Those who saw the film Sliding Doors will remember that the movie had two stories, the different story lines depending on whether the heroine caught a train or accidentally just missed it. Life, being sequentially linear, usually offers us no chance to find out what would have happened had a different choice been made at a crucial time. Taiwan politics however appears to be doing just that.
A major part of the history of the KMT in the 1990s was the conflict between Lee Teng-hui (
Think again. Chen and Lin are now about to re-enter the party, and in Lin's case not as a despised renegade, now penitent, who ran against his own party in a presidential election, but as a grandee of the party claiming what is rightfully his.
Which is where Sliding Doors come in. For having seen what would happen if Lee trounced his reunificationist enemies, either neutralizing them or pushing them out of the party, we are about to see what would have happened if fate had determined the story go in a different direction, with Lee himself forced out of any active role and his values rather than those of the new KMT Alliance and its sympathizers becoming the "non-mainstream."
Now we see the party beating the reunification drum more strongly than at any time since the days of Chiang Ching-kuo (
While this playing out in real life of a situation most of us only ever saw as counterfactual, a game of "what if" is bizarre, it is also useful, perhaps even necessary. We cannot help but feel that now the KMT has embraced not only the values but also the strategies of the New Party -- in neglecting its constituency in Taiwan in favor of posing as a cross-strait mediator -- it is heading for the same destiny: utter marginalization as a party of only ethnic appeal. This might be wishful thinking on our part, disliking reunificationism as we do. But if reunificationsim is anything other than a cause of crackpots, if it has some kind of political future among the mainstream of Taiwan political opinion, the KMT's participation in elections in the next couple of years is likely to find this out.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past