It is a sad day when one begins to question whether this administration has ever actually read the Constitution. You might have heard about it. It is the document that details what the government can and cannot do, and serves as this nation’s highest legal authority.
Because if they had, hypothetically speaking, read the document, they might have been left scratching their heads after failing to find the city of Nanjing in its articles. And then they might have been left even more confused after failing to find a single article that mentions where the capital of the ROC should or should not be.
This failure is because such an article does not exist. It was not present in the constitution adopted by the National Assembly in 1946. It was not present when the document came into force the year after. And it especially was not present in any of the seven revisions since.
In fact, the only time such a reference did appear was under Article 9 of a 1936 draft of the constitution text. The very same draft that explicitly does not mention Taiwan as being part of the ROC.
And so with this in mind, it quickly becomes apparent that Ministry of Education officials were either misinformed, mistaken, or misguided when they sent a letter to high schools requiring them to only purchase textbooks printed “correctly” with Nanjing as the capital of the ROC last week.
However, such an inference about the ROC capital also appears to be part of a trend, deliberate or otherwise, to cast parts of the constitution in support of this administration’s “one China” policy, even when such bases fail to exist.
In October, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) told a Taiwanese delegation to China that there was a constitutional basis behind his position that China continues to remain part of ROC territory.
Yet given the chance, the president might also be pressed to explain how he arrived at his inference, given that the Council of Grand Justices, the highest legal authority for constitutional questions, failed to arrive at the same conclusion under Interpretation No. 392.
All of this is, of course, quite troubling. Especially as the administration’s arguments rely on a public that remains ignorant of a document that is commonly seen as outdated and irrelevant.
And so a better use of education resources perhaps would have been instead to ask publishers to better educate students on the Constitution, so that absurd misunderstandings, like the one made earlier this week, do not take place again.
Vincent Chao is a researcher at the Thinking Taiwan Foundation.
World leaders are preparing themselves for a second Donald Trump presidency. Some leaders know more or less where he stands: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy knows that a difficult negotiation process is about to be forced on his country, and the leaders of NATO countries would be well aware of being complacent about US military support with Trump in power. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would likely be feeling relief as the constraints placed on him by the US President Joe Biden administration would finally be released. However, for President William Lai (賴清德) the calculation is not simple. Trump has surrounded himself
US president-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday named US Representative Mike Waltz, a vocal supporter of arms sales to Taiwan who has called China an “existential threat,” as his national security advisor, and on Thursday named US Senator Marco Rubio, founding member of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China — a global, cross-party alliance to address the challenges that China poses to the rules-based order — as his secretary of state. Trump’s appointments, including US Representative Elise Stefanik as US ambassador to the UN, who has been a strong supporter of Taiwan in the US Congress, and Robert Lighthizer as US trade
Following the BRICS summit held in Kazan, Russia, last month, media outlets circulated familiar narratives about Russia and China’s plans to dethrone the US dollar and build a BRICS-led global order. Each summit brings renewed buzz about a BRICS cross-border payment system designed to replace the SWIFT payment system, allowing members to trade without using US dollars. Articles often highlight the appeal of this concept to BRICS members — bypassing sanctions, reducing US dollar dependence and escaping US influence. They say that, if widely adopted, the US dollar could lose its global currency status. However, none of these articles provide
On Friday last week, tens of thousands of young Chinese took part in a bike ride overnight from Henan Province’s Zhengzhou (鄭州) to the historical city of Kaifeng in search of breakfast. The night ride became a viral craze after four female university students in June chronicled their ride on social media from Zhengzhou in search of soup dumplings in Kaifeng. Propelled by the slogan “youth is priceless,” the number of nocturnal riders surged to about 100,000 on Friday last week. The main road connecting the two cities was crammed with cyclists as police tried to maintain order. That sparked
RSS