The fall of former Tunisian president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak seems to have set off what could become a wave of democratization similar to the liberalization of eastern Europe that precipitated the collapse of the Soviet Union. A “Jasmine Revolution” movement started by a group of Chinese Internet users calling for an independent judiciary, democracy and an end to one-party autocracy also seems to have shaken the Chinese leadership.
The Chinese authorities, very experienced in totalitarian suppression of public movements, reacted as if they were facing a formidable enemy. They immediately dispatched police in large numbers to the urban areas where protests were taking place to seize control and stop the protests from spreading. Officials also strengthened their control and supervision of the Internet, censoring articles and reports including words and phrases like “Jasmine Revolution,” “Egypt,” “Mubarak” and “Wangfujing” — a shopping street in Beijing. They also restricted text messaging, all in an attempt to do whatever is necessary to suppress the “jasmine blossoms.”
A closer look at the causes behind the Jasmine Revolution shows that, although elected, the presidents of both Tunisia and Egypt had been in power for an unreasonably long time. Both countries lacked supervisory mechanisms, there had been no valid handovers of political power and the governments ruled their countries through autocratic methods. Once a spark was set off through the Jasmine Revolution, the revolutions took off.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has run China as an autocratic one-party state since 1949. The country lacks substantive democratic monitoring forces, and there are no free and independent media or any freedom of expression. Nor is there an effective political party system, and the government relies on the military and police force to suppress public movements and ethnic minorities. These similarities in the political environment are why the Chinese leadership fears that a Jasmine Revolution could take off in China.
Although China’s power is growing for the time being, and it recently leapfrogged Japan to become the world’s second-largest economy, there are a considerable number of destabilizing factors lying just below the surface. These include severely worsening social inequality, uneven development between the coastal cities and inland regions, increasing inflation, soaring commodity prices, prohibitively high housing prices in urban areas, an unusually serious drought that could well turn into a famine this year, government corruption and simmering discontent among the people over the wider social conditions in China, which make it a hotbed for a Jasmine Revolution. China already has many of the conditions in place for a revolution to break out; it just lacks the fateful spark to ignite it. This has got the powers that be worried, and they are on tenterhooks over the Jasmine movement. They fear that if they don’t proceed with caution, that spark might still start a fire that will burn their house down.
It is of course possible that the people’s pride in the rise of their nation, coupled with the rapidly rising GDP, will prove stronger than their revolutionary verve and dampen their sense of urgency. The likelihood of a Jasmine Revolution in China anytime soon is not too high, but the Jasmine movement is nevertheless emerging as a force for change in China. The Chinese authorities would be well advised to heed the winds of change blowing through their lands. They need to step up democratization and political and judicial reform, because if they allow political development to lag too far behind economic development, this gap will feed the revolutionary rumblings of the people. Once the ball has started rolling, no amount of force, censorship or “golden shield” initiatives will keep the people down. If they want proof, they need look no further than Tunisia and Egypt.
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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