Taiwan and Hong Kong have been boiling over with pro-democratic activity lately, prompting attacks from Chinese officials and media outlets. However, since they possess neither a concept of democracy, nor democratic experience, these Chinese critics are shooting themselves in the foot by disparaging both places’ democratic movements.
In response to Hong Kong’s Occupy Central movement and its online “referendum” on “true universal suffrage,” Chinese newspaper the Global Times, which is run by the Chinese Communist Party paper the People’s Daily, has published a series of strongly worded pieces attacking the vote initiated by the Hong Kong movement, saying that the territory’s pan-democracy camp holds a superstitious belief in protests. It has also tried to belittle the movement by saying that even if many Hong Kongers vote in the “illegal referendum,” they will never equal or outnumber China’s 1.3 billion citizens.
The Global Times has gone too far in its criticism of Hong Kong affairs. Even Hong Kong Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying (梁振英), who normally follows China in everything, has spoken against the paper’s statement regarding the number of participants in the online poll, saying that no one should place Hong Kongers in opposition to Chinese.
Leung said that many of his Hong Kong friends wished that Chinese officials and media outlets would not criticize or comment on the territory’s affairs, adding that he has heard many Chinese officials express the same sentiment in wishing that Hong Kongers would not criticize or comment on China’s affairs.
With these comments, Leung expressed hope that Beijing will let the people of Hong Kong run their territory and that the two sides would not overstep each other’s boundaries by publicly telling the other how to handle its affairs. China can of course ignore Leung and continue to criticize and interfere with Hong Kong’s affairs, but that could cause anti-Chinese sentiment in the territory to rise further. Given Leung’s position, that tact would not be conducive to helping China promote stable development in Hong Kong.
Lately, China has been fond of talking about democratic majorities when trying to suppress democratic dialogue in Taiwan and Hong Kong. Earlier this month, China’s Taiwan Affairs Office spokesperson Fan Liqing (范麗青) said Taiwan’s future “must be decided by all Chinese people, including [our] Taiwanese compatriots,” denying that it should be decided by the 23 million Taiwanese. That also created a strong backlash.
These statements are off-the-cuff remarks that do not stand up to scrutiny. China understands neither Taiwan’s nor Hong Kong’s democratic values, nor their respective peoples, which is why it resorts to talking of the 1.3 billion Chinese at every turn. However, the more threats Beijing makes, the faster Taiwan and Hong Kong run in the opposite direction.
China has no democracy and if its citizens were able to elect their representatives, leaders and presidents in elections where every person has a vote, that would mean that China’s political system has transformed from a communist dictatorship to a democracy. If this were to happen, a democratic Taiwan, Hong Kong and China would have shared values and a shared decisionmaking system, and perhaps then it would be possible for them to jointly discuss the future.
When Chinese officials and media outlets threaten Taiwan and Hong Kong’s democratic development, they are wasting their breath. If Beijing wants to unify with Taiwan and hold on to Hong Kong, it must attain a real understanding of the living situation and problems of their two populaces, understand what the public there wants, help them solve problems and fix the problematic relationship between Taiwan, Hong Kong and China in a rational, democratic manner. When Chinese officials and media outlets make disrespectful and insolent remarks and issue threats, they are only doing themselves a big disservice.
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS