Political winds of change
With reference to a recent opinion poll conducted by the Liberty Times [the Taipei Times’ sister newspaper], Lin Cho-shui (林濁水) has said that next year the political landscape will shift from majority support for the pan-blue camp to majority support for the pan-green camp and that next year’s presidential election will be the final battle in the independence-unification struggle.
I would like to expand on his reasoning by further discussing the significance of next year’s presidential election.
First, there is the qualitative change of the independence-unification issue. The opposition between the blue and green camps — which the pan-blue camp has seen as its winning weapon in the past — is no longer an effective weapon. The reason for this is not the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) talk about the green camp’s educational brainwashing, which is only serving to paint the KMT into a corner, but rather the way President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) and his government have given up on protecting Taiwan’s economic autonomy over the past eight years and how this has influenced the defeatist approach to political sovereignty.
Last year’s Sunflower movement and this year’s protests against the changes to the high-school curriculum guidelines might only be the opposition of young students, but the reality is that these protests are a miniature reflection of broader opposition to the special privileges of vested cross-strait interests.
This qualitative change originates with Ma and his government’s destruction of the “status quo” — the view that Taiwan is gradually becoming a part of China, a country that lacks fairness, justice, democracy and freedom, has been frequently expressed by various social movements in the past few years.
This is why the qualitative change in the independence-unification issue means that this is no longer about whether Taiwan should be independent or unified with China, but rather about how the current “status quo” — that neither Taiwan nor China has any jurisdiction over the other — should be maintained.
This leads to a second issue: How will Taiwanese independence develop? The “status quo” that Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) proposes, based on the spirit of the Resolution on Taiwan’s Future (台灣前途決議文), builds on the mainstream opinion that Taiwan is not a part of China.Political organizations with an even clearer standpoint have offered further analysis of the historical and political connection between the Republic of China (ROC) and Taiwan and proposed that both are independent.
However, this discussion cannot remain at a purely logical level, because the many jurisprudential flaws in the relationship between the ROC and Taiwan originate with the international political situation after World War II. The issues of jurisdiction over the Ryukyu Islands — which are now part of Japan — and the Diaoyutai Islands (釣魚台) are part of this context.
Regardless of what kind of independence we are talking about, this means that we, at the very least, must keep a strategic eye on the situation in East Asia and move toward our goal one pragmatic step at a time.
Based on these observations, the deeper significance of next year’s presidential election will no doubt be to initiate Taiwan’s move toward true and substantial independence. Not only are we to see a change of power in the Presidential Office and the Legislative Yuan, voters should also prepare to welcome a new political era; one in which real independence is the basic assumption.
Chen Tzu-yu
Taipei
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