Democratic sabotage
The blue and white camps have come together five times to block the Executive Yuan’s proposed budgets. Together with legislation to expand the powers of their own branch of government, this deliberate dysfunction is a long-term strategy to chip away at our democratic system. It is reminiscent of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s classic quote: “They lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying, but they keep lying anyway.”
The blue and white camps are taking advantage of democratic loopholes, endlessly blocking budgets from passing, leading to the government’s inability to function normally. They are chipping away at the development of our national defense, basic infrastructure and resources for the general welfare. This not only delays progress, but could also provide opportunities for China to infiltrate our government.
Public awareness helps to protect our democracy. The 2014 Sunflower movement and the 1990 Wild Lily student movement were successful wake-up calls for public consciousness. They were aimed not only at blocking harmful policies, but also promoting Taiwan’s democratic reform. If civil society is unable to respond in time, the blue-white coalition’s strategy could leave the door wide open for outside forces to intervene.
China’s influence is evident in the blue and white camps’ activities to block budget increases. This would lead to shortfalls in resources for national security and social welfare, threatening our security and stability. On the international stage, it could also give rise to doubts about our internal governance, further impacting the outside world’s faith in Taiwan.
The two camps’ concerted manipulations have, since their inception, been preordained as a “feast of falsehoods.” This is not mere political theater. These are highly coordinated movements based on deception that are meant to cut away at our lines of defense and throw the public mood into disarray. No doubt, they know exactly what kind of consequences could result from their actions, yet they continue to ignore reality and maintain their manipulation of our political system. They also believe that they can keep up these falsehoods and false equivalences without the public fighting back.
We cannot just sit by and wait while everything crumbles around us. We must find the courage to stand up and use social movements to break through the fake visages. This does not just mean mobilizing for future votes, nor is this only for the sake of the current government. It is to protect our homeland and to guard our flame of democracy from being extinguished.
These politicians are afraid of civic power. Their hope is for the public to grow idle and indolent, or become exhausted by all of their games and shenanigans. Taiwanese have never easily bowed down to authoritarians. The blue-white camp cannot keep up their charades forever. The jig has to end sometime. We can use movements and marches to strike back, and use the truth to sweep away the miasma and fog of their falsehoods, thereby keeping us and our nation’s future safe.
Shih Li
Tainan
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
I have heard people equate the government’s stance on resisting forced unification with China or the conditional reinstatement of the military court system with the rise of the Nazis before World War II. The comparison is absurd. There is no meaningful parallel between the government and Nazi Germany, nor does such a mindset exist within the general public in Taiwan. It is important to remember that the German public bore some responsibility for the horrors of the Holocaust. Post-World War II Germany’s transitional justice efforts were rooted in a national reckoning and introspection. Many Jews were sent to concentration camps not