If the Presidential Office is to be believed, everyone inside “the Beltway” — US political speak for Washington — is over the moon about the progress in relations between Taiwan and China since the change of government last May.
Over the last few weeks, a steady succession of US establishment figures and academics — most notably former US ambassador to the UN John Bolton — have landed in Taipei to file through the Presidential Office turnstiles and slap President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) on the back while commending him for the recent cross-strait detente. Ma, meanwhile, has taken every opportunity to detail how happy the world is with his management of relations with China.
The reason, no doubt, for the US’ glee is that the warming of cross-strait relations means it is less likely that war will break out in the Taiwan Strait, in which case US soldiers would likely have to put their lives on the line to defend Taiwan.
In fact, the only dissenting voice of late has come from Pentagon officials, who have expressed worries that Taiwan’s headlong tilt toward China could eventually see advanced US weapons technology falling into the “wrong hands.”
At home, another dissenting voice — and one that seems to be having trouble making itself heard — is that of the growing number of Taiwanese alarmed at the pace and scope of the cross-strait rapprochement.
So far, because Ma was elected with a large majority less than 12 months ago, these dissenting voices have been written off as disappointed opposition supporters.
But these, and many more people who voted for Ma’s moderate pre-election promises, did so in the belief that the Presidential Office — not the KMT — would be in charge of cross-strait policy.
And while Ma touted the idea of a peace agreement with China during his election campaign, it is safe to assume that voters believed any agreement would not touch on political relations, as Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) seemed to suggest in a recent Xinhua article and which now seems increasingly likely.
Any such move would be deeply distressing to the majority in Taiwan, which has time and again shown support for maintaining the current cross-strait state of affairs.
Another consideration for those praising the new atmosphere in the Strait is that the closer democratic Taiwan gets to authoritarian Beijing, the bigger the threat China poses to the nation’s democratic system and the rights of Taiwanese to determine their future.
Washington must understand that the two are not mutually exclusive.
Although the Taiwan Relations Act — the guiding principle on US-Taiwan relations — states that the future of Taiwan should be settled by peaceful means, any “peace deal” between Taipei and Beijing, despite Beijing’s best guarantees, would inevitably result in a deterioration in human rights, the rule of law and democracy in the same manner witnessed in Hong Kong since 1997.
While the US is quite right in wanting a peaceful settlement to the Taiwan issue, it is hard to believe that the country that for so long served as Taiwan’s protector is prepared to turn its back on one of Asia’s freest societies as it is slowly swallowed by its giant, authoritarian neighbor.
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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