On April 11 an open letter by 34 academics and writers was sent to President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九). It was not the first by this group of experts on Taiwan. The letter questioned the timing and validity of the Presidential Office’s announcement — three years after the fact — that about 36,000 files went missing after the transfer of power from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) administration in 2008.
The Presidential Office had turned the matter over to the Control Yuan to launch a full investigation into former top officials of the DPP government. Barely was the letter published, when minions of the Ma government responded in exactly the same way that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) responds when any of its abuses of human rights and the right of law are questioned.
So close in wording and method were the responses of the two regimes that they seem to have been taken from the same handbook on authoritarianism. First, of course, there was the questioning of the legitimacy of foreigners commenting on the Republic of China’s (ROC) or the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) internal affairs. Next followed the procedure of questioning the authenticity of the letter and suspicions that a nefarious plot was afoot.
Finally there was disbelief that the government’s care for its people could be questioned, whether it was by dissident Tibetans, Uighurs or Falun Gong practitioners. Or, as in the case of Taiwan, that Ma’s government was above political motivation for its actions.
In the past week and a half, the various Taipei Economic and Cultural Offices (TECO) around the world have been ordered to track down the signers of the letter and question them on the authenticity of their signatures.
Think for a moment, what president of any democratic country has ever done the same when his rule of law might be questioned? What democratic president would immediately respond by ordering his minions to challenge the authenticity of the signatures of a letter?
Yet this is what has happened with the Ma government. TECO officials asked those involved if their signature was real and/or if they had been pressured or deceived in any way into signing the letter. Finally the TECO officers — as if they were police officers with the ability to call each of the signers in — “explained” (shall we say “indoctrinated”) to those involved exactly what the government’s position was. Surely if they knew that the government was pure as the driven snow in its motivation, such scholars and writers would never have signed the letter.
Why would anyone in the DPP, like the falsely accused Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌), be so naive and/or stupid as to put forth such an open letter with bogus or made up signatures? Academics who consistently follow Taiwan’s politics would immediately protest such manipulation of their names. Is not such questioning a projection of paranoia and/or guilt on the part of Ma’s government?
Yet this is what happened. The resources and time of the TECO officials and their offices were used in spending Taiwanese tax dollars to try and prove that somehow the Ma government was being misunderstood. The signatories could not help but wonder at such paranoia and feel somewhat embarrassed for the career officials that had to carry out such orders.
Jerome Keating is a writer based in Taipei. He was a co-signatory to the recent open letter.
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