It was announced without fanfare on Friday and few acknowledged its importance, but the decision by the Ministry of the Interior to allow the registration of previously banned political organizations was another step toward becoming a normal, moderate and mature democracy.
What the decision means is that the country’s polity has become confident enough to accommodate a multiplicity of political views, rather than smother non-prevailing voices that could make life uncomfortable for those in power.
The banning of one political organization in particular — the Taiwan Democratic Communist Party (TDCP) — had long become an anachronism, not because the Cold War is over, but, as historian Tony Judt puts it, because Marxism and communism have no intellectual or political future. The fall of the Soviet Union forever discredited the concept of communism and the countries that still practice it — such as North Korea and to a diminishing extent Vietnam and Cuba — certainly do not add to its appeal.
Skeptics who argue that the TDCP could serve as a fifth column should be reminded that — like every other political organization in this country — it is the product of a long process of localization and could not conceivably be part of an underhanded Beijing plot, let alone a global front along the lines of the Comintern. Anyone visiting China these days quickly realizes the country is now only nominally communist and, despite the official rhetoric, shares very little with its ideological past.
What still has some popular appeal, however, are the foundations of Marxism, such as combating poverty and inequality.
Judt, in his review of the Polish philosopher and Marxist Leszek Kolakowski, says that “renewed faith in Marxism — at least as an analytical tool if not as a political prognostication — is now once again, largely for want of competition, the common currency of international protest movements.”
What this means is that at best the TDCP would use Marxist rhetoric to address social problems. But anything that departed from that, anything that resembled a political system, would crumble under the weight of the political burden of anything associated with “communist” or “communism.” A party like the TDCP will never represent a threat to the stability of the state and as such, its existence as a social entity no longer needs to be disallowed, as doing so would represent disproportionate intervention by the state.
The ministry’s decision was, among other things, made possible by the normalization of the country and its security apparatus, which now serves the state rather than a specific political party. This transformation, begun in the 1990s but for the most part springing from the reforms of the Democratic Progressive Party government, has given Taiwan the surefootedness it needs to allow for political pluralism, even when this means permitting the registration of parties whose names are echoes of an old ideological conflict.
Friday’s announcement may have gone unnoticed, but it should be celebrated as yet another achievement by Taiwanese, who are choosing inclusiveness and pluralism over the kind of repression that, sadly, is prevalent in the region and elsewhere.
KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun’s (鄭麗文) recent visit to Beijing and her upcoming visit to Washington will serve as a high-level test of her diplomatic mettle. In Beijing, Cheng was received with symbolic gestures, a warm reception, and high-level access. In Washington, she will receive far less pomp and far sharper questions about the KMT’s vision for the future of Taiwan. Her challenge will be to persuade Washington that the KMT’s engagement with China can coexist with strong deterrence. Cheng’s April 7-12 visit to mainland China coincided with an intense period of conflict in Iran. Despite the strategic significance of Cheng’s trip,
The closure of the Strait of Hormuz has sent the vast Asian chemicals industry into a tailspin. Deprived of the likes of Qatari natural gas and Saudi Arabian oil, the region’s fertilizer and plastics plants are slowing production or even shutting down. Everywhere except China, that is. In petrochemicals, China is unique. As well as a traditional industry that uses oil and gas as feedstock, it has parallel output that relies on its abundant domestic coal. Unsurprisingly, India and other regional powers want to copy and paste the Chinese method. This would not be easy — or climate friendly. The
US President Donald Trump recently repeated his claim that “Taiwan stole America’s chip industry,” reigniting public debate on the issue. As a former Taiwanese minister of economic affairs and an entrepreneur deeply involved in semiconductor supply chain development, I feel a responsibility to clarify this misunderstanding. From the perspective of global industrial evolution and the economic principle of comparative advantage, such a statement appears overly simplistic and risks obscuring the essence of the issue. The rise of Taiwan’s semiconductor industry was not built on “replacing America,” but rather emerged as a result of countries pursuing different development paths within the
Indonesian President Prabowo Subianto says he knows how to fix the problems facing Indonesia. Yet his economic mismanagement and authoritarian tendencies are steering the nation toward a familiar mix of currency instability and political chaos. The world’s fourth-most populous nation risks reversing the hard-won democratic and business reforms that came after the Asian Financial Crisis in 1997. At that time, the rupiah collapsed and the political upheaval that followed forced former president Haji Mohamed Suharto from power. Prabowo’s administration is ignoring similar warning signs. That disconnect was apparent in a national address on Wednesday, when Prabowo projected the swagger that has
RSS