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.
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