men can be jailed, beaten, drugged or executed without a word of condemnation, but we should respect the names the pandas have grown accustomed to in order not to confuse them.
As it focuses on the goal, the Ma government has made a pair of pandas and The Process they symbolize a top priority, while relegating the millions of Taiwanese it supposedly represents to a lower rung.
For a country so flexible about its own name, it is most instructive to see just how resolute people in the pan-blue camp can be over the names of other species.
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