So Lee Yuan-tseh's (
That's not what was officially said, of course. Rather the group advised the president to deal with cross-strait issues and react to Beijing's "one China" principle in accordance with the Republic of China's Constitution. What piffle! Call yesterday's conclusion what it was -- a cop-out.
The advisory group quite obviously did this simply because it could not reach a consensus on anything meaningful. The tough issues -- the meaning of "one China" and whether Taiwan should ever advocate such a concept -- were intractable, with the group split between reunificationists who see Taiwan as part of China in some way and anti-reunificationists who don't.
The chances of these two finding common ground were always non-existent because there isn't any common ground to find. You either support Taiwan's continued existence as a sovereign entity or you want, sooner or later, to give up that sovereignty to a greater reunited China. So the project was probably doomed from the start.
The result of the deliberation was therefore vapid nonsense. Apparently we are going to deal with the "One China" issue according to the constitution -- according to which "one China" is the ROC and it includes the mainland, while also abiding by "the PRC and the ROC neither mutually represent one another, nor belong to each other." So apparently we can stand on our feet and our heads at the same time.
There is reason, however, to be doubly angry with the outcome of this pitiful result. Not only did the advisory group come up with the lamest, most impractical advice possible, which the president now has in some way to act on -- God knows how -- but, by dodging its own inability to agree on anything substantial, the group performed a signal disservice to Taiwan. Being unable to reach a consensus was a far more intellectually cogent position than making the agreement they did. Better then for the group to split into its factional parts, with each part making its own recommendations. Then both or all of these sets of opinions (there might have be more than two) should have been presented to the president.
Hopefully the president would have the wit to realize that it was not up to him to decide which of these different positions the government should follow -- he would only risk a torrent of criticism about the smallness of his mandate invalidating his right to choose. Probably the KMT would want there to be some kind of decision by the legislature for obvious reasons. But the real decision should have been made by the country via a referendum. The opposition parties could demonstrate their commitment to the people's right to choose by supporting the passage of the necessary legislation -- a lack of support could only be construed as a rejection of democratic principles. Oh, and one thing more would be needed: an agreement to abide by the result of the vote -- something the opposition hasn't shown itself to be too good at. And let this newspaper be the first to say that if it could be shown that a majority of Taiwanese craved unification as ardently as Wu Poh-hsiung (
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