The point of entering government and politics is to establish a political domain. Achieving the goal of political office involves more than just courting votes — one must follow mainstream public opinion, which means altering one’s political positions when necessary.
However, political movements are different. They have fixed political positions and rarely align entirely with mainstream public opinion. This is what makes political movements essential.
The Republic of China (ROC) that occupied Taiwan after World War II was a foreign autocratic regime. Under this regime, Taiwanese were politically discriminated against because of where they were born. This gave rise to the democratization movement.
However, confronting a foreign power gave rise to a different movement — the Taiwanese independence movement.
However, the fact that both of these movements — Taiwanese independence and Taiwanese civil rights — were promoted by the same constituency, gave rise to the mistaken belief that they are one and the same.
The democratization movement aimed for citizens to become the masters of their destiny and form their government through a democratic process.
The Taiwanese independence movement hoped to expel the foreign presence of the ROC government.
Both of these are challenging tasks. Writer and vocal critic of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Henry Liu (劉宜良) was assassinated in a house fire in the US in 1984. As a result, his family could no longer carry on the movement.
Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) then brought Taiwan from a dictatorship to a democracy.
In the 1990s, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) began participating in the ROC government system, forming the first DPP government in 2000.
The party transformed from a political movement into an organization seeking to become a party of government, doing so by upholding the ROC and falling in line with public opinion.
The Taiwanese independence movement remains a political movement, but its goal has shifted from expelling the ROC to advocating for constitutional reform and renaming the country.
The DPP and the Taiwanese independence movement have taken different paths. As both sides have gone their separate ways, no one can label the DPP as being pro-independence.
However, some members of the Taiwanese independence movement have overly tenacious personalities with a talent for finding resources, similar to cockroaches.
They constantly fly the banner of Taiwanese independence and latch onto the DPP, making it difficult for outsiders to differentiate between the two. As a result, the DPP has been stained by the Taiwanese independence movement, leading the Chinese Communist Party to accuse the ROC and the DPP of being pro-independence.
Those pro-independence cockroaches have tainted Taiwan’s political environment.
Chen Mao-hsiung is a retired National Sun Yat-sen University professor and chairman of the Society for the Promotion of Taiwanese Security.
Translated by Kyra Gustavsen
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