There was a time not so long ago when Taiwan’s government could be counted on to support oppressed minorities and dissidents in China, a time when Taipei would speak in their name and request that their rights be respected.
Doing so came at a cost, as it could sour already poor relations with Beijing, but at least Taipei could stand by its principles and be called a bastion of democracy in the region.
A mere month has elapsed and already that image is being threatened. Fearing that rattling the cage would complicate ongoing cross-strait negotiations, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) avoided referring to the Tiananmen Square Massacre or calling for the release of protesters from that era in his June 4 speech — a sad departure from previous years. The rest of his government has fared no better.
Since then, reports have emerged that a handful of Chinese activists have been arrested for scratching beneath the surface in the quake-hit areas and exposing circumstances that Beijing would prefer stay unknown. Huang Qi (黃琦) was detained for seeking to provide assistance to families who lost children in the catastrophe, writers Huang Xiaomin (黃曉敏) and Zhang Qi (張起) were detained on May 16 for seeking to join relief efforts, while Zeng Hongling (曾宏玲), a retired worker who published several accounts of his visits to quake-hit areas, was detained on June 9 on suspicion of “illegally providing information overseas.”
Then, with the Olympic torch heading for Xinjiang, reports revealed that thousands of Uighur Muslims in the region had been “preventively” rounded up, passports had been seized and a number of people forced into “political education” on “protecting” the Olympics — preparations for the Games that are sure not to appear in any International Olympic Committee manual.
Add to this the continuing limits on foreign reporters in China and daily acts of repression in general, and we see that despite the Games — and despite the Sichuan earthquake — Chinese President Hu Jintao’s (胡錦濤) grip on political freedoms remains as tight as ever. In other words, China hasn’t changed.
But there is a real chance that Taiwan is changing, too, and not for the better.
Its new envoys now fail to speak against injustice. Worse, as Taiwanese negotiators are feted in restaurants and palaces in Beijing, they could become complicit in the crimes that are perpetrated against China’s minorities and dissidents. This would make Taiwan no better than other countries that, for their own reasons, choose to look the other way when Beijing fails to meet the most basic standards of responsible and competent government.
Taiwanese, recognized the world over for achievements in democratization, should not be willing to sacrifice this reputation so that ideologically driven officials can cross the Strait and compromise standards of decency and accountable governance.
To sully Taiwan’s accomplishments over a distant promise of better political relations with Beijing — assuming Beijing would keep any of its promises, which is naive — is an act of shamelessness that will become increasingly difficult to rationalize when the the consequences of selective cross-strait opening become clear to the average voter.
Ideas matter. They especially matter in world affairs. And in communist countries, it is communist ideas, not supreme leaders’ personality traits, that matter most. That is the reality in the People’s Republic of China. All Chinese communist leaders — from Mao Zedong (毛澤東) through Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), from Jiang Zemin (江澤民) and Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) through to Xi Jinping (習近平) — have always held two key ideas to be sacred and self-evident: first, that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is infallible, and second, that the Marxist-Leninist socialist system of governance is superior to every alternative. The ideological consistency by all CCP leaders,
The US on Friday hosted the second Global COVID-19 Summit, with at least 98 countries, including Taiwan, and regional alliances such as the G7, the G20, the African Union and the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) attending. Washington is also leading a proposal to revise one of the most important documents in global health security — the International Health Regulations (IHR) — which are to be discussed during the 75th World Health Assembly (WHA) that starts on Sunday. These two actions highlight the US’ strategic move to dominate the global health agenda and return to the core of governance, with the WHA
In the past 30 years, globalization has given way to an international division of labor, with developing countries focusing on export manufacturing, while developed countries in Europe and the US concentrate on internationalizing service industries to drive economic growth. The competitive advantages of these countries can readily be seen in the global financial market. For example, Taiwan has attracted a lot of global interest with its technology industry. The US is the home of leading digital service companies, such as Meta Platforms (Facebook), Alphabet (Google) and Microsoft. The country holds a virtual oligopoly of the global market for consumer digital
Former vice president Annette Lu (呂秀蓮) on Saturday expounded on her concept of replacing “unification” with China with “integration.” Lu does not she think the idea would be welcomed in its current form; rather, she wants to elicit discussion on a third way to break the current unification/independence impasse, especially given heightened concerns over China attacking Taiwan in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. She has apparently formulated her ideas around the number “three.” First, she envisions cross-strait relations developing in three stages: having Beijing lay to rest the idea of unification of “one China” (一個中國); next replacing this with
RSS