While Minister of Culture Cheng Li-chiun (鄭麗君) was moving from table to table toasting attendees at a lunar year-end banquet in Taipei on Tuesday last week, veteran entertainer Lisa Cheng (鄭心儀) — also known as Cheng Hui-chung (鄭惠中) — suddenly slapped her in the face.
Lisa Cheng later said that she assaulted the minster for trying to abolish Taipei’s Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Vice Chairman Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) in a message of support for Lisa Cheng on Facebook said: “Who gave the Democratic Progressive Party permission to uproot [the nation’s] culture, brainwash the public, engage in desinicization and willfully sever its ties to its origins?”
We should really thank both Lisa Cheng and Hau — her for her slap and him for his Facebook post. Their actions should help wake the public up from its trance-like futile pursuit of reconciliation and coexistence with the KMT. This is especially true for university students who have been attentively hosting the Coexistence Music Festival since 2013.
Lisa Cheng’s administering of a smack in the chops has once again revealed the KMT’s true colors — a political party whose members have consistently pursued a historical narrative at odds with the policy of coexistence favored by the majority of Taiwanese.
The people who seek a path of coexistence also include so-called waishengren (外省人) — “Mainlanders,” those who came from China with the KMT after the war and their offspring. Taiwan Solidarity Union (TSU) Chairman Lau Yi-te (劉一德) is a good representative of this group.
At a 30-year retrospective exhibition on the 228 Incident held last year at the National History Museum in Taipei, there was a video segment that contained an interview with Lau. The interviewer asked Lau why, as a Mainlander, he lent support to the 228 movement.
Lau replied: “Once you understand the history of the 228 Incident, it is impossible not to feel sympathy for Taiwanese.”
If even Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) contributions to China can be criticized as being 10 percent good and 90 percent bad [former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping introduced the official line that Mao was “70 percent right and 30 percent wrong”], then in today’s democratic Taiwan, we should no longer pursue personality cults.
We should be even stronger in our insistence on accurately portraying Chiang Kai-shek’s (蔣介石) contributions and mistakes.
This is not a question of whether we should purge all aspects of Chiang or engage in all-out desinicization. It is about the public having the confidence to begin confronting historical truths — a matter of awakening rather than a political matter of purging all references to Chiang and desinicization.
Following South Africa’s transition to democracy, justice Albie Sachs was appointed to the Constitutional Court by then-South African president Nelson Mandela in 1994.
Sachs famously said that one country cannot have two histories and cultures.
If Taiwan is to pursue a path of reconciliation, it needs to find a way to construct a common foundation for coexistence out of two diametrically opposed historical perspectives. We need to find a way forward through the tangled web of disagreement and dissenting views.
Today Taiwan stands for democracy, liberty, the rule of law and human rights. That is a considerable achievement. We should treasure it as one.
Lin Jui-hsia is director of the Taoshan Humanity and Arts Institute in Chiayi County.
Translated by Edward Jones
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
The military is conducting its annual Han Kuang exercises in phases. The minister of national defense recently said that this year’s scenarios would simulate defending the nation against possible actions the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) might take in an invasion of Taiwan, making the threat of a speculated Chinese invasion in 2027 a heated agenda item again. That year, also referred to as the “Davidson window,” is named after then-US Indo-Pacific Command Admiral Philip Davidson, who in 2021 warned that Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) had instructed the PLA to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027. Xi in 2017