Two leaders on Wednesday gave closely watched policy addresses: President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) and Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam (林鄭月娥). Tsai used her Double Ten National Day speech to call out China for Beijing’s browbeating of Taiwan, and challenging peace and stability.
She urged China to act as a “responsible large nation” should.
She also vowed to defend Taiwan’s democracy at all costs and bolster national security.
Lam, in her second policy address since taking office in July last year, also spoke about the need to protect and defend sovereignty and security, but in her case she placed China’s interests ahead of Hong Kong’s by continually referring to the territory she administers second and China first.
Although the main focus of her talk was on proposals for housing, the economy and young people’s development, Lam reiterated that Hong Kong must enact laws against sedition and subversion, but would do so only when there was a favorable social environment. She pledged to “explore ways to enable” the territory to “respond positively to this constitutional requirement.”
Her speech was all “one country,” with very little defense or support for the “two systems” supposedly in place for 50 years from the 1997 handover.
It was yet another example of how rather than have Hong Kong serve as an example to China for how to be more politically free, Beijing’s aim is to erode the territory’s political system and freedoms until they are indistinguishable from its repressive state.
In China, its much-vaunted rule of law means whatever the Chinese Communist Party wants it to, including amending laws to retroactively legalize crackdowns, as the Xinjiang Provincial Government did on Tuesday to authorize vocational education centers to “educationally transform those influenced by extremism,” ie, the detention camps in which it has imprisoned millions of Uighurs to force them to renounce tenets of their Muslim faith.
In contrast, while Tsai also spoke about economic and trade goals, she did so in terms of building a stronger Taiwan and making the nation indispensible to the world.
Her speech was much stronger in tone than last year’s, when she said that the old path of confrontation with China was over. Her tougher line was fully merited, as it has been made glaringly obvious in the past few months — if it were already not clear enough — that Tsai’s efforts to maintain the “status quo,” be non-confrontational and show goodwill have been met by outright contempt by Beijing.
The poaching of diplomatic allies, aggressive efforts to force foreign governments and corporations to acquiesce to its “one China” policy, and carrot-and-stick measures targeting Taiwanese living and working in China, or in third countries, have been picking up pace.
Beijing’s mantra appears to be “no step is too big or too small,” right down to thinly veiled threats and warnings to Taiwanese living in China and Southeast Asia that they could face repercussions if they returned home for Double Ten National Day.
The response from Chinese authorities and media to the two leaders’ speeches was predictable, with Lam winning praise for her talk and the Taiwan Affairs Office of China’s State Council slamming Tsai’s address for being full of “separatist nonsense and antagonist thinking” and calling the Democratic Progressive Party “a destroyer of peace.”
However, it is clear that despite Beijing’s antipathy and international isolation, Tsai’s Taiwan is a much more desirable place to be than Lam’s Hong Kong.
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