The friendship visit by US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi was greatly appreciated by Taiwanese and government officials alike. It was followed by the visits of hostile warplanes, missiles, drones and submarines from China, which were very much unwelcome by locals.
It seems that China’s ruling elites believe that the intimidation of war, the tyranny of dominance and the threat of destruction can win the hearts and minds of Taiwanese. Their illogical and far-fetched concept is based on, according to Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Hua Chunying (華春瑩), the presence of 38 Shandong dumpling restaurants and 67 Shanxi noodle restaurants in Taiwan, which apparently demonstrate the public’s affection for China.
Sarcastically, former US Department of State spokesperson Morgan Ortagus countered that China, with its thousands of KFC restaurants, “has always been part of Kentucky.”
Meanwhile, China’s ambassadors to Australia and France have advocated the “re-education of Taiwanese” — a tacit admission that Xinjiang’s internment camps are used to re-educate Uighurs and other Muslims — showing that Chinese diplomates are no better than propagandists who lack an understanding of democracy and human rights.
Beyond the incompetence of officials who were neither scrutinized nor chosen by the people, there are more shortcomings in an autocratic government that suppresses freedom and deprives people of creativity. Without media freedoms, it is difficult to identify, report and punish corruption. This makes a nation impossible to govern in the long run. Worse, the purge of corruption has always been a tool to consolidate power during regime change, only to add more chaos to a treacherous transfer of power.
Without institutional integrity and independence, justice and social fairness cannot be guaranteed. The lack of check and balance easily lead to fatalities such as those during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns — crimes such as police cooperating with gangs, secret societies and “Chinese mafia,” bribery of national and local government officials and insecure bank loans to powerful elites.
Without freedom in enterprise, a planned economy by the central government could enable a society to thrive in a relatively underdeveloped economy. However, it lacks the natural selection process through economic evolution to prevent mistakes from piling up. That means non-performing financial assets will grow, efficiency will be jeopardized and productivity will fall, contributing to a loss in competitive edge. These were clearly revealed in the Soviet Union before its collapse, and evidently emerging in China.
What followed the planned economy can be difficult, if not impossible, for a centralized government to tackle, since it intrinsically lacks the innovation to compete in the marketplace. In a free economy of capitalism, the natural selection of strong enterprise and the “creative destruction” of inferior companies constantly improves efficiency, productivity, quality and even labor relations. While capitalism tends to create wealth disparity, a planned economy has a far worse record of wealth creation. Furthermore, capitalism, with the right social agenda, can in principle reduce wealth inequality, although that remains to be worked out.
China is now dominated by the culture of Mao Zedong (毛澤東): a mix of communism, autocracy, party and worse. The burst of its housing bubble, a run on its banks, unprofitable high-speed rail systems, the debt burden its Belt and Road Initiative and high unemployment, especially among the young people, are clear signs that the days of the Chinese Communist Party are numbered.
James J. Y. Hsu is a retired physics professor.
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 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,
“I compare the Communist Party to my mother,” sings a student at a boarding school in a Tibetan region of China’s Qinghai province. “If faith has a color,” others at a different school sing, “it would surely be Chinese red.” In a major story for the New York Times this month, Chris Buckley wrote about the forced placement of hundreds of thousands of Tibetan children in boarding schools, where many suffer physical and psychological abuse. Separating these children from their families, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) aims to substitute itself for their parents and for their religion. Buckley’s reporting is
Last week, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), together holding more than half of the legislative seats, cut about NT$94 billion (US$2.85 billion) from the yearly budget. The cuts include 60 percent of the government’s advertising budget, 10 percent of administrative expenses, 3 percent of the military budget, and 60 percent of the international travel, overseas education and training allowances. In addition, the two parties have proposed freezing the budgets of many ministries and departments, including NT$1.8 billion from the Ministry of National Defense’s Indigenous Defense Submarine program — 90 percent of the program’s proposed