The legislature's determination to take a more active role in cross-strait affairs is a decidedly mixed blessing. On Tuesday, the Legislative Yuan voted to establish a cross-strait task force, led by speaker Wang Jin-pyng
The DPP legislative caucus has boycotted the task force on the grounds that it constitutes an encroachment into executive authority and is therefore unconstitutional. Nonsense. If the Legislative Yuan can set up a task force on WTO affairs, why can't it set up one on cross-strait affairs? Given that the legislature has to pass laws relating to China policy, not to mention budgets for the various bodies that deal with China, it is just doing its job by trying to increase the depth of understanding of cross-strait affairs among legislators, and trying to extend the limits of its oversight of government policy.
Legislators might even become an important conduit of information between the two sides of the Strait given that their semi-official representative bodies have not had a formal meeting for five years. That legislators can perform a diplomatic task should not be too worrisome to the government. Taiwan has, in fact, used relations between its Legislative Yuan and other countries' legislative bodies to very useful effect. The warm relations Taiwan has with the US Congress and the European parliament have significantly offset the chilly arms-length at which Taiwan is kept by both the US government and the EU.
Nevertheless there are two complicating factors which give cause for unease. The first is, of course, that the new move has little to do with increasing democratic accountability, even less forging links to fellow democrats, and everything to do with undermining the status of the president's inter-party cross-strait task force, headed by Academia Sinica president Lee Yuan-tseh
The New Party and People First Party have never made a secret of their reunificationist stance while, since the departure of former president Lee Teng-hui
What we are faced with is a legislative body dominated by people who seem only too ready to put the idea of a greater reunited China in front of that of the sovereign freedoms of the people of Taiwan. There is surely no extant historical analogy for a country, the majority of whose legislators are fifth columnists for a predatory foreign power. Put another way: The Munich crisis of 1938 was a result of Czechoslovakia refusing to give in to the demands of Nazi Germany. Imagine the Czechs' position if their legislature was, in fact, dominated by pro-Nazi Sudeten Germans. How can we have any faith that such people intend to safeguard Taiwan's national interests?
If opposition legislators resent the implication that they are potentially disloyal, all we can says is stop the junketing to China, stop the schmoozing with the cadres, stop the cosy business deals and the advocacy of Beijing's views. Stand up for Taiwan and the Taiwanese, the people you are supposed to represent. We don't know which is the more strange; that putting Taiwan first should seem so difficult for opposition legislators, or that the Taiwanese are prepared to put up with this. Let us hope this complacency does not prove fatal.
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