President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) has taken a personal interest in the history textbooks of Taiwan’s high schools. Apparently, the historical legacy he leaves during his second term is to be concerned not with improving the lives of Taiwanese, but in seeing his own ideology written into school textbooks.
To makes matters worse, he is using the Republic of China (ROC) Constitution as an excuse, reportedly saying the textbooks were not written “in accordance with the ROC Constitution.”
If Taiwanese are not aware of the following facts, the problems caused by Ma’s interventions may haunt us for years to come, and may even jeopardize the democracy we currently enjoy: The ROC Constitution is little more than a tool the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) uses to rule the country, characteristic of a foreign colonial power.
The emergence of the ROC Constitution has nothing to do with Taiwanese history. This is common knowledge. At the time, Taiwan was a colony of Japan. The ROC Constitution reflected the political situation in China, although several clauses have been altered since. However, even before it was implemented, China fell into civil war and was regarded differently by different leaders. Finally, Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) brought the Constitution over to Taiwan, mothballing it during the Martial Law era.
However, having kept it locked away for so long, the KMT were quite happy to resurrect it when Taiwan became a democracy, using it as a tool to suppress political dissent. This was a lesson in the application of soft power that Ma learned from his former boss, former president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國).
Regardless of whether Ma is interfering with textbooks, forcing high school pupils to study the Four Books and Five Classics, or branding his political opponents’ ideas unconstitutional, we are constantly reminded of how the Constitution is being abused. We also saw this ideological nonsense during the last presidential election campaign, best understood as underpinning a pincer movement by the KMT and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in their efforts to realize unification.
In democratic nations, the constitution acts as a charter representing the terms by which the populace seek to live and providing the framework to facilitate this. It also represents hope of a better future. However, this is not true in the case of the ROC Constitution — forced upon Taiwanese by a foreign power. The KMT maintains that Taiwan’s future is not in Taiwan itself, but in China. Neither do Taiwanese own their past, for this has also been commandeered, again by the KMT, happy to rewrite it to reflect its own ideology and politics. This is characteristic of colonialism: The colonized are denied a future of their own and Taiwanese, like many colonized peoples, have been fooled, through a mixture of temptation, intimidation and brainwashing into taking on the historical perspective of their colonial masters.
The KMT has no respect for the ROC Constitution. Content to cherry-pick clauses that can be used to attack its political foes or suppress the populace, it discards those clauses that counter the party’s interests. The KMT does not countenance others using the document to support the public interest. Now, Ma wants to interfere with the content of school textbooks, saying they should comply with the Constitution, regardless of historical facts or indeed the principles of education. He ignores all this in the interests of reinstating party-state ideology in Taiwan. Until Taiwanese wake up to how the Constitution is being used and abused about how it has been introduced from outside and how the KMT is using it to govern the land it has colonized, the KMT will continue to use it as a revisionist tool.
Chu Ping-tzu is an associate professor of Chinese literature at National Tsing Hua University.
Translated by Paul Cooper
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS