In 2010, then-premier Wu Den-yih (吳敦義) claimed that Taiwan’s endangered white dolphins would know how to turn to avoid the waters near a proposed petrochemical plant. Will Wu make a similar detour in the face of Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu’s (洪秀柱) new cross-strait policy?
This will be yet another good show following the KMT’s defeat in the elections.
Hung has streamlined the policy by cutting it in half, keeping only the first half — the “1992 consensus” — while tossing out the second half, “one China, with each side making its own interpretations.”
Wu has insisted that both parts be kept, but there are signs that, just like what he said about white dolphins, he could also make an eventual turn around.
KMT leaders and strategists had been busy the past month defending the existence of the so-called “1992 consensus.”
Former Mainland Affairs Council minister Su Chi (蘇起), who has admitted to making up the term, said this is a “false issue” that is being manipulated by the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP).
Some former council officials have also said that although the consensus did not take form at the 1992 meeting, it was reached through subsequent cross-strait interactions.
The KMT is simply creating trouble for itself, and it seems as if the party cannot even clarify whether the “1992 consensus” contains that part about individual interpretations or not. This goes to show that there is no consensus even within the KMT itself, let alone Taiwanese society at large.
Still, the party has since 1992 insisted that the two sides of the Taiwan Strait had reached a consensus — which only exposes the KMT’s fraud, as it yields to Beijing’s deceit.
During a visit to the US last month, Wu criticized Hung’s version of the policy, making a big deal about insisting that slogan cannot be cut and accusing Hung of departing from the KMT’s own stance.
However, soon after he returned to Taiwan, he gave a speech to a group of die-hard pan-blue supporters, drawing a forced analogy glorifying Su’s “1992 consensus” as a historical term that was defined as such by historians after the event.
Wu, who holds a bachelor’s degree in history, drew an analogy between the “1992 consensus” and both the Second Sino-Japanese War and the “Golden Years of Zhenguan” (貞觀, the second emperor of the Tang Dynasty). Wu said that the two other terms also did not exist at the beginning, but were later defined as such by historians.
Wu is adept at deceit. By comparing apples and oranges, he is attempting to use historical facts to mislead people into believing that his lie is also a “fact.”
The Golden Years of Zhenguan is the judgement of historians just as the eight-year Second Sino-Japanese War is the KMT’s own historical view. If we count from Manchukuo’s declaration of independence in 1932, it was a 14-year war, but if we count from the official declaration of war in 1941, it was just a four-year war.
More importantly, whether the “1992 consensus” exists is a matter involving Taiwan’s future as well as the well-being of all Taiwanese. How can Wu compare the term with past historical discourses?
The “1992 consensus” is similar in nature to the Treaty of Shimonoseki or the San Francisco Peace Treaty. Whether an agreement was signed at the time of the talks was clear at that time, and no sophistry can change that.
Wu is good at deceiving and misleading the public, and he deserves the reputation he enjoys.
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Eddy Chang
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