As he faces China’s leader across the long wooden table, a gigantic mural of tall mountains, valleys and temples as a backdrop, there are two ways of looking at the significance of this pudgy envoy and what his presence there means for the future of Taiwan.
The first is to regard former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairman Wu Poh-hsiung (吳伯雄) as a threat. The man no longer has a position in office, nor did Taiwanese elevate him to some position with their votes. No, Wu is like a shadow, operating behind the scenes and free, it seems, of the restraints that apply to elected party officials or government figures.
Across from him sits Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping (習近平) and a few CCP cronies. Wu and Xi are heading a KMT-CCP summit in Beijing, the first since Xi’s ascension to the leadership. Wu is accompanied by former National Security Council secretary-general Su Chi (蘇起) — a Beijing regular — KMT Deputy Chairman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) and former KMT vice chairman Chan Chun-po (詹春柏). This is, we are told, the first meeting to be held under the “one China” framework rather than the so-called “1992 consensus.”
As expected, Wu said everything that Beijing wanted to hear, and in the days that followed last week’s meetings, the CCP promised a whole new series of measures to win the “hearts and minds” of Taiwanese. The whole affair touched on politics, on Taiwan’s status and future, and went well beyond what the government has dared to venture since President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) stepped into the Presidential Office in 2008.
Viewed from this angle, Wu the emissary could be part of a diabolical behind-the-scenes deal between the KMT and the CCP, perhaps to prepare the terrain for Taiwan’s annexation by its determinedly authoritarian neighbor.
Perhaps. But the other way to look at Wu and his retinue suggests something else. A little more than five years into Ma’s administration, and the best that China can do to discuss Taiwan’s political status is to welcome a delegation of “has-beens,” who, with the exception of Hung, have no direct hand in government policymaking. Wu (73), Su (63) and Chan (71), or another typical envoy, former vice president and KMT chairman Lien Chan (連戰), 76, are hardly the future of Taiwan — or of the KMT, for that matter — while Hung, at 65, only has a few years left in politics.
Despite all the pressure from the CCP, the signs of impatience, the threats, all they get is this, a group of envoys from which Taipei immediately distanced itself, whose views it said were not reflective of the administration’s official position?
It is worth considering the possibility that the KMT-CCP summits, alarming though they may be to supporters of a free Taiwan, are nothing more than a means for Taipei to deflect pressure from Beijing, mere crumbs to give the CCP the illusion of progress, that it is making headway, when in fact they are little more than a stopgap measure, a way to win time.
Taiwanese themselves should be relieved that rather un-influential dinosaurs, and not elected government officials, are conducting this kind of unsavory business. They should find comfort in the fact that the government, along with its semi-official creation the Straits Exchange Foundation, is sticking to economics, just as Ma had promised. And with less than three years left of Ma’s second and last term, that is unlikely to change, as the KMT and Ma’s successors know very well that any policy that departs from that promise, that threatens Taiwan’s democracy, freedom and way of life, will cost them dearly, perhaps even the Presidential Office.
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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