President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) wiped out almost 10 years of progress made under former presidents Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) and Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) in one fell swoop last week when he told a Mexican newspaper that the relationship between Taiwan and China “is a special one, but not [one] between two countries.”
By turning back the clock to before Lee’s 1999 “state-to-state relations” declaration, Ma’s statement was a marked departure from his pre-election pledges to defend Taiwan’s sovereignty, a fact the Presidential Office was quick to “clarify.”
In the same interview, Ma also referred once again to the fictitious “1992 consensus,” saying that both sides of the Taiwan Strait had agreed to accept the “one China, different interpretations” model supposedly enshrined in this fabricated agreement.
He was wrong. At no time has Beijing said it subscribes to the so-called “consensus” and China’s outright rejection of the Ma government’s self-
deprecating UN bid two weeks ago is clear proof that Beijing will brook no deviation from its definition of the “one China” policy.
But while the rest of the world recognizes rejection when they hear it, the Presidential Office persists in trying to disguise a failure as a success, dismissing Beijing’s sharp rebuff as an “isolated incident.”
George Orwell could have been talking about the Ma government when, in his influential 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language,” he wrote “political speech [is] largely the defense of the indefensible and consists largely of ... sheer cloudy vagueness.”
The Ma administration has purposely played word games with national sovereignty in the belief that it can earn mutual goodwill from China. As Ma’s campaign promises were predicated on Beijing’s willingness to throw Taiwan a few crumbs from its economic banquet, the government has had no choice. Yet 100 days on, Ma has nothing to show for his government’s ingratiating behavior.
Although China may not be playing Ma’s game, “progress” on another front — unraveling the Taiwan consciousness that has flourished over the last decade or so — seems to be gathering momentum.
Ma may have promised to follow his “three noes” — no unification, no independence and no use of force — during his presidency, but his policies risk making Taiwan so reliant on its giant neighbor that the nation could eventually have no choice but to strike up some kind of union. No amount of flowery language can obscure the risks involved in the government’s actions.
In his essay, Orwell wrote: “When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”
Looking back, despite all Ma’s patriotic obfuscation in the lead up to election day, it should have been quite clear to anyone with a basic knowledge of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) that Ma and his party consider Taiwan a part of China, albeit the Republic of China and not the People’s Republic of China.
The cuttlefish may have spurted out enough ink to confuse people ahead of the presidential election in March, but with everything going wrong on the policy front, it will take quite a reserve of ink to last another three-and-a-half years.
China has not been a top-tier issue for much of the second Trump administration. Instead, Trump has focused considerable energy on Ukraine, Israel, Iran, and defending America’s borders. At home, Trump has been busy passing an overhaul to America’s tax system, deporting unlawful immigrants, and targeting his political enemies. More recently, he has been consumed by the fallout of a political scandal involving his past relationship with a disgraced sex offender. When the administration has focused on China, there has not been a consistent throughline in its approach or its public statements. This lack of overarching narrative likely reflects a combination
Behind the gloating, the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) must be letting out a big sigh of relief. Its powerful party machine saved the day, but it took that much effort just to survive a challenge mounted by a humble group of active citizens, and in areas where the KMT is historically strong. On the other hand, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) must now realize how toxic a brand it has become to many voters. The campaigners’ amateurism is what made them feel valid and authentic, but when the DPP belatedly inserted itself into the campaign, it did more harm than good. The
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