Who Taiwanese choose to be the nation’s next president would be vital to the survival of Taiwan’s democracy, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Ressa said yesterday.
The presidential elections in Taiwan, Indonesia and the US will have a critical impact on the survival of democracy around the world, said Ressa, a Filipino-American journalist and cofounder of the Rappler news Web site.
Ressa made the remarks at a democracy forum hosted by the Jakarta Post in the Indonesian capital.
Photo: AFP
When asked to elaborate, Ressa was quoted by Central News Agency (CNA) as saying that Taiwan’s democracy “will fall into the abyss” if its voters follow the global trend of electing incompetent populists into power.
Ressa, who has visited Taiwan twice in the past six months, said that her impression is that Taiwanese seemed to be in a “constant state of readiness,” because they had to be, CNA quoted her as saying.
Beijing’s crackdown on democracy activists in Hong Kong and the implementation of the National Security Law in the territory demonstrate the speed with which democracy and the rule of law can be dismantled, she said, citing the arrest of 50 protesters in Hong Kong on Jan. 6, 2021.
Taiwan’s next leader “will have to be on the front lines and confront China’s enormity,” she said.
Beijing’s claims over territory is not unfamiliar to Filipinos, who face similar treatment with regard to its sovereign waters in the South China Sea, she said, adding that the region has been transformed into the most geopolitically dangerous place on Earth.
Democratic institutions are being undermined by disinformation and hate speech on social media, which use algorithms to encourage the spread of distrust and promote conflict, Ressa said.
“Social media platforms amplify controversial subjects with no regard to their news value or factual accuracy,” CNA quoted her as saying. “Without facts, there is no truth, and trust is impossible without truth.”
Earlier, Ressa told the forum that democracies are in decline globally and 72 percent of the world’s population lives under authoritarian rule, citing a recent study by the Sweden-based Varieties of Democracy Institute.
“If we keep electing authoritarian leaders through democratic elections and if this trend continues, authoritarian leaders will destroy democracy from within,” she said.
A Chinese freighter that allegedly snapped an undersea cable linking Taiwan proper to Penghu County is suspected of being owned by a Chinese state-run company and had docked at the ports of Kaohsiung and Keelung for three months using different names. On Tuesday last week, the Togo-flagged freighter Hong Tai 58 (宏泰58號) and its Chinese crew were detained after the Taipei-Penghu No. 3 submarine cable was severed. When the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) first attempted to detain the ship on grounds of possible sabotage, its crew said the ship’s name was Hong Tai 168, although the Automatic Identification System (AIS)
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