This week has seen a flurry of debate and controversy over the nation's history and its symbols. Much of this debate is simply obfuscatory. Of course the Cairo Declaration does not formally give the Republic of China (ROC) sovereignty over Taiwan. Only an international treaty can do that and no treaty since 1951 has -- which is the real reason why the status of Taiwan, as far as the US is concerned, (US Secretary of State Colin Powell take note) -- is "still to be determined."
On the other hand, of course the Allies meant to return Taiwan to China. They said so in Cairo and in Potsdam. And the Japanese agreed that this should be so. Only it was never formalized.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) government in 1945 was therefore not the legitimate sovereign government of Taiwan, it was the legitimate occupying power until sovereignty could be determined. The illegality of the KMT government was not in its occupation of Taiwan but in its assumption that it was sovereign and in its execrable behavior when it arrived. The current controversy is intimately bound up with the kind of society that was established by this government, especially after its transfer to Taiwan in 1949.
What was established was a settler colonialism in which the incoming Mainlanders were the privileged colonial overlords and the Hoklo, Hakka and Aborigines routinely discriminated against. For non-Taiwanese to put this in perspective, think of Taiwan as Ireland, and the Mainlanders as the Protestant ascendency. For the argument over Sun Yat-sen (孫中山) this week you can substitute the argument over the "correct" name of the city of Derry.
The colonial ascendency imposed its symbols, its history, even its language upon the people it colonized and this is the heritage that some among the pan-greens now seek to dismantle. Sun, for instance is no more than the father of Taiwan than Oliver Cromwell was of Ireland. He is a totemic figure of the colonial power. The 1911 revolution has as much relevance to Taiwan as does prime minister Winston Churchill's wartime leadership of Britain to the happy denizens of today's Dublin.
So let us put the recent debates into perspective. In the 1990s Taiwan effectively decolonized. Former president Lee Teng-hui's (李登輝) extraordinarily crafty tactics resulted in Taiwan becoming a democracy under majority rule -- although majoritarianism has yet to sufficiently penetrate a number of key areas in society, including the media, the civil service and the education system.
While Lee was in power he was able, through his power in the KMT -- and his ability to co-opt the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and social groups when the KMT was recalcitrant -- to make this a rather quiet revolution. But since the advent of the DPP government in 2000, the old Mainlander ascendency, along with the considerable number of Taiwanese clients they recruited over the years, has panicked. Some intellectuals have thrown in their lot with the Taiwanese, who up to now have been remarkably inclusive for formerly oppressed peoples. But many Mainlanders simply do not want to accept their diminished status. They do not want to compete on an even playing field with the native Taiwanese.
Their leaders, People First Party Chairman James Soong (宋楚瑜) and the Taiwanese collaborationist KMT Chairman Lien Chan (連戰), even flirted, back in March, with overthrowing democracy through a military coup or inviting a Chinese invasion, in order to retain their privileged position; that is, in order to keep Taiwan a colonial society.
One of the sad things about all this is that 50 years of KMT indoctrination has persuaded a significant number of Taiwanese to buy into the ROC myth -- an example of false consciousness or what Franz Fanon called the "captive mind."
We can only hope that the recent controversy has led to some of those captives loosening their chains. After all, what they are being told is that what matters to Taiwan is first and foremost Taiwan. Everything else comes afterwards. What could be simpler than that?
In the first year of his second term, US President Donald Trump continued to shake the foundations of the liberal international order to realize his “America first” policy. However, amid an atmosphere of uncertainty and unpredictability, the Trump administration brought some clarity to its policy toward Taiwan. As expected, bilateral trade emerged as a major priority for the new Trump administration. To secure a favorable trade deal with Taiwan, it adopted a two-pronged strategy: First, Trump accused Taiwan of “stealing” chip business from the US, indicating that if Taipei did not address Washington’s concerns in this strategic sector, it could revisit its Taiwan
The stocks of rare earth companies soared on Monday following news that the Trump administration had taken a 10 percent stake in Oklahoma mining and magnet company USA Rare Earth Inc. Such is the visible benefit enjoyed by the growing number of firms that count Uncle Sam as a shareholder. Yet recent events surrounding perhaps what is the most well-known state-picked champion, Intel Corp, exposed a major unseen cost of the federal government’s unprecedented intervention in private business: the distortion of capital markets that have underpinned US growth and innovation since its founding. Prior to Intel’s Jan. 22 call with analysts
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) challenges and ignores the international rules-based order by violating Taiwanese airspace using a high-flying drone: This incident is a multi-layered challenge, including a lawfare challenge against the First Island Chain, the US, and the world. The People’s Liberation Army (PLA) defines lawfare as “controlling the enemy through the law or using the law to constrain the enemy.” Chen Yu-cheng (陳育正), an associate professor at the Graduate Institute of China Military Affairs Studies, at Taiwan’s Fu Hsing Kang College (National Defense University), argues the PLA uses lawfare to create a precedent and a new de facto legal
International debate on Taiwan is obsessed with “invasion countdowns,” framing the cross-strait crisis as a matter of military timetables and political opportunity. However, the seismic political tremors surrounding Central Military Commission (CMC) vice chairman Zhang Youxia (張又俠) suggested that Washington and Taipei are watching the wrong clock. Beijing is constrained not by a lack of capability, but by an acute fear of regime-threatening military failure. The reported sidelining of Zhang — a combat veteran in a largely unbloodied force and long-time loyalist of Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — followed a year of purges within the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA)
RSS