The answer given by a police officer for blocking a protest could not have been more obscure, if not worrying. Asked on what grounds Tibetan protesters applying for a permit to demonstrate on Sunday against a controversial Tibetan Buddhist art exhibition at the National Palace Museum would have been turned down, the officer’s response was: “Based on which law? Well, maybe I should not answer that question.”
Well, maybe he should, because there is no law in this land that can bar a group from holding a protest at the museum, political or otherwise. Such a law exists less than 200km across the Taiwan Strait, however, and there are signs that the laws over there are little by little becoming a rule of thumb here.
While we can hardly blame the police officer for doing his job (and in his defense, this was a theoretical question, as the Tibetans’ protest did not require a permit), clear answers should be asked of the authorities, as obscure references to some “laws” and their arbitrary application is exactly what underpins the reign of terror that keeps Chinese dissidents on their toes — and in jail.
In recent months, the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has provided many oblique references to “national security” and the “national interest” to justify barring peaceful individuals from entering the country, including people closely associated with World Uyghur Congress president Rebiya Kadeer, who herself has been “blacklisted” for three years. Then, as now, no clear laws were stated by the authorities and the arguments given would not have held up in court.
If, when it comes to certain issues, this country is no longer governed by law, then what are the foundations of the state’s policies?
There is reason to believe that on the question of “splittism,” the laws are now being written in Beijing, and the first victims of this de facto application of Chinese law on Taiwanese soil are the very minorities whose voices have been silenced in China: Tibetans and Uighurs. Under Ma, representatives from those ethnic groups have increasingly been treated as second-class citizens — denied entry visas, dumped by police in the mountains of Neihu after participating in a rally in Taipei, and now barred from bringing a picture of their spiritual leader to “complete” an exhibition from China at the National Palace Museum.
All of this is ostensibly meant to please Beijing. Although the suppression of Tibetans and Uighurs already warrants the strongest of condemnation, it also points to the possibility that this is merely the beginning. Legal arbitrariness is a slippery slope, one that eventually risks bringing other groups under its shadow. Next in line, we can imagine, are Falun Gong practitioners, Aborigines and supporters of Taiwanese independence.
If we are to avoid such a scenario from becoming reality, every instance of arbitrariness should be opposed at all cost. If no article of law governing this land justifies those actions, whoever is responsible should face the consequences.
Ma and others in the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) have attempted to blur the lines between Taiwan, the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China, especially when discussing notions of culture and sovereignty. Irritating though this may be, the ramifications of those pronouncements usually remained in the abstract, with no immediate impact on people’s lives. However, should aspects of China’s repressive “legal” system be imported and mixed with Taiwan’s, it won’t be long before certain groups and individuals start feeling the consequences.
The current targets of pseudo-legal arbitrariness are not merely “others” in the ethnic sense of the word; that could very well be us in the not too distant future.
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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