The strong cold front that swept across Taiwan last week was not enough to stop people from attending a forum organized by the Taiwan Thinktank. As for so many other Taiwanese, the cold weather was of little importance compared with their worries about whether Taiwan’s democracy will make it through its severe winter.
The forum brought together professors who have devoted most of their lives to the struggle for democracy, chairpersons of political opposition parties who have been fighting against the one-party state, young academics who rarely participate in activities outside of their classrooms, research rooms or conference rooms, and students too young to remember the authoritarian system. They all agreed that the results of the legislative and presidential elections held early last year indeed have resulted in democratic regression in Taiwan.
The only contribution that China’s Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) made to Taiwan was probably the fact that his visit alerted many people to how the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) in just seven months has paralyzed the nation’s legislative supervision, let police brutality run amok and impaired the independence of the judiciary.
Any of this was unimaginable during the past eight years. It is even less acceptable to see that the government’s arrogance and unscrupulous behavior may have sprung from its landslide victories in democratic elections, and that it is this that has given the government the boldness to use the state apparatus to oppress human rights in Taiwan and externally to use the KMT-Chinese Communist Party platform to erode the nation’s sovereignty.
While the purpose of a transfer of political power is to consolidate human rights and sovereignty, the KMT-led government has done the exact opposite.
As it managed to secure a two-thirds majority in the legislative elections and win more than 50 percent of the vote in the presidential election, it is hard to challenge its democratic legitimacy. It is precisely this that is the source of our worries.
We first thought Taiwan’s democracy was on the road to irreversible progress since 2000, but we have now painfully come to realize two things. Many aspects of Taiwan’s democratic reforms are incomplete.
Old systems and mindsets that were not abandoned over the past eight years have staged a rapid comeback.
We have also come to realize that we cannot rely on victories in democratic elections alone to put us on the road toward democratic transformation.
This is a mistake that the Democratic Progressive Party, the former ruling party and now biggest opposition party, must recognize, and it is the party’s unshakable responsibility to resolve the consequences of this mistake.
Although elections certainly play an important role in democracy, only by insisting on democratic reforms and the development of human rights can we help Taiwan consolidate its democratic foundation.
All Taiwanese concerned over the nation’s future must have the courage to take action in the face of Taiwan’s democratic regression. Carrying out democratic reforms is not a dinner party.
Although Taiwanese democracy is suffering through a severe winter, we should unite various social forces and equip ourselves with knowledge.
Only then can we generate a force capable of bringing public attention to Taiwan’s democratic crisis and preventing the government from continuing to violate human rights so that we can put Taiwanese democracy back on the right track.
Michael Hsiao is director of the Center for Asia-Pacific Area Studies at Academia Sinica.
TRANSLATED BY TED YANG
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS