Tainan Mayor William Lai (賴清德) caused an uproar last week when he said that he feels “affinity toward China as much as he loves Taiwan.”
Fellow Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) member and Kaohsiung Mayor Chen Chu (陳菊) responded by describing herself as “at peace with China,” while Taoyuan Mayor Cheng Wen-tsan (鄭文燦), another DPP member, described himself as being “China-friendly.”
Commenting on the three mayors’ remarks, Lee Hsiao-feng (李筱峰), a professor at National Taipei University’s Graduate School of Taiwanese Culture, said: “They are idealistic expressions of hope, but also expressions of goodwill. It is not simply wishful thinking on our part, but for this goodwill to be turned to practical use does require reciprocity from China.”
Lee is correct: The ball is in China’s court. President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) China policy stresses that her government will “continue to pursue the peaceful development of cross-strait ties, in accordance with the framework of the current Constitution of the Republic of China [ROC] and general public opinion.”
The above formula contains an enormous amount of goodwill. In a democratic nation, “adhering to general public opinion” goes without saying. As for the phrase “in accordance with the framework of the current Constitution of the ROC,” this means that Tsai’s government is committed to adhering to the Constitution, in its current form.
In its present form, the ROC Constitution is closely related to a final draft of the constitution known as the Constitutional Draft of the Political Convention, which was jointly drafted by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).
The CCP later boycotted theNational Assembly and declared that it would not recognize the ROC Constitution, following its promulgation by the Nationalist government on Jan. 1, 1947.
Generally speaking, China has no problems with this part of Tsai’s China policy. However, ever since Tsai refused to accept the so-called “1992 consensus,” Beijing has been winding itself up into a frenzy.
China’s leaders see the government’s non-recognition of the “1992 consensus” as saying that it sees China as another nation, and as a result have been using every opportunity to demand that Taiwan express its acceptance of the “consensus” and claiming that Taiwan and China are “joined at the hip,” and must unite.
One can see that Beijing will be satisfied with nothing short of the full annexation of Taiwan.
Last month, the Council of Grand Justices issued Constitutional Interpretation No. 748, making Taiwan the first nation in Asia to guarantee the right of same-sex couples to marry.
The news was a shock to Chinese citizens, and online media outlets made the observation that the grand justices’ decision clearly demonstrates that there are two legal governments on either side of the Taiwan Strait.
The phrase “in accordance with the framework of the current ROC Constitution,” undoubtedly gives Chinese the impression that Taiwan and China are attached by an invisible umbilical cord and creates a feeling of commonality between the two nations.
The problem is that since the enactment of the original ROC constitution in Nanjing, it has been revised no less than seven times by the legislature in Taiwan, to the extent that it has essentially morphed into a “Taiwanese constitution.”
Furthermore, the old National Assembly was “suspended” in 2005, which effectively severed the umbilical cord with China.
In addition, while China has its own grand justices, they are not charged with making constitutional interpretations.
In Taiwan, constitutional interpretations carry the same weight as the Constitution. This means that the sensation in international media when a constitutional interpretation guaranteed the right of same-sex couples to marry had the effect of signaling to the world that Taiwan, with its mature legal system, exists as a nation that is separate and distinct from China.
This has of course touched upon a raw nerve in China, which is why, after the interpretation was announced, China Central Television severely criticized “the Taiwanese authorities” for “violating ethical codes governing human relations.”
One can reasonably infer from this that same-sex marriage is not the real issue for Beijing; it was really an expression of impotent rage from a dictatorship at its inability to block the constitutional interpretation.
Taiwan was only able to achieve this milestone because it is a legally founded state. This fact was not lost on Chinese Internet users who lamented that Taiwan has “in the blink of an eye drifted apart from China; the pace of change is too fast.”
Taiwanese might well respond: “Whose fault is that?”
Christian Fan Jiang works in electronic media.
Translated by Edward Jones
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS