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 As a matter of fact, they would prefer to jettison that outdated and imposed Constitution and even seek to change the name of their country.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
“History does not repeat itself, but it rhymes” (attributed to Mark Twain). The USSR was the international bully during the Cold War as it sought to make the world safe for Soviet-style Communism. China is now the global bully as it applies economic power and invests in Mao’s (毛澤東) magic weapons (the People’s Liberation Army [PLA], the United Front Work Department, and the Chinese Communist Party [CCP]) to achieve world domination. Freedom-loving countries must respond to the People’s Republic of China (PRC), especially in the Indo-Pacific (IP), as resolutely as they did against the USSR. In 1954, the US and its allies
A response to my article (“Invite ‘will-bes,’ not has-beens,” Aug. 12, page 8) mischaracterizes my arguments, as well as a speech by former British prime minister Boris Johnson at the Ketagalan Forum in Taipei early last month. Tseng Yueh-ying (曾月英) in the response (“A misreading of Johnson’s speech,” Aug. 24, page 8) does not dispute that Johnson referred repeatedly to Taiwan as “a segment of the Chinese population,” but asserts that the phrase challenged Beijing by questioning whether parts of “the Chinese population” could be “differently Chinese.” This is essentially a confirmation of Beijing’s “one country, two systems” formulation, which says that
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi arrived in China yesterday, where he is to attend a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) and Russian President Vladimir Putin today. As this coincides with the 50 percent US tariff levied on Indian products, some Western news media have suggested that Modi is moving away from the US, and into the arms of China and Russia. Taiwan-Asia Exchange Foundation fellow Sana Hashmi in a Taipei Times article published yesterday titled “Myths around Modi’s China visit” said that those analyses have misrepresented India’s strategic calculations, and attempted to view
When Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) stood in front of the Potala Palace in Lhasa on Thursday last week, flanked by Chinese flags, synchronized schoolchildren and armed Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) troops, he was not just celebrating the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the “Tibet Autonomous Region,” he was making a calculated declaration: Tibet is China. It always has been. Case closed. Except it has not. The case remains wide open — not just in the hearts of Tibetans, but in history records. For decades, Beijing has insisted that Tibet has “always been part of China.” It is a phrase
RSS