After a recent TV campaign blitz launched by President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) re-election campaign office featuring the Republic of China (ROC) national flag, one cannot help but wonder whether Ma’s campaign staff are deranged or are simply assuming for some unknown reason that Taiwanese will not remember Ma’s track record on the national flag.
One TV ad released by Ma’s campaign office focused on the passion Taiwanese feel for the flag and the nation, while another thanked anyone who had ever waved an ROC flag, praising their patriotism and calling them the true guardians of the nation’s dignity.
Unfortunately for Ma, while he may see nothing ironic about holding himself up as a defender of Taiwanese dignity, the two TV ads remind people of the way the ROC flag has been trampled on during his three years in office.
Ma’s crimes against the flag can be traced back even further.
As Taipei mayor he urged soccer fans not to display ROC national flags at Taipei City’s Zhongshan Soccer Stadium when it hosted the 2001 Asian Women’s Soccer Championship.
Even if people have trouble remembering that far back, they are unlikely to have forgotten how in 2005 Ma instructed the Taipei City Government — then co-sponsor of the Asian Judo Championship and the International Auto Gymkhana — to dissuade fans from bringing national flags to competition venues.
Ma’s love of the flag has been no more in evidence since he became president in May 2008.
Indeed, images of policemen forcefuly removing ROC flags when Chinese envoy Chen Yunlin (陳雲林) visited in November that year are a defining moment of Ma’s presidency for many.
If not that incident, then how about the way ROC national flags were removed along the route the day the two giant pandas sent as a gift by China arrived in Taiwan and made their way from the airport to the Taipei Zoo.
Here is another example: Less than a year ago, spectators attending a basketball game between Taiwan University All-Stars and China’s Tianjin Polytechnic University at Kainan University in Taoyuan, were “asked” to take down a 1m high ROC flag.
Perhaps we should applaud Ma’s boldness and take it as a case of “better late than never” now that he and his campaign team are publicly encouraging Taiwanese to wave ROC flags as an expression of patriotism.
However, as neither ad bothers to apologize for Ma’s record of banning the display of ROC flags, the public has every right to be suspicious about this sudden embrace of the flag as a patriotic symbol, less than four months before a presidential election.
However heart-warming and uplifting these TV ads might be, ignoring Ma’s history of flag abuse in the face of Chinese pressure might make for a good ad, but the willingness to cynically edit history for political ends is simply unbecoming to a vibrant democracy and indicative of a mind-set that Taiwanese must reject outright.
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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