Could any opener better summarize Taiwan’s current situation than the immortal words with which Charles Dickens started his novel A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”?
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and all who sail with it still insist on looking backward, whereas more progressive people are trying to look forward.
Taiwan is emerging from a tragedy to welcome the dawn of a new political era. The KMT, the architect of Taiwan’s tragedy, still believes itself to be the party that could save the nation amid the current political crisis.
If Taiwan was a normal, democratic country, should not the principle of political parties taking turns to hold the reins of power actually facilitate the country’s development along the road of democratization and normalization?
Is that not how things should be?
However, from the first transition of political power after the 2000 presidential election, the KMT has been blatantly against this principle, showing that it has never really abandoned the mindset that it is entitled to govern the country.
This mindset is a result of the party-state nature of the KMT regime. It has meant that the People’s Republic of China wrestling control of China away from the Republic of China (ROC) government was a zero-sum game, where the winner took it all. The reason for China not being able to develop a normal transition of power between parties on different ends of the political spectrum — as it is done in Europe — is that Beijing, too, is haunted by this rather outdated concept.
Between 2000 and 2008, the KMT did its best to use its power to frustrate the Democratic Progressive Party administration. The tension and fighting between the government and the opposition came from the KMT’s belief that the ROC belonged to the party and that the ancestral concept of the ROC had primacy over the actual country.
The transition of power in 2000 gave the KMT an opportunity to reinvent itself, an opportunity to shake off the party-state mindset and turn itself into a democratic political party. Evidently, it had no intentions of doing such a thing. The KMT presidential candidate at the time, former vice president Lien Chan (連戰), in his capacity as party chairman, joined forces with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — which had previously overthrown and ousted the KMT and is still trying to annex Taiwan as part of its own territory — in the misguided and pernicious hope that he could harness the CCP’s power to deal with his political rivals at home.
Then came President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who brought the party back to power, but did not make use of this new opportunity either. After gaining power, he rather disingenuously embarked on a policy of getting even closer to China, and the political, economic and cultural difficulties he has brought on Taiwanese due to the excessive links with Beijing have brought his own party close to collapse.
The cries that are being heard in Taiwan — saying that all will be lost unless the KMT folds — demonstrate that the colonial party-state system of the KMT is, indeed, falling apart.
Taiwan has at last reached a crossover between the fortunes of party-state domination and the country working to rebuild itself. This is the “golden cross” moment where Taiwan stands up to the KMT.
It is time Taiwanese set sail and left the KMT and its reactionary ways behind. This is a historical imperative.
Lee Min-yung is a poet.
Translated by Paul Cooper
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
If you had a vision of the future where China did not dominate the global car industry, you can kiss those dreams goodbye. That is because US President Donald Trump’s promised 25 percent tariff on auto imports takes an ax to the only bits of the emerging electric vehicle (EV) supply chain that are not already dominated by Beijing. The biggest losers when the levies take effect this week would be Japan and South Korea. They account for one-third of the cars imported into the US, and as much as two-thirds of those imported from outside North America. (Mexico and Canada, while
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not
RSS