Recent speculation that the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) was becoming more amenable to talks with Chinese officials rang truer last week when DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) announced the creation of a party think tank which, among other duties, would encourage mutual understanding across the Taiwan Strait through dialogue.
Rumor even has it that the DPP recently allowed Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials to enter its sacred ground — party headquarters in Taipei.
This occurs at a time when Chinese officials have allegedly complained to a pan-blue newspaper that information they have received from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) painted such an incomplete picture of the mood in Taiwan that it prompted Zhongnanhai to look elsewhere.
Should this be true, Taiwan and China could be on the brink of taking their real first steps toward mutual understanding, or at least toward clearing the ideological air that has poisoned Chinese perceptions of Taiwan for so long. If the noise coming out of Beijing is true and the CCP is indeed realizing that its KMT interlocutors have not been straight with it on the Taiwanese polity’s reaction to President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) detente, this could signify that Beijing is becoming more attuned to the multiplicity of voices that characterizes Taiwanese society.
Although one should speculate on such matters with the utmost caution, this could signify a refinement of Beijing’s approach to Taiwan, or at least the realization that the number of people who don’t see eye-to-eye with it on unification is much more substantial than a “clique,” the term often used to characterize DPP supporters and those who oppose unification.
Equally encouraging is that the DPP is showing a willingness to engage China and institutionalize the process. This shows maturity and self-confidence, likely boosted by a resurgence in its popular appeal, even in defeats such as the Nov. 27 special municipality elections, in which it won only two of five mayoralty seats, albeit with 400,000 more total votes than the KMT.
Ma and his party’s popularity appear to have peaked in 2008, with the DPP in the ascendancy since. That the DPP could turn its fortunes around so quickly and do so at a time when Ma could flaunt the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) and myriad Chinese sweeteners is no small achievement. This tells Beijing that the pan-green camp is a force to be reckoned with and that there is life after former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁).
Unwilling to accept that there could be another game in town, the KMT — which cannot be unaware that its appeal is waning — appears to have engaged in a game of deception with Beijing, just as US officials in Saigon for years sent rosy pictures of the situation in South Vietnam back to Washington until reality kicked in. Maybe, just maybe, Chinese officials have enough wisdom to avoid a similar mistake.
However, it is too early for optimism, as this isn’t the first time the DPP has been willing to talk (which should not be confused with having political negotiations) with China. Soon after entering office in 2000, the Chen administration sent feelers to Beijing, only for possible exchanges to be aborted after Beijing imposed preconditions such as the “one China” principle and the abandonment of the party’s independence clause.
There is no knowing whether similar caveats would be imposed this time around, but there is a major difference between then and now: The KMT seems to have discredited itself in Beijing’s eyes.
In a Facebook post on Wednesday last week, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Taipei City Councilor Hsu Chiao-hsin (徐巧芯) wrote: “The KMT must fall for Taiwan to improve.’ Allow me to ask the question again: Is this really true?” It matters not how many times Hsu asks the question, my answer will always be the same: “Yes, the KMT must be toppled for Taiwan to improve.” In the lengthy Facebook post, titled “What were those born in the 1980s guilty of?” Hsu harked back to the idealistic aspirations of the 2014 Sunflower movement before heaping opprobrium on the Democratic Progressive Party’s (DPP)
The scuffle between Chinese embassy staffers in Fiji and a Taiwanese diplomat at a Republic of China (ROC) Double Ten National Day celebration has turned into a public relations opportunity for the government, Beijing and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT). Although the incident occurred on Oct. 8, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MOFA) downplayed it, only for the story to be picked up by the foreign media, forcing the ministry to respond. The public and opposition parties asked why the government had failed to remonstrate more strongly in the first instance. It is still unclear whether the ministry missed a trick
US President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival, former US vice president Joe Biden, are holding their final debate tonight. In their foreign policy debate, China is sure to be a major issue of contention for the two candidates. Here are several questions the moderator should pose to the candidates: For both: In the first televised US presidential debates in 1960, then-Democratic candidate John F. Kennedy and his Republican counterpart, Richard Nixon, were asked whether the US should intervene if communist China attacked Taiwan’s outlying islands of Kinmen and Matsu. Kennedy said no, unless the main island of Taiwan was also attacked.
For most of us, the colorful, otherworldly marinescapes of coral reefs are as remote as the alien landscapes of the moon. We rarely, if ever, experience these underwater wonderlands for ourselves — we are, after all, air-breathing, terrestrial creatures mostly cocooned in cities. It is easy not to notice the perilous state they are in: We have lost 50 percent of coral reefs in the past 20 years and more than 90 percent are expected to die by 2050, a presentation at the Ocean Sciences Meeting in San Diego, California, earlier this year showed. As the oceans heat further and
RSS