The issue of Taiwan’s participation in the World Health Assembly meeting refuses to abate and it is difficult to predict how things will transpire. However, one thing the issue achieves is a reminder that the definition of the status of the relationship across the Taiwan Strait remains contentious. All ears were on the new president as she made her inaugural address, fascinated by how she intends to approach Taiwan’s relationship with China.
President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) said that she will work to maintain the “status quo.” However, the Democratic Progressive Party has not really said much about what this means, beyond “maintaining the status quo of liberty and democracy under the Republic of China’s (ROC) system of constitutional government.”
However, from the prevailing discourse of how nations either unify or break up into smaller entities in the modern civilized world, the fundamental discourse of maintaining the “status quo” of liberty and democracy in Taiwan is consistent with the role of an elected president under the system of constitutional government being operated in the nation, as it is with prevailing thinking on how the modern world deals with addressing unification and separation of nations.
In the modern world, based upon democratic ideals, nations that are unified can split up and separate nations can come together. There were examples for both of these in 1993. At the beginning of that year, Czechoslovakia officially divided into two nations to become the Czech Republic and Slovakia; at the end of the year, the EU, following a process of economic and then political integration, was officially established. The union continues to expand.
Under democratic principles, disagreements over unification and division can be resolved by means of democratic referendum. This is how independence proposals around the world have been addressed.
Taiwan is a democratic nation. It has the threat of the cross-strait issue hanging over it. Whatever the source of tensions, be they from the inside or from overseas, the nation needs to maintain democracy as the bottom line. The prevailing international perspective on Taiwan’s travails is that they are rooted in China. After all, does China want to remain stuck in a different mindset from everyone else, trapped in the imperial era and wanting to develop its borders and expand its lands, or does it aspire to come into the fold of prevailing modern-world thinking? Is it willing to solve the cross-strait issue through democratic, civilized means?
China likes to consider itself a major power. However, surely it cannot think that it can find a solution to problems running counter to prevailing international thinking?
Of course, politics carries with it both reason and strength. Taiwan has reason on its side; China, strength. Despite the inevitable frustrations, Taiwan must cling to its democratic values, struggle for a consensus among Taiwanese and hold fast to the democratic model to cultivate the basis necessary to find a solution to the cross-strait issue.
With China still under authoritarian rule, whatever framework it offers for unification would test the new government. It would run counter to democratic ideas, be unfair to Taiwanese and be detrimental to the future aspirations of the entire Chinese-speaking world for freedom and democracy.
If China seeks the revitalization of the Chinese-speaking world, it needs to promote cross-strait goodwill exchanges and try to find a resolution to the problems in line with democratic thinking, if the future is to hold a free, civilized and advanced Chinese-speaking world.
Ho Hsin-chuan is a professor in National Chengchi University’s philosophy department.
Translated by Paul Cooper
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