Despite the controversy surrounding changes to school curriculums and the new 12-year national curriculum, the Ministry of Education insists that everything is “constitutional, legal and according to proper procedure.”
Let’s start with the “proper procedure” claim. The High Administrative Court recently ruled that the ministry had violated the Freedom of Government Information Act (政府資訊公開法), and yet the ministry still has the audacity to say it is acting according to proper procedure.
Then there is the claim of legality. Ignoring the 228 Incident and the White Terror era contravenes paragraph 2 of Article 2 of the Educational Fundamental Act (教育基本法), which clearly lists “patriotic education” and “care for the native soil” among the stated “purposes of education.”
However, the big one is “constitutional.” Our pro-unification president says he believes China is part of our territory, as the Additional Articles of the Republic of China (ROC) Constitution are built upon the “one country, two areas” framework. How preposterous. Even if it were constitutional, that does not mean it conforms to reality. Does the ministry think that, by making these curricular amendments, the whole of China will follow suit?
If the ministry also admits that this stretches credulity, the, what exactly is our territory? To which territory does “one country, two areas” refer, and what is this supposed to demarcate?
There is no need for constitutions to specify territory, and indeed there is often little point in their doing so. South Korea’s constitution defines its territory as “the Korean Peninsula and its adjacent islands.” Is that specific? Not really. The Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany mentions territory five times, but at no point does it specify exactly what constitutes that territory.
Article 4 of the ROC Constitution talks of “the territory of the Republic of China according to its existing national boundaries.” China’s constitution does not specify its boundaries, except for in the preface where it proclaims upon the territory of another: It says that Taiwan is an inalienable part of the territory of the People’s Republic of China.
Evidently, territory can appear, or not appear, in a country’s constitution. Nevertheless, there are international institutions to keep armies in check.
In 1993, the Council of Grand Justices was asked to answer the question: “What are the existing boundaries of the national territory of the ROC?”
In constitutional Interpretation No. 328, the justices denied the application for an interpretation as “[T]he delimitation of national territory according to its history is a significant political question and thus it is beyond the reach of judicial review.”
Thus, if even the Council of Grand Justices refuse to make an interpretation of this issue, on what grounds does the ministry stand making grand proclamations about its own view of Chinese history?
The US constitution does not clearly specify the nation’s territory either. As the country rapidly became more powerful, more states joined the union, making the definition and classification of territory very important. These newcomers were defined equally as territory, just as the original 13 states had been when the nation was first founded.
US territory is wherever US courts have jurisdiction — anywhere that the US constitution, including citizens’ rights and the jury system, applies in full. There is no ambiguity.
Does the ministry want to teach Taiwanese children that China is part of Taiwan’s territory and that they should look at Taiwan from the point of view of Chinese history?
Christian Fan Jiang is deputy convener of the Northern Taiwan Society’s legal and political group.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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