Kinship with foreign parties
The Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) and the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) are similar to the Democratic Party in Japan and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in China, respectively.
The DPP and the Democratic Party have identical names (民進黨) in their original language, and are led by female politicians. DPP Chairperson Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) is Taiwanese and the president of Taiwan; Democratic Party leader Renho (蓮舫) is Taiwanese from her father’s side and was elected last week as the major opposition party’s leader in Japan. If interested, the two parties can form sister parties like sister cities.
On the other hand, the KMT and the CCP are like siblings who share the same surname, “Chinese,” except that the former is nationalist and the latter is communist. KMT members used to call CCP members “communist bandits” decades ago, but now members of these two parties call each other “cross-strait relatives of one family.”
Many KMT members, including some retired generals and government officials, while enjoying the pensions paid by Taiwan, have gone back to China for a family reunion. Eventually the whole KMT might go back to China like “fallen leaves returning to the roots.”
The KMT recently officially dropped the addendum “with each side having its own interpretation” from the so-called “1992 consensus” slogan to be consistent with the CCP’s “one China” principle.
The KMT and the CCP are even more matched. Based on this slogan, six KMT and two non-partisan local government heads went to China to beg Beijing to end the restriction on the number of Chinese tourists to these eight cities and counties. Is the KMT already power-hungry again after the power transfer in May and trying to implement the so-called “one country, two systems” in Taiwan?
Charles Hong
Columbus, Ohio
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