You know election time is around the corner when you start hearing Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government officials trumpeting “Taiwan” and “Taiwanese people” in their speeches.
At a seminar in Taipei last week on cross-strait relations from 2008 to this year, Mainland Affairs Council Minister Lai Shin-yuan (賴幸媛) said in a speech that “putting Taiwan first for the benefit of the people” was the main principle guiding the KMT government’s policy toward China.
“It also needs to be ensured that [Taiwanese] people have the right to decide the future development of cross-strait relations,” she said.
With Double Ten National Day this weekend, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) will also likely accentuate the importance of “Taiwan’s interests” and “Taiwanese people” in his national day address.
Naturally, government officials will highlight the great importance they attach to the nation’s interests and its people. However, amid the backdrop of the KMT government signing the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China, it is not hard to see the irony and farce of pro-Taiwan words pouring out of KMT officials’ mouths.
How can the Ma government convince the voters that it truly believes that the “people have the right to decide the future development of cross-strait relations” when the public is muzzled and the government rejects any chance for critics to have their voices heard through a referendum?
On Thursday last week, the Executive Yuan’s Committee of Appeal upheld the Referendum Review Committee’s rejection of a petition, signed by 200,000 people, to put the ECFA to a referendum, again supressing the public’s voice. So much for KMT remarks that the public has the right to decide the future of cross-strait development.
The KMT government should heed the warning suggested by a recent Research, Development and Evaluation Commission poll. The survey showed that in 2007, 63 percent of people referred to themselves as Taiwanese, while 15.4 percent considered themselves Chinese. In 2008, after Ma won the presidency, the group that considered themselves Taiwanese rose to 67.1 percent, while those who regarded themselves as Chinese dropped to 13.6 percent. In a similar poll in May last year, the number who saw themselves as Taiwanese slid to 64.6 percent, although those who saw themselves as Chinese dipped even further, to 11.5 percent.
Statistics from National Chengchi University’s Election Study Center show that in 2007, 43 percent of respondents saw themselves as Taiwanese, while 5.4 percent considered themselves Chinese. In June this year, the percentage of people who identified themselves as Taiwanese rose to 52 percent, while those claiming to be Chinese dropped to 3.8 percent. Meanwhile, the group that saw themselves as Taiwanese as well as Chinese also declined, dropping from 44.7 percent in 2007 to 40.4 percent in June this year.
These numbers suggest that the public’s identification with Taiwan has not diminished despite the Ma administration’s China-friendly policies.
The Ma government can keep using the words “Taiwan” and “Taiwanese people” all it wants, but in case the KMT hasn’t realized, using these phrases to get votes and then tossing them away like toilet paper when their use has been fulfilled will only hurt the Ma government, undermining its credibility and repulsing the public with its hypocrisy.
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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
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