The political reform movement in Taiwan has brought the nation into the post-martial law era, but has become mired in a debate over legitimacy of political power.
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has been holding on to the name of a country that does not fully exist, something it views as its ancestral right, but is really just a justification for its holding on to power in the land in which it was exiled. The party that would oppose this narrative, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP), has transformed itself on several occasions, showing a surplus of energy, but an unfortunate deficit of reformist resolve.
The US is a good example of what a country needs to transform itself. The Declaration of Independence encapsulates the ideals the authors intended to inform the nascent country. In it, they said: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
It was an insistence on holding to these ideals that makes the US what it is today.
Through various other documents, the US laid out for all to examine the true essence of the country it wanted to be.
This is the way civilization in the modern period should move and it is the kind of spirit Taiwanese politicians need most right now. It was lacking in the conception and implementation of the revolution that brought about the KMT’s nationalist China and then the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) communist China.
Power struggles are always affected by the power of logic dictating that history is written by the victor and something in the Chinese psyche made it inevitable that the blue revolution led by the KMT would be doomed to failure and that the red revolution led by the CCP would turn out ugly.
It is not necessarily the case that revolutions need to be violent. If you look at several of the US’ documents, from independence to its founding, and the effort that went into the establishment of the new country, you see that it was born of learning and culture, through new concepts incorporating new ideas and values.
In China, the revolution was simply a matter of one side overpowering another, responding to violence with violence, and so nationalist China was toppled by communist China.
What happens when the force of power, and not of culture, is behind the founding of a country?
The result is that many people living under KMT and CCP rule have very little genuine belief in the state and that many people cling to an idea of China, but reside in the US, a separation of the soul and the body.
Both China and the US exert an influence over Taiwan, although it is only the former that has any malicious intent toward us.
Look at Taiwan’s military: This incomplete country does not even know what it is to fight for, it has no idea of the importance of cultural foundations and lacks any real conception or values about how it is to truly shape itself or to seek to establish itself as a nation. It is merely a notion wrapped up in the historical baggage of the last war, of the struggle between the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China, or the rivalry between the pan-blue camp and the pan-green camp within the current system.
Meanwhile, trivial court intrigues will not go very far in creating a new nation or envisaging a genuinely new society.
Lee Min-yung is a poet.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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