Former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱) certainly got a number of things wrong in her comments on Taiwan’s history (“Former KMT chairwoman Hung slams ‘desinicization,’” Aug. 27, page 3).
At a forum commemorating Ming-era warlord Cheng Cheng-kung (鄭成功, also known as Koxinga) she criticized President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) administration for substituting “Cheng’s governance of Taiwan under the Ming Dynasty” with the “Cheng Dynasty” in school textbooks.
While Cheng was a Ming loyalist, by the time he came to Taiwan (1661-1662), the Ming Dynasty had long disappeared, as the Qing Dynasty took over in 1644. The new formulation is thus more factually correct than the old.
Hung also said that “had Cheng not reclaimed Taiwan from the Dutch 350 years ago, there would be no Taiwan as we know it today.”
The operative word here — reclaimed — is incorrect.
Before the arrival of the Dutch in 1624, Taiwan was not part of China: The Dutch found only a few hundred Hokkien fishermen and traders living along the coast, and no administrative presence from China whatsoever.
Indeed, when the Dutch tried to establish a trading post along the Chinese coast in 1622, they were told by Ming Dynasty emperor Zhu Youxiao’s (朱由校) envoys that they needed to go “beyond Chinese territory,” so the Dutch established Fort Zeelandia in what is now known as Tainan.
Certainly Hung is correct in saying that if history had been different 350 years ago, there would be no Taiwan as we know it today. We could surmise that if Taiwan had continued under Dutch rule, today it would have been a free and democratic nation, internationally recognized, just like Indonesia.
While today Koxinga’s legacy has traditionally been presented in a positive light, Taiwan’s majority population in the 1600s — Aborigines such as the Siraya — saw him as a corrupt and brutal warlord who killed many people, destroyed their culture and took their land.
This sentiment still lingers: In a survey among high school and college-aged Aborigines in Tainan earlier this year, 44.4 percent of respondents thought that Koxinga’s rule had been bad for Taiwan, while only 32.7 percent said it had been positive and 22.8 percent did not know.
So perhaps Koxinga’s legacy is not as positive as Hung would like it to be.
Gerrit van der Wees teaches the history of Taiwan at George Mason University in Virginia.
Taiwan stands at the epicenter of a seismic shift that will determine the Indo-Pacific’s future security architecture. Whether deterrence prevails or collapses will reverberate far beyond the Taiwan Strait, fundamentally reshaping global power dynamics. The stakes could not be higher. Today, Taipei confronts an unprecedented convergence of threats from an increasingly muscular China that has intensified its multidimensional pressure campaign. Beijing’s strategy is comprehensive: military intimidation, diplomatic isolation, economic coercion, and sophisticated influence operations designed to fracture Taiwan’s democratic society from within. This challenge is magnified by Taiwan’s internal political divisions, which extend to fundamental questions about the island’s identity and future
The narrative surrounding Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s attendance at last week’s Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit — where he held hands with Russian President Vladimir Putin and chatted amiably with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) — was widely framed as a signal of Modi distancing himself from the US and edging closer to regional autocrats. It was depicted as Modi reacting to the levying of high US tariffs, burying the hatchet over border disputes with China, and heralding less engagement with the Quadrilateral Security dialogue (Quad) composed of the US, India, Japan and Australia. With Modi in China for the
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) has postponed its chairperson candidate registration for two weeks, and so far, nine people have announced their intention to run for chairperson, the most on record, with more expected to announce their campaign in the final days. On the evening of Aug. 23, shortly after seven KMT lawmakers survived recall votes, KMT Chairman Eric Chu (朱立倫) announced he would step down and urged Taichung Mayor Lu Shiow-yen (盧秀燕) to step in and lead the party back to power. Lu immediately ruled herself out the following day, leaving the subject in question. In the days that followed, several
The Jamestown Foundation last week published an article exposing Beijing’s oil rigs and other potential dual-use platforms in waters near Pratas Island (Dongsha Island, 東沙島). China’s activities there resembled what they did in the East China Sea, inside the exclusive economic zones of Japan and South Korea, as well as with other South China Sea claimants. However, the most surprising element of the report was that the authors’ government contacts and Jamestown’s own evinced little awareness of China’s activities. That Beijing’s testing of Taiwanese (and its allies) situational awareness seemingly went unnoticed strongly suggests the need for more intelligence. Taiwan’s naval
RSS