The Chinese are good at political calculations, and they are particularly adept at division and subtraction. When the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) started to rule Taiwan, the party first divided the Taiwanese into two groups, luring one group to help it defend its regime. Today, Beijing has taken care of the KMT, and is now planning to cause division within the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Since the DPP is unable to stop China from playing its tricks, the party’s only choice is to respond in kind and to avoid the Chinese trap. However, some politicians are incapable of keeping their mouths shut, and they love to make stupid comments that they believe to be clever, thus falling into the trap.
On April 8, former DPP premier Frank Hsieh (謝長廷) said that the party should review its failed China policies of the past and he also asked rhetorically how the public’s interests would be protected if the DPP were unable to regain power. His remarks may have been appealing and moving, but they are seriously flawed when applied to the debate over China policy.
First of all, Hsieh’s statement that “our past policies have failed” was ambiguous, because it was unclear whether he was implying that the policies were ineffective, or that they were the reason that the DPP failed to win the presidential elections in 2008 and last year.
Former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) never accepted Beijing’s “one China” policy and former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) never accepted the so-called “1992 consensus.” Despite that, they were able to develop cross-strait exchanges while maintaining that Taiwan was an independent and sovereign state. Such a China policy cannot be said to be a failure.
If Hsieh thinks that the DPP’s China policy is a failure because the party was defeated in the presidential elections, he has oversimplified people’s voting behavior. In addition, if the DPP’s China policy has failed, that means that the KMT’s China policy, which entails selling out Taiwan’s sovereignty, has succeeded. Does using this as a standard for determining whether the DPP’s China policy has been successful not imply that the DPP must work even harder than the KMT at selling out Taiwan for its China policy to be successful?
Without question, if the DPP wants to remain viable, it must not violate its core values by following a defeatist line. The DPP regaining power would help protect Taiwanese sovereignty, but there is no reason for the party to sacrifice national sovereignty to regain power.
More than half of Taiwanese refuse to accept Chinese annexation, and this is what provides the strongest support for rejecting a surrender to China. Late president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國) told former US ambassador Walter McConaughy that any government trying to hold peace talks with the Chinese Communist Party would create social turmoil, and that such a government was doomed to fail.
If the DPP really wants to protect the public’s interests, even though it is not currently the ruling party, it should focus on mobilizing a majority of the public to restrain the pro-unification camp. If it must sacrifice the public’s interests to regain power, it will lose its raison d’etre.
James Wang is a political commentator.
TRANSLATED BY EDDY CHANG
A gap appears to be emerging between Washington’s foreign policy elites and the broader American public on how the United States should respond to China’s rise. From my vantage working at a think tank in Washington, DC, and through regular travel around the United States, I increasingly experience two distinct discussions. This divergence — between America’s elite hawkishness and public caution — may become one of the least appreciated and most consequential external factors influencing Taiwan’s security environment in the years ahead. Within the American policy community, the dominant view of China has grown unmistakably tough. Many members of Congress, as
The Hong Kong government on Monday gazetted sweeping amendments to the implementation rules of Article 43 of its National Security Law. There was no legislative debate, no public consultation and no transition period. By the time the ink dried on the gazette, the new powers were already in force. This move effectively bypassed Hong Kong’s Legislative Council. The rules were enacted by the Hong Kong chief executive, in conjunction with the Committee for Safeguarding National Security — a body shielded from judicial review and accountable only to Beijing. What is presented as “procedural refinement” is, in substance, a shift away from
The shifting geopolitical tectonic plates of this year have placed Beijing in a profound strategic dilemma. As Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) prepares for a high-stakes summit with US President Donald Trump, the traditional power dynamics of the China-Japan-US triangle have been destabilized by the diplomatic success of Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi in Washington. For the Chinese leadership, the anxiety is two-fold: There is a visceral fear of being encircled by a hardened security alliance, and a secondary risk of being left in a vulnerable position by a transactional deal between Washington and Tokyo that might inadvertently empower Japan
After declaring Iran’s military “gone,” US President Donald Trump appealed to the UK, France, Japan and South Korea — as well as China, Iran’s strategic partner — to send minesweepers and naval forces to reopen the Strait of Hormuz. When allies balked, the request turned into a warning: NATO would face “a very bad” future if it refused. The prevailing wisdom is that Trump faces a credibility problem: having spent years insulting allies, he finds they would not rally when he needs them. That is true, but superficial, as though a structural collapse could be caused by wounded feelings. Something
RSS