Taiwan-Japan tensions over the Diaoyutai islets and cross-strait negotiations have helped to obscure the tedious controversy over green cards, foreign citizenship and residence that has been impacting on government officials and elected representatives.
This obscuring process is welcome, if only because the silliness of it all has been made more apparent.
For decades now Taiwan’s government — regardless of the party in power — has been trying to sell itself as a potential Asia-Pacific hub for various services or industries. This is a natural direction to take, though the execution has frequently failed to live up to the impressiveness of the sales pitch.
Being a hub for anything requires an understanding of how the rest of the world works, as well as the ability to come to administrative terms with professional mobility and the complexity of global markets.
It is difficult to detect any of these positive elements in the argument over officials who allegedly possess foreign residency or work permits.
The Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP) presidential candidate, Frank Hsieh (謝長廷), started this embarrassing ball rolling with a poorly thought out — indeed, self-destructive — campaign strategy that sought to tarnish President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). The thesis was that a presidential candidate who had or might still have a US green card could not fulfill the functions required of him by the Constitution.
It was a ridiculous argument, though this in itself did not preclude its effectiveness as a political weapon. Unfortunately for the DPP, voters rejected Hsieh’s attempts to label Ma as unpatriotic and Hsieh was left looking foolish after failing to learn from his lazy, unsuccessful run for Taipei mayor.
The irony now is that this same argument has been revitalized in a formal witch hunt — with bipartisan support — for officials and politicians who took up residency or employment in other countries before returning to Taiwan to work in the government or as an elected representative.
The latest person to be dragged through the mud is National Security Council Secretary-General Su Chi (蘇起). A DPP legislator yesterday accused Su of retaining a valid green card, though the Presidential Office was quick to respond by saying the card ceased to be valid in the late 1980s.
But the biggest catches in this executive review have been officials who hold current — and possibly conflicting — status as dual nationals, the kind of people that Next Magazine delights in “exposing.” One of those is KMT Legislator Diane Lee (李慶安), who has been accused of having US citizenship, and therefore who would have broken the law by being elected to the legislature. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is apparently continuing a probe into her status.
But for the most part, this drama goes to show that Taiwanese political circles are capable of bipartisan expressions of muddle-headed nationalism even when it is manifestly hypocritical and blind to the reality of professional and public life.
Most of the people who have been caught up in this drama broke no law and have exhibited no behavior in this context that suggests their allegiance to the nation was ever under question.
Changes to regulations inspired by this witch hunt have met a symbolic imperative and have nothing to do with good governance, as subsequent appeals for exemptions in the field of economics, for example, demonstrate all too clearly.
As strategic tensions escalate across the vast Indo-Pacific region, Taiwan has emerged as more than a potential flashpoint. It is the fulcrum upon which the credibility of the evolving American-led strategy of integrated deterrence now rests. How the US and regional powers like Japan respond to Taiwan’s defense, and how credible the deterrent against Chinese aggression proves to be, will profoundly shape the Indo-Pacific security architecture for years to come. A successful defense of Taiwan through strengthened deterrence in the Indo-Pacific would enhance the credibility of the US-led alliance system and underpin America’s global preeminence, while a failure of integrated deterrence would
It is being said every second day: The ongoing recall campaign in Taiwan — where citizens are trying to collect enough signatures to trigger re-elections for a number of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) legislators — is orchestrated by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), or even President William Lai (賴清德) himself. The KMT makes the claim, and foreign media and analysts repeat it. However, they never show any proof — because there is not any. It is alarming how easily academics, journalists and experts toss around claims that amount to accusing a democratic government of conspiracy — without a shred of evidence. These
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
On Wednesday last week, the Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article by Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) asserting the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) territorial claim over Taiwan effective 1945, predicated upon instruments such as the 1943 Cairo Declaration and the 1945 Potsdam Proclamation. The article further contended that this de jure and de facto status was subsequently reaffirmed by UN General Assembly Resolution 2758 of 1971. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs promptly issued a statement categorically repudiating these assertions. In addition to the reasons put forward by the ministry, I believe that China’s assertions are open to questions in international
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