In US President George W. Bush's State of the Union address last month, he said that the continuing push for democracy remains the nation's key overseas mission.
Yet a recent suggestion by President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) that the time has come to seriously consider scrapping the National Unification Council and the guidelines for national unification upset the US Department of State, which believes that Chen's plans may result in a change of the cross-strait status quo.
Suspicions have also been raised by several media outlets in Taiwan, which have been eager to point out that the guidelines are the foundation on which cross-strait relations are built and that they therefore they must not be abolished arbitrarily.
But if we take a closer look at the guidelines, whose historical implications have been regarded as sacred by Taiwan's opposition parties, Chinese authorities and some US politicians, we see that they are in fact not sacred at all.
The guidelines were enacted in 1991, and the main force behind them, former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝), was elected in 1990 by the first National Assembly.
Although the first National Assembly -- which didn't face elections for more than 40 years -- had a legal foundation, it lost all legitimacy amid vigorous calls for new elections to be held.
As a result, the legitimacy of a president elected only by the assembly was in doubt. The fact that the guidelines were hammered out by the Presidential Office without consulting the public highlights their expedient nature.
The guidelines removed the restrictions of former president Chiang Ching-kuo's (蔣經國) "three noes" policy -- "no contact, no compromise, and no negotiation" with the Chinese Communists.
This played an important role in helping to kick-start landmark talks between the two sides of the Taiwan Strait in the early 1990s.
But since the guidelines were implemented without first gaining public consent, however, their legitimacy was clearly questionable. After Lee became the first popularly elected president in 1996, the guidelines were shelved.
The guidelines set out short-, mid- and long-term goals for achieving the unification of Taiwan and China, but from the perspective of legal theory, they are only a policy statement or a basis for short-term administrative expediency. In the absence of public consent, the guidelines should not be used to plan Taiwan's cross-strait policies.
Strangely, the US government does not hesitate to send soldiers to Iraq, but when faced with the thorny cross-strait situation, it ignores the guidelines' undemocratic character.
The US tolerates China's "Anti-Secession" Law, which amounts to a unilateral change to the cross-strait status quo, but it does not support the abrogation of a policy statement which is not even a law.
When a great global power, which has declared that it will defend democracy unnecessarily criticizes democratic Taiwan in this way, its double standards are laid bare for all to see.
The opposition parties' worship of the guidelines -- which have not been approved by any elected institution or been given any other form of authorization by the public -- ignores the damage the guidelines inflict on Taiwan's democracy. They continue to backpedal by standing on the opposite side of democracy.
Li To-tzu has a master's degree from the Graduate Institute of National Development at National Taiwan University.
Translated by Lin Ya-ti
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS