Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Ma Ying-jeou (
The first mistake was to believe that Wang was resentful following his losses to Ma in the KMT chairmanship election and the presidential primary. The main reason, however, is probably that Vice President Annette Lu's (
Some people have suggested that if Wang were to become vice president, he should be put in charge of interior affairs. These people have said all that would be needed for this to happen would be the president's authorization. But Taiwan does not have a full presidential system. The premier sits between the president and the Cabinet, and the president is criticized if he interferes with Cabinet affairs. Imagine the criticism if a vice president were to get involved in Cabinet interests. Wang is smart enough to understand this.
US President George W. Bush's delegation of defense and diplomatic affairs to Vice President Dick Cheney was based on long-term trust. Is there any such long-term trust between Ma and Wang?
Some may think that the vice presidency would be a promotion and offer Wang an opportunity, so they have pushed Wang to team up with Ma. This might be favorable to the KMT's presidential campaign and to the two men themselves, but it does not take Wang's wishes into consideration.
The KMT's second mistake was to believe the ethnic issue is crucial to Ma's winning the presidency. Both Ma and Wang appear to believe this. In the authoritarian era, the KMT's ethnic discrimination did cause social conflict, but following Taiwan's democratization over the past 15 years, the focus of social conflict has shifted from ethnicity to the unification issue, although the ethnic issue still requires cautious handling.
It is because the ethnic issue is no longer the major problem that Ma defeated Wang in the speaker's hometown of Kaohsiung in the KMT's chairmanship election.
Today, support for independence has risen to 55 percent, while support for unification has fallen to 30 percent. The trend implies that pro-independence sentiment will continue to grow at the expense of support for unification. Although the KMT needs to take care of the ethnic issue internally, the major external issue is its stance on the unification issue.
Obviously, some inside the KMT have discovered this. These people have proposed that Taiwan, rather than China, be made the party's priority and that the call for unification in the party charter be rephrased. Party diehards, however, know that "unification" remains their biggest bargaining chip for internal power and they have tried to shift the focus back from unification to ethnicity. By showing their respect for Wang, they are trying to exchange concessions on the ethnic issue for more room on the unification issue.
The hype for a Ma-Wang ticket was built on misjudgments of both Wang and the political situation. It is not worth spending more time on.
What does deserve our attention is that once the KMT amends its party charter, Taiwan's political situation will be profoundly changed.
Whether this change will be completed by the KMT's National Assembly on June 24 is uncertain, but the pan-green camp must not take the situation lightly but rather face it head on.
Lin Cho-shui is a former Democratic Progressive Party legislator.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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