Alive and well? Look again
Dennis Hickey’s piece indicates that he may need to leave Missouri and get a little updating on what has been happening in Taiwan and Asia in the past decades (“ROC is alive and well in Taiwan,” March 21, page 8).
It is questionable that the world will be celebrating the 100th anniversary of the revolution that “overthrew the Qing Dynasty and led to the establishment of the Republic of China [ROC].”
Certainly, the 1.3 billion people in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will celebrate on Oct. 1 — the anniversary of the PRC’s establishment — rather than the ROC’s Double Ten National Day on Oct. 10.
Of those people in the PRC, it is doubtful that the Tibetans, Uighurs and Mongolians care about the PRC or the ROC. They wish for a restoration of their own land. In Taiwan, the ROC government is downplaying any talk of joint celebrations with the PRC. Add to that the fact that many Taiwanese look back knowing that in 1911, their land was a colony of Japan and that the 1911 revolution in China means little to them.
Further, they are knowledgeable that the San Francisco Peace Treaty, which entered into force in 1952, did not give their land to either the PRC or the ROC. If Taiwanese are going to celebrate any year, they may prefer 1987, which they see as the overthrow of the one-party state of the ROC with the lifting of martial law and the end of the White Terror era.
Or they may look to 1996 as the year to celebrate since it is the year that a true democracy finally came to Taiwan. Also, if Hickey was to keep up with recent polls and surveys, he would see that a growing number of people in Taiwan identify themselves as Taiwanese and not Chinese.
They have no desire to be linked to the “mainland area” that President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) tries to claim as theirs under the 1947 ROC Constitution. As a matter of fact, they would prefer to jettison that outdated and imposed Constitution and even seek to change the name of their country. It is only the nostalgic waishengren community in Taiwan that cares about 1911, and even then, not all of them necessarily do.
JEROME KEATING
Taipei
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