Despite the occasional suggestion by a handful of US academics that Washington should “abandon” Taiwan to its “inevitable” fate of unification with China, a good number of experts and officials maintain that the nation of 23 million cannot simply be willed out of existence and must therefore be dealt with.
Welcome though this defense of Taiwan may be, a surprisingly large number of such proponents, often in the same breath, add that democratic Taiwan is useful because it serves as an example for China, encouraging the incremental democratization and liberalization of the authoritarian giant next door.
Using terminology like “the first Chinese democracy,” such individuals fail to recognize that Taiwan is a distinct entity unto itself, or that the existence of its 23 million people is more than a means to an end.
Although qualitatively better than the argument that Taiwan should be forsaken by its allies and protectors for the sake of better relations with Beijing, the case that the nation is “useful” because it can foster change in China fails on moral grounds.
By not attesting to its intrinsic value, such proponents are committing the same mistake as those who would like to see the “Taiwan problem” disappear forever: It turns 23 million human beings into mere abstractions or pieces to be moved around on a chessboard toward some ultimate goal.
To a certain extent, it is undeniable that Taiwan serves as an example to China, and one can only hope that the millions of Chinese who now find it possible to make the journey across the Taiwan Strait take back home with them an inkling of how to improve their own lives.
However, the very same memes of justice, freedom and democracy are not unique to Taiwan, and Chinese have for decades traveled to countries where the same fundamental principles apply. Taiwan is special not because it has disproved the largely flawed theory that Confucianism is incompatible with democracy, but rather because it became one of the first small nations to democratize after decades of authoritarian rule.
Emerging as it did from under the heavy hand of authoritarianism about the same time as South Korea, why is it that only Taiwan is touted as an example for China, if not for the acknowledgement, inadvertently perhaps, that it is part of China? One would be hard pressed to tout Taiwan as some special model for China and yet maintain that one supports the view that Taiwan’s people have a right to choose their own destiny.
Those two contentions are incompatible and will remain so until it is recognized that Taiwan is not a means to an end, but an end in itself.
The world is rife with examples of liberal democracies for countries like China and North Korea to follow. There is nothing special about Taiwan, mis a part a shared language and culture, that would make China more willing to embrace and experiment with democracy. In fact, the assumption that Chinese will somehow be more amenable to democracy because it is found in Taiwan is downright insulting to the Chinese, as if they needed a shared language, or ethnicity, to understand it.
After decades of contact, albeit limited, with democracies the world over, the Chinese Communist Party remains a politically rigid, repressive entity. That interactions with Taiwan would unlock a box that has remained shut for so long where similar interactions have failed to do so is pure speculation, if not outright fantasy.
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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