At a campaign event on Sunday, New Taipei City Mayor Hou You-yi (侯友宜), the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) presidential candidate, said that January’s elections would be “a choice between peace and war.”
Hou echoed comments in January by former president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) with rhetoric that former CIA station chief in Asia David Sauer had said would be used by China in its cognitive warfare efforts against Taiwan.
It is as if Hou, who is supposed to be representing the interests of Taiwanese, is under the critically incorrect assumption that people should only vote for a candidate if the nation’s enemies would approve. What country could be considered democratic if its people were coerced into voting for a candidate out of fear of inciting wrath overseas?
If anything, Taiwanese should vote for whichever candidate Beijing dislikes, given that it is bent on destroying Taiwan’s freedoms and obstructing its participation in the global society.
During Taiwan’s long Martial Law period, countless people were imprisoned, tortured, dehumanized or executed. The freedoms that Taiwanese enjoy today — ranked the greatest among Asian countries by the Economist Intelligence Unit — have been hard-won.
It would be foolhardy for Taiwanese to throw away those freedoms by capitulating to Beijing and ceding Taiwan’s sovereignty in favor of becoming a special administrative region — which is the only option Beijing would offer in exchange for a peace agreement.
The innumerable arrests in Hong Kong since the imposition of the territory’s National Security Law demonstrate what Taiwanese would face for even vaguely expressing a dissenting opinion under the so-called “one country, two systems” framework.
Facing such a stark future, Taiwanese would surely fight to keep their democracy and freedom.
Some candidates for next year’s presidential election have argued that Taiwan would be the “next Ukraine” if people voted in a way unfavorable to Beijing. This is a poor comparison for many reasons, including dissimilar geographical, economical and sociopolitical factors between the two countries and their respective enemies.
However, if Ukraine is to be invoked, it should be as an inspiration and a model. Ukrainians have fought hard for their country, and have so far turned what Moscow thought would be a quick, one-week campaign to annex Ukraine into a protracted conflict lasting more than one-and-a-half years, and in which Russia has sustained heavy military and economic losses.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of Ukrainian territory remains firmly under the administration of Kyiv.
Instead of aiding Beijing’s cognitive warfare campaign against Taiwan and attempting to scare Taiwanese, candidates should be encouraging people to unite and stand up for their democracy.
What does it say about a potential leader of the nation if they tell people to give up before the battle for sovereignty even begins?
While speaking at his own campaign event on Sunday, Vice President William Lai (賴清德), the Democratic Progressive Party’s candidate, said that the threat of war with China is not just a problem that Taiwan faces on its own, but rather is “a problem that the world has to deal with.”
A military conflict in the Taiwan Strait would affect the distribution of top-end computer chips that are crucially important to the global economy, and would disrupt shipping along one of the world’s most important sea corridors. War would be ruinous for the world’s economies, including China’s. That is also why, despite its saber-rattling, China is highly unlikely to attempt an overt annexation of Taiwan.
Taiwanese are free to vote as they wish, and candidates who resort to fearmongering and coercive campaign speeches should be rebuked.
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