In a perfectly apt scene involving barbed wire barricades and hundreds of police officers, National Taiwan Democracy Memorial Hall was restored yesterday to its original name, the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall.
It was no small irony that the reversal occurred almost 22 years to the day since the lifting of martial law, declared in 1949 by dictator Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) himself. What followed were decades of the White Terror, during which thousands of Taiwanese and Chinese who opposed Chiang’s rule were murdered — both at home and abroad — or disappeared.
Some — ostensibly those who favor the renaming of the hall back to the name of a despot — argue that Chiang defended Taiwan and prevented the island being taken by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) while slowly developing its economy.
If defending Taiwan and developing its economy were the prerequisites for naming the hall, then surely it should be called the United States Memorial Hall instead, given that it was US assistance in the form of the Mutual Defense Treaty, security guarantees and arms sales that gave Taiwan the space to grow.
In fact, Chiang’s adventurism and disconnect from reality — from his vow to retake the mainland by force to fanciful plans for entry into regional conflicts — created unnecessary danger for Taiwan and brought Asia closer to nuclear war.
The CKS Memorial, therefore, is not a means to honor a man who stood up for Taiwan, but rather a symbol of “one China.” Aside from an instrument to score political points domestically, the renaming of the monument by former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) administration was an attempt to distance Taiwan from China by removing symbols of their supposed common destiny. In the process, Chen was also following a trend in co-opting memorials to antidemocratic leaders.
Back in China, the reviled Nationalist leader’s image has gradually been rehabilitated, so much so that in recent years there has been growing interest among domestic tourists in his refurbished former residence in Chongqing. Chinese tourists are also eager to visit his mausoleum in Taiwan. But Chiang’s rehabilitation in China is not the result of a decision by the CCP to “forgive” its old nemesis. It is, rather, part of Beijing’s strategy to narrow the divide between Taiwan and China and so bolster the image of a big happy Chinese family divided by Western and Japanese colonialism and the “unequal treaties.”
With the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) back in power, it is now the KMT’s turn to cater to its domestic constituency by renaming the hall. The party will also claim that the move is part of its policy of mending fences with Beijing — as if the CCP leadership cared what a block of granite in downtown Taipei is called.
More to the point, in renaming the hall, the KMT once again reaffirms its ideology as a party that sees Taiwan not as a sovereign entity, but rather as a part of China.
And so, the murderous little tyrant rears his ugly head once again, laughing at a people who suffered so much under his guard.
In September 2013, the armed wing of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) quietly released an internal document entitled, “Coursebook on the Military Geography of the Taiwan Strait.” This sensitive, “military-use-only” coursebook explains why it is strategically vital that China “reunify” (annex) Taiwan. It then methodically analyzes various locations of interest to People’s Liberation Army (PLA) war planners. The coursebook highlights one future battlefield in particular: Fulong Beach, in New Taipei City’s Gongliao District, which it describes as “3,000 meters long, flat, and straight,” and located at “the head of Taiwan.” A black and white picture of Fulong’s sandy coastline occupies the
US President Joe Biden’s first news conference last month offered reassuring and concerning insights regarding his administration’s approach to China. Biden did not mention the contentious meeting in Alaska where US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan confronted China’s top two foreign policy officials. The Americans implicitly affirmed the administration of former US president Donald Trump’s direct pushback against communist China’s repressive domestic governance and aggressive international behavior. Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) and Chinese Central Foreign Affairs Commission Director Yang Jiechi (楊潔篪) had explicitly demanded a return to the policies of
Early last month, China’s rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC), officially approved the country’s 14th Five-Year Plan. The strategy was supposed to demonstrate that China has a long-term economic vision that would enable it to thrive, despite its geopolitical contest with the US. However, before the ink on the NPC’s stamp could dry, China had already begun sabotaging the plan’s chances of success. The new plan’s centerpiece is the “dual-circulation” strategy, according to which China would aim to foster growth based on domestic demand and technological self-sufficiency. This would not only reduce China’s reliance on external demand; it would also
Interrupting the assimilation of Xinjiang’s Uighur population would result in an unmanageable national security threat to China. Numerous governments and civil society organizations around the world have accused China of massive human rights abuses in Xinjiang, and labeled Beijing’s inhumane and aggressive social re-engineering efforts in the region as “cultural genocide.” Extensive evidence shows that China’s forceful ethnic assimilation policies in Xinjiang are aimed at replacing Uighur ethnic and religious identity with a so-called scientific communist dogma and Han Chinese culture. The total assimilation of Uighurs into the larger “Chinese family” is also Beijing’s official, central purpose of its ethnic policies
RSS