With steely-eyed determination and a clenched fist held up high, a stern-faced President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) on Tuesday asserted his intention to safeguard Taiwan’s sovereignty and dignity as he slammed the WHO for addressing Taiwan as a “Province of China” in an internal memo, and held China responsible for pressuring the WHO into designating Taiwan as part of China.
Just before the public was swept away by Ma’s rhetoric and convinced of his will to stand up against China and anyone who stomps on Taiwan’s sovereignty and dignity, however, an event that took place on the same day on the other side of the Taiwan Strait led people to wonder whether Ma was at all sincere at the press conference.
It is ironic that as Ma spoke in Taipei about protecting the nation’s dominion and dignity and singled out China as the culprit suppressing Taiwan’s international standing, the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) honorary chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) was sharing the stage with Chinese President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) in Beijing, with the latter speaking of China’s ambition to unify Taiwan.
If Ma is at all serious about safeguarding the nation’s standing, wouldn’t the Hu-Wu meeting have provided the perfect platform for Wu to voice Taiwan’s protest?
Ma, who doubles as KMT chairman, could very well have instructed Wu to seize the opportunity and showed the Ma administration’s resolve in defending the nation’s name and dignity.
Instead, Hu was left to trumpet his message of unification, saying that “commercial and cultural exchanges can serve as two bridges for cross-strait hand-in-hand and mind-to-mind cooperation.”
Hu also stressed that both the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party had to uphold the so-called “1992 consensus that adheres to the one China principle” — all without a squeak of opposition from Wu.
It is no wonder then that Taiwanese are left guessing whether Ma’s performance on Tuesday was simply more political theater aimed at fooling the public.
The disclosure of the WHO memo, which said WHO publications needed to use the terminology “Taiwan Province of China” and that Taiwan should be “listed or shown as falling under China and not separately as if they referred to a state,” brings to mind Taiwanese student Huang Hai-ning (黃海寧) and her fellow protesters confronting then-Department of Health minister Yeh Ching-chuan (葉金川) over his dubious representation of Taiwan at the World Health Assembly (WHA) in Geneva in 2009.
It would appear that their concerns have proven well-founded.
Many vividly recall that Yeh, in response to the protesters’ question, visibly lost his composure and abandoned all civility as he launched into a tirade, pointed a finger at Huang and said: “Shame on you” and “People like you are useless.”
At the time, Yeh dodged that simple question posed by Huang and her fellow protesters. Two years later, the answer has been laid bare for all to see — that Taiwan’s status has indeed been belittled by the international organization.
Who are the ones who should really be shamed for allowing Taiwan and Taiwanese to endure such an insult? Without need for hesitation, the public knows the answer.
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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