For more than three decades, since former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平) “opened up” the People’s Republic of China, the prevailing argument has been that greater contact and trade with the West and other nations would lead to economic development, which would eventually lead to liberalization and even democratization.
World leaders have held out the hope that the Chinese Communist Party would see the wisdom of allowing the development of a more civil society and the rule of law, while the Republic of China was repeatedly cited as an example that Beijing’s mandarins might follow, since Taiwanese activists from all walks of life were leading the fight to end the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) martial law rule and democratize Taiwan at the same time that Deng was implementing his reforms.
In the spring of 1989, there was a joke in Taipei that the only way one could tell whether television footage of a lawmaking body filled with elderly men nodding off was of the National Assembly meeting on Yangmingshan or the National People’s Congress in Beijing was that there were a lot more geriatrics in the Beijing pictures. Then the Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred and the joking stopped.
Yet, in the past two-and-a-half decades, Taiwan has developed into a vibrant democracy, one that today goes to the polls for the sixth time to choose a directly elected president. It is not a perfect democracy, if such a creature exists, but it is one that is embraced with more passion and commitment by its citizenry with every passing year.
However, the dreams of Chinese political reform have proven as facile, even delusional, as the lure of the multimillion-person Chinese market, where government interventionism, rampant corruption and lack of legal protection have derailed so many business plans. While there has been a tremendous explosion of economic and social change in China that has benefited millions of Chinese by raising living standards, these improvements have not translated into political liberalization. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has consistently demonstrated its fear of political reform and a true civil society and continues to insist that its way is the only way.
Despite the sufferings that President Xi Jinping (習近平) and his family endured under Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) rule, since assuming power Xi has clearly demonstrated a desire to return to the Mao era in terms of developing a cult of personality and wiping out opposition to his rule. His government’s decision this week to charge several leading lawyers and human rights advocates with subversion of state power and many more with “inciting” such subversion is a major escalation of Xi’s war on those whom he sees as a threat to the CCP’s rule.
Xi’s government has frequently proclaimed its intention to govern the nation according to the rule of law, albeit a “socialist rule of law with Chinese characteristics.” Yet anyone who would misinterpret that goal with the more internationally accepted concepts should remember Xi’s pledge that the rule of law would be “a knife whose handle is in the hands of the party and the people.”
Portraying the protection of free speech and human rights as reckless disregard for social order and motivated by greed, and attacking lawyers for simply doing their jobs, prove the extent of Xi’s paranoia. Xi’s fingerprints are all over the handle of the knife that has been plunged into the back of China’s nascent civil society.
Taiwanese today enjoy both freedom of speech and protections of their civil and political rights. Going to a polling booth to cast ballots for the nation’s next leader and members of the legislature is a right and privilege that Chinese can only dream of — a dream that can land them in prison. Taiwanese voters across the color spectrum should remember that when they exercise their hard-won right to elect their own leaders.
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
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In the 2022 book Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China, academics Hal Brands and Michael Beckley warned, against conventional wisdom, that it was not a rising China that the US and its allies had to fear, but a declining China. This is because “peaking powers” — nations at the peak of their relative power and staring over the precipice of decline — are particularly dangerous, as they might believe they only have a narrow window of opportunity to grab what they can before decline sets in, they said. The tailwinds that propelled China’s spectacular economic rise over the past