The Chinese Communist Party's 16th National Congress is underway in Beijing with important decisions on China's leadership being made over the course of the next five days. However, looking at the content of the report Chinese President Jiang Zemin (
Chinese officials recently launched a rhetorical offensive to push for direct links, sparking expectations that Jiang's report to the congress would break new ground -- that Beijing would show some flexibility. Such expectations have been dashed. Jiang said nothing new about Taiwan. Since he will continue to call the shots for the foreseeable future his report will dictate Beijing's policies toward Taiwan for the next two or three years.
Jiang's policies toward Taiwan have been a failure because he has never been able to understand public opinion in this country. His eight-point policy on Taiwan remains just a piece of paper.
Taiwan is very different from Hong Kong or Macau. The ROC is an independent sovereignty established in 1912. It did not disappear after the PRC's establishment, but instead has continued to enjoy sovereignty over its own territory and population. Therefore any discussions between Taipei and Beijing must be at the level of two independent states, not between a central government and a "renegade province." China wants cross-strait relations to be conducted under the premise of its "one China" principle. It wants Taiwan to give up its self-esteem and status and accept the "one country, two systems" scheme. If the leadership in Beijing was younger, one might be tempted to ask what it had been smoking.
Even talk between a man and a woman about marriage has to be an act of free will. One side can extend a proposition and try to make the other side happy. However, if your potential partner threatens to blow your brains out with a gun if you don't marry them, it is not exactly what one would consider a friendly offer. But this is what China's Taiwan policy is like.
The unification of two countries is a marriage of thousands of families. State leaders need to consider the optimum welfare of all of them. Despite his emphasis on peaceful unification, Jiang has also vowed not to renounce the use of force, warning Taiwan that it cannot delay unification indefinitely. No parent can ever accept such a belligerent marriage proposition, much less a state leader.
A normal relationship between a man and a woman should begin from friendship and then proceed toward marriage, not the other way around. Beijing's Taiwan policy is to force Taipei to recognize "one China" before any negotiation can begin -- which is equivalent to forcing a marriage before the two sides have become friends. This is diametrically opposite to the normal procedure, where people interact on an equal basis before they discuss marriage.
Cross-strait relations reached an impasse more than 10 years ago because Chinese leaders of Jiang's generation were unable to overcome their blind spots. Hopefully the next generation of leaders will see that equality and mutual benefit should be the true nature of cross-strait relations. Hopefully they will remove the unnecessary ballistic missiles deployed against Taiwan and try to win acceptance from the people of Taiwan through a normal relationship.
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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