When President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Singapore on Saturday last week, he gave a speech in which the sole point of note was the “one China” principle. Even compared to Xi’s four-point proposal to maintain peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, including resisting the Taiwanese independence movement and an insistence on keeping to the [so-called] “1992 consensus,” the speech given by Ma, whose approval rating once fell as low as 9 percent in his own nation, was even more manifestly selling Taiwan down the river.
Ma said that the reason he was unprepared to talk of “two Chinas,” or “one China and one Taiwan,” or of Taiwanese independence, was that such formulations were not acceptable according to the Republic of China (ROC) Constitution.
He emphasized that his position was the one that any president of the ROC should take.
However, this — just like the idea that both nations “belong to the same China” — offered up by former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) presidential candidate Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), is in complete violation of a campaign promise that Ma made: that Taiwan’s future is to be decided by the 23 million Taiwanese living in the nation.
Ma has his eyes fixed on his own legacy; his place in history.
Not only is he running around on the world stage, a traitor to the ROC in its fight against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), but he is acting as Beijing’s lackey, helping it achieve its goal of annexing Taiwan. China is using him to set the framework in which his successor will have to negotiate.
By responding to the call to go to Singapore to meet Xi, Ma has essentially bowed to Xi’s “one China” framework with the international community watching, leading the international media to believe that Taiwan has handed over its sovereignty to Beijing and accepted that it is a part of China, and that the two sides can now set about the business of unification.
It gives the impression, in particular, that ordinary Taiwanese are now prepared to give up their liberty, their democracy and their freedom to live as they choose, and to parcel all this off to the authoritarian regime of the CCP. It is almost impossible to describe in words just how much damage this has done to Taiwan internationally.
It is quite evident that the reason Xi “suddenly” decided to extend this gesture of goodwill to Ma is that he wants to make cross-strait relations an issue of internal politics, and to use Taiwan’s connection with the East China Sea and the South China Sea to make the entire region a Chinese interior sea through the power of its military.
By binding Taiwan to China and turning his back on our allies — the US and Japan — by punching a hole through their joint security perimeter, Ma is effectively signing the nation’s death warrant.
The Taiwan Association of University Professors believes that Ma and his government have acted in complete disregard of the public will, without following legally required procedures, through undemocratic means, trying to bend government to his own personal needs and engaging in closed-door diplomacy. Any resulting public announcements or agreements have no validity, and public servants would in no way be bound to adhering to them, neither does any future government following the handover of power have any duty to be constrained by them.
The political opposition parties should unite to impeach the president. In addition, Taiwanese have a clear choice in January’s elections and we hope that they obliterate the party that advocates Taiwan’s unification with China.
The Taiwan Association of University Professors.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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