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Editorial: Soong loses to Chinese academic

James Soong (宋楚瑜), in a head-to-head with Yan Xuetong (閹學通) of the Chinese Institute for Contemporary International Relations, landed a few punches yesterday on CNN. This is puzzling because you might think that it would be easy to explain why Taiwanese don't want to reunify with a regime that runs over its students with tanks, jails people for performing qigong calisthenics and starves orphans to death.

Instead, Soong first made the mistake of being anti-communist, allowing his opponent to point out that China's "one country, two systems" offer allows Taiwan not to be communist. He also let his opponent trap him in an apparent admission that the Taiwan-China issue was an internal affair, whereas Taiwan needs internationalization of the issue, in fact, to claim the rights of the Taiwanese under the UN charter to determine their own future.

Soong only scored on the issue of China's military threat. Even then, when Yan said that China was not against the people of Taiwan but against the small number of foreign agents and Taiwanese separatists working to split China, Soong should have called the man a fool who didn't have a clue what he was talking about. This would have been true, and robustness towards Beijing apologists usually goes down well with a Taiwanese electorate. But then again, part of Soong's problem is that his core support is not Taiwanese.

Yet what really puzzled us was how Soong, who for many years was the defender of the indefensible in his days as chief spokesman for the then-murderous KMT, appeared to have his hands tied in his every response to Yan's statements. This might have been partly the result of knowing that his performance would be watched and judged in Taiwan. But it should also be remembered that Soong did not leave the KMT because he disagreed with it, but because he couldn't run it himself. Soong has no quarrel with KMT orthodoxy -- unlike, we suspect, President Lee Teng-hui (李登輝); his estrangement from the party is driven by differences in personality, not ideology.

It is hard, therefore, not to see Soong's weakness in debate as part of the KMT's ideological weakness as a whole. We have encountered this recently in the distressing performance of Taiwan's representative to the US, Stephen Chen (陳錫蕃), bad-mouthing President Lee's "state-to-state" policy -- a policy he is meant to be following. We saw it in spades earlier this year as the Cabinet, in a fit of collective cold feet, backed away from the serious implications of the same policy announcement.

The problem is that what Taiwan really needs tallies hardly at all with what the KMT -- the Chinese Nationalist party -- claims is its duty to provide. It is supposed to be committed to one goal (greater China, the three principles of the people, etc.) while it is plain that it should be working toward another (internationally recognized self-determination for the people of Taiwan). The fact that it can't maintain its policy of lip service to the former while pursuing the latter is mostly because people less capable of double-think than President Lee tend to take the former too seriously.

What the KMT needs, for its sake and Taiwan's, is to lose office. Only then can it decide what it stands for. Only then can it close the gap between what it says and what it does, into which so much of the credibility that Taiwan should have earned from the last decade of reforms has fallen and been lost.
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