KMT choking foreign policy
Taiwanese have been unaware of the evils perpetrated by the Republic of China (ROC) over the past decades in its international dealings, such as forming alliances with dictatorships that share its paranoid anti-communist Cold War mentality. These include forming an alliance with the South African apartheid government and complicity in supporting and training reactionary death squads in Central America.
Notably, Roberto D’Aubuisson, who founded El Salvador’s right-wing ARENA party and has been documented to have ordered the March 1980 assassination of Bishop Oscar Romero, has visited the then-Political Warfare College in New Taipei City’s Beitou District (北投) seven times (see Inside the League, 1986, by Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson).
Less lethal, but still damaging to Taiwan’s international reputation, is its recent money diplomacy with small Pacific islands, which has been disparaged by Australian commentators.
Transitional justice on the international front must delve into and acknowledge the corrosive history of Taiwan’s international relations. What better way for president-elect Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) upcoming administration to distinguish itself from the martial law heritage of the Chinese settler regime and promote its international image as the new embodiment of democracy in Taiwan?
Former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) eight years in office did not alter the mindset and stance of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It still upholds the untenable and self-isolating “one China” principle as seen in the pre-emptive severing of diplomatic ties with Nauru in July 2002.
News commentators and people around the world call Taiwan just “Taiwan.” What is the use of maintaining relations with 3 percent of the world’s population under the fictional title of the “Republic of China”?
Undoubtedly, it provides inflated salaries and expense budgets for ministry staff. However, we can give the ministry some credit for funding and providing informational services for non-governmental international activities since the 1990s.
With an overwhelming mandate from the public that rejected the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) pandering to China and gave the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) a legislative majority, Tsai has a responsibility to take control of the ministry and set a new direction for it.
However, several sources said that the incoming administration plans to appoint a ministry official who began his career in the martial law period and served as the nation’s representative to the US, Canada and Australia, as the new head of the ministry.
Whatever the merits of the individual, this cannot but provoke astonishment and outrage. The ministry has consistently upheld the “one China” principle, no matter how anachronistic or damaging to Taiwan. This massively sends the wrong message to the rest of the world. Taiwanese have expressed their collective will by electing Tsai, even though the nation retains the ROC title in its Constitution.
However, the KMT has denied and suppressed the sovereignty of Taiwanese and instead recognized the sovereignty of China over Taiwan. Far from moving toward transitional justice, appointing a KMT official to head the ministry could be construed to be a betrayal of the founding ideals of the DPP, ideals for which many spent years in prison, and perhaps a frustration of the hopes of the electorate as well. What justification can be given for this?
I can attest that several prominent Taiwanese with experience in foreign relations concur with my views; I hope that they will speak for themselves.
Linda Gail Arrigo
Taipei
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,
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
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
RSS