The road toward transitional justice in Taiwan is filled with obstacles. Strong opposition mainly comes from Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) politicians, who want to protect the godlike status of Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) and Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國). They seem to think that the effort to rectify past unjust, fabricated or wrongful cases would expose the illusion of the party’s political achievements in governing Taiwan and severely downgrade the political legacy of the two Chiangs.
Moreover, they see transitional justice efforts as building the foundation for Taiwanese independence. They think it is aimed at desinicization and a tilt toward the US and Japan, as well as a way to sweep away the political and cultural obstacles to the establishment of Taiwan as a sovereign and independent nation.
For this reason, certain individuals and groups take repeated radical action to disrupt transitional justice. Even though the political project seems to have reached the home stretch, the final leg remains long and winding.
For Taiwan, having been ruled by authoritarian and foreign regimes in the past, the transitional justice process is necessary for the establishment of a normalized democratic country. Although the nation was ruled by foreign regimes and their representatives for several hundred years, it became an ethnically, culturally and religiously diverse society even before the transition to democracy and localization.
Ethnically speaking, Taiwan mainly consists of Austronesian indigenous peoples, early Chinese settlers, war refugees who followed Chiang Kai-shek here and new immigrant spouses. Throughout the years, these diverse ethnic groups have been integrated into a shared community, so distinct and self-determined that it by no means is “an inseparable part of Chinese territory since ancient times,” as China claims.
To emphasize that Taiwan and China do not belong to the same country, carrying out transitional justice is a necessary addition to democratization and localization, so as to remove the past dark-power politics and authoritarian rule history, and consolidate all Taiwanese even more firmly to establish a shared community.
The implementation of transitional justice not only helps integrate diverse ethnic groups and cultures in Taiwan, but more importantly, serves as a stark contrast to the dark and barbaric nature of China’s autocratic form of government, which has diverted far from the road taken by Taiwan toward achieving benevolence and goodwill. This contrast shows that unification is neither justified nor legitimate.
Regrettably, some domestic pro-unification figures ignore and even go to great lengths to smear the universal values of human rights and democracy, while the descendants of the perpetrators confuse right and wrong, turning justice upside down by labeling the advocates of transitional justice “Dong Chang” (東廠) — a Ming Dynasty secret police and spy agency.
There are also opportunistic politicians who claim to be moving beyond the traditional blue and green political divide, but in reality sit on the fence and move between the two. They repeatedly block transitional justice efforts by promoting the idea that it would cause social division and conflict.
However, this specious and twisted discourse cannot hide the sheer power of transitional justice, which shows the Chinese regime’s authoritarian dictatorship and unveils its deceit as it trumpets the great cause of reinvigorating Zhonghua minzu (中華民族, “Chinese nation”), while pursuing the Chinese imperial dream in reality.
Taiwan has become increasingly incompatible with China in terms of the state, social developments and even its innate character, and there is simply no homogeneity between the two.
First, the early phase of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was a totalitarian rule built on the incessant mass movements and power struggles of Mao Zedong’s (毛澤東) charismatic leadership approach.
After the Cultural Revolution ended, China started to undertake economic reforms and explore theories of enlightened despotism. This tendency stopped with the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre. Since then, the regime has become more authoritarian, reaching a high point when Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) took office and abolished presidential term limits and used the combined economic and technological powers to move on to a “digital authoritarian regime.”
During this time democracy reached new heights in Taiwan. The two sides of the Taiwan Strait have evolved into two completely different countries: one without any personal freedom, even banning Winnie the Pooh, while the other is a democracy, where people believe democracy and freedom are as important as the air they breathe.
If these two countries are forced into an “arranged marriage,” historical tragedies similar to the 228 Incident are very likely to occur. How could these two “fall deeply in love?”
Most importantly, the “Chinese empire” only exists in the “China dream” of a feudal dynasty, and the so-called Zhonghua minzu is an imagined community that does not exist.
When China claims that its dynastic history has never been interrupted, it actually reverses the history of how China was conquered by foreigners, such as the Mongolians and the Manchus, and builds a false history in which these conquerors were assimilated by the “great culture” of the conquered.
After the Chinese Communist Party’s establishment of the PRC, the country has become not a state ruled under the dictatorship of the proletariat, but a successor state of a false history. Chinese leaders are treating their fabricated history as a historical mission for the great reinvigoration of Zhonghua minzu and attempting to accomplish this mission using the state power accumulated through China’s economic development.
Due to its authoritarian and autocratic nature and feverish “China dream,” China poses a severe threat to human civilization, universal values, and the geopolitics of democratic and free nations. If the “China dream” is realized, civilization could be pushed to the verge of destruction.
In China’s hegemonic rise, Taiwan faces a much more dangerous situation than other democracies, because of the domestic threat posed by conservative anti-democratic forces, as well as the external threat of military invasion.
Attacked from within and without, Taiwanese should put more faith in democracy and universal values, thoroughly implement transitional justice and consolidate its democracy, so as to solidify the sense of shared community in opposition to authoritarian China and survive this crisis.
Translated by Chang Ho-ming
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