In a perfectly apt scene involving barbed wire barricades and hundreds of police officers, National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall was restored yesterday to its original name, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.
It was no small irony that the reversal occurred almost 22 years to the day since the lifting of martial law, declared in 1949 by dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) himself. What followed were decades of the White Terror, during which thousands of Taiwanese and Chinese who opposed Chiang’s rule were murdered — both at home and abroad — or disappeared.
Some — ostensibly those who favor the renaming of the hall back to the name of a despot — argue that Chiang defended Taiwan and prevented the island being taken by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while slowly developing its economy.
If defending Taiwan and developing its economy were the prerequisites for naming the hall, then surely it should be called the United States Memorial Hall instead, given that it was US assistance in the form of the Mutual Defense Treaty, security guarantees and arms sales that gave Taiwan the space to grow.
In fact, Chiang’s adventurism and disconnect from reality — from his vow to retake the mainland by force to fanciful plans for entry into regional conflicts — created unnecessary danger for Taiwan and brought Asia closer to nuclear war.
The CKS Memorial, therefore, is not a means to honor a man who stood up for Taiwan, but rather a symbol of “one China.” Aside from an instrument to score political points domestically, the renaming of the monument by former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) administration was an attempt to distance Taiwan from China by removing symbols of their supposed common destiny. In the process, Chen was also following a trend in co-opting memorials to antidemocratic leaders.
Back in China, the reviled Nationalist leader’s image has gradually been rehabilitated, so much so that in recent years there has been growing interest among domestic tourists in his refurbished former residence in Chongqing. Chinese tourists are also eager to visit his mausoleum in Taiwan. But Chiang’s rehabilitation in China is not the result of a decision by the CCP to “forgive” its old nemesis. It is, rather, part of Beijing’s strategy to narrow the divide between Taiwan and China and so bolster the image of a big happy Chinese family divided by Western and Japanese colonialism and the “unequal treaties.”
With the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) back in power, it is now the KMT’s turn to cater to its domestic constituency by renaming the hall. The party will also claim that the move is part of its policy of mending fences with Beijing — as if the CCP leadership cared what a block of granite in downtown Taipei is called.
More to the point, in renaming the hall, the KMT once again reaffirms its ideology as a party that sees Taiwan not as a sovereign entity, but rather as a part of China.
And so, the murderous little tyrant rears his ugly head once again, laughing at a people who suffered so much under his guard.
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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