The basis for the "Anti-Secession" Law is spelled out in the first sentence of Article 3: "The Taiwan question is one that is left over from China's civil war of the 1940s."
The "Taiwan question" exists only because China's continuing claims on Taiwan culminated in enactment of the law.
To avoid falling into a "chicken and egg, which came first?" argument, let's clarify the matter and change the wording. Article 3 would then read: "China has a claim on Taiwan based on China's civil war of the 1940s."
The problem is that this claim is at least nine years and three presidential elections too late.
In 1996, Taiwanese elected their own government for the first time. Taiwan belonged to Taiwanese people from that point forward.
China's claim seemed to have some legitimacy during the Chinese Nationalist Party's (KMT) iron-fisted rule. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the victor of the Chinese civil war, demanded territory held by the KMT, the loser. Under these circumstances, the Anti-Secession Law could have been a legitimate ultimatum.
But the KMT doesn't "hold" Taiwan any more -- even if a KMT member becomes the president. Today, Taiwan and China are indeed two separate countries.
In basing the law on historical intrigue, Beijing seems to be following a script for a Chinese version of Back to the Future.
The first scene saw the KMT dispatch a delegation to Beijing to patch up its differences with the CCP.
That was meant to smooth the way for KMT Chairman Lien Chan (連戰), one of the would-be main characters, to appear in the next scene.
In the second scene, Beijing treats Lien's visit as the surrender of the KMT to the CCP and proceeds to demand that Lien hand over Taiwan.
All signs point to Lien playing along at least partially with the script by conveniently failing to point out that Taiwan in 2005 is a democracy and that the KMT doesn't own it any more.
Instead, Lien tells Beijing's leaders that the government of President Chen Shui-bian (
The obvious implication is that he himself should be the one occupying the presidency and that Beijing is dealing with the right person if China wishes to get Taiwan.
However, at the moment the script diverges from reality, the claim as well as the basis of the Anti-Secession Law become nothing more than fantasy.
Only Lien's penchant for mischief in collaborating with Beijing is perpetuating the fantasy.
Still, Lien's visit to Beijing could paradoxically serve as closure of "China's civil war of the 1940s" and unwittingly help to expose the delusional nature of any further claims by China on Taiwan.
Huang Jei-hsuan
California
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) sits down with US President Donald Trump in Beijing on Thursday next week, Xi is unlikely to demand a dramatic public betrayal of Taiwan. He does not need to. Beijing’s preferred victory is smaller, quieter and in some ways far more dangerous: a subtle shift in American wording that appears technical, but carries major strategic meaning. The ask is simple: replace the longstanding US formulation that Washington “does not support Taiwan independence” with a harder one — that Washington “opposes” Taiwan independence. One word changes; a deterrence structure built over decades begins to shift.
Taipei is facing a severe rat infestation, and the city government is reportedly considering large-scale use of rodenticides as its primary control measure. However, this move could trigger an ecological disaster, including mass deaths of birds of prey. In the past, black kites, relatives of eagles, took more than three decades to return to the skies above the Taipei Basin. Taiwan’s black kite population was nearly wiped out by the combined effects of habitat destruction, pesticides and rodenticides. By 1992, fewer than 200 black kites remained on the island. Fortunately, thanks to more than 30 years of collective effort to preserve their remaining
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
RSS