Editorial: Chen's loss would be China's win

James Soong's (宋楚瑜) remarks last week that he could secure Taiwan's participation in the World Health Organization within two years after taking office reminds us that it is now less than a year until that accession -- so unbearably bitter for anyone with respect for Taiwan's hard-won liberties -- might come about. Of course Soong will get Taiwan into the WHO -- as a province of China. His aim is after all to achieve a speedy reunification which will be good for him, good for the communists and very far from good for the people of Taiwan. But Soong doesn't really care about Taiwan, rather he seeks a place in the greater Chinese pantheon of heros, the "Great Reunifier." The question is: How can he be stopped?

The short answer to this is by winning the election and right away we are plunged into gloom. How can one expect this government to win? Just looking at the bizarre policy flip-flops in the last two weeks alone, the announcement of a deferred tax-filing deadline because of SARS which was almost immediately withdrawn except for some very limited cases and the mess over the joint-college exam dates and format and it is easy to get the impression that the government is simply falling apart, the left hand doesn't know and doesn't even think to ask what the right hand is doing anymore. Its a kind of systemic failure that is all but unknown in Taiwan's limited term of democratic rule but is familiar in more entrenched democracies -- British readers will be reminded of the John Major government in the mid-1990s, French readers of the Fourth Republic, Italians of almost all their governments since 1945. But those Europeans are lucky in one way: a bad government, even several bad governments, does not mean the end of their country. That's a luxury Taiwan does not have.

What to do? Few have any idea. "The best lack all conviction/ while the worst are full of passionate intensity." Among liberal leaning pro-Taiwan independence supporters, defeatism has all but triumphed. People who have devoted themselves to Taiwan's democracy movement for decades are now seriously talking about which foreign country they should move to after the blue camp triumphs. Taiwan's liberal bourgeoisie are a sophisticated bunch, often as much at home in any western capital as they are in Taipei. And that might be their weakness. So much easier to move to Los Angeles, Vancouver, Sydney, sip white wine in the cool of the evening shaking their heads over the folly of one's compatriots than to stay and fight and maybe lose everything, let down by a population more interested in its stock portfolio than in maintaining its country's freedom. So the green camp is directionless and concentrating more on individual survival strategies while the blue camp conspires with their allies in Beijing to divide up the spoils as Taiwan falls into their grasp.

If this is a scenario that scares, well, it should. Next year's presidential election might well be the last, if the wrong side wins. And the DPP is such a shambles that such a win is very likely. Anyone who doesn't take this seriously simply isn't in tune with reality.

What is to be done? It seems that Taiwan's democratic system cannot protect itself from those who can use the system to destroy it. Perhaps this is a problem systemic to democracy, that it cannot protect itself from those who seek its subversion through the democratic process itself. Weimar Germany is history's most famous example of this. But if democracy itself cannot prevent the destruction of an independent Taiwan, should we shrug and start looking for property in San Francisco, or think how we might have to step outside the democratic system in order to save it. And how might that be done?