Taiwan needs to resolve the issue of its divided national identity to become a full-fledged democracy, and that requires civic awareness and engagement from the public, as well as a humble national leader who is strongly committed to democracy, former president Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) said yesterday.
Lee made the remarks in a speech at a forum hosted by the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy, the first of a series of lectures to celebrate a 10th anniversary of the government-affiliated organization headed by Legislative Speaker Wang Jin-pyng (王金平).
Dubbed “Mr Democracy” by Newsweek magazine in 1996, Lee said he followed two paths to political reform when he served as vice president in the late 1980s under then-president Chiang Ching-kuo (蔣經國).
Photo: George Tsorng, Taipei Times
Lee said that Chiang said on two separate occasions that “I am Taiwanese” and that “the president of the Republic of China is not required to be a member of the Chiang family,” which struck Lee as important because that was a marked departure from China’s 5,000-year history of imperial rule.
“Though I did not say anything at the time, I was of exactly the same mind as [Chiang] and that put me on the course of political reform” during his 12-year presidency, Lee said.
As influential political scientist Samuel Huntington wrote regarding challenges to democratic consolidation in third-wave democracies, Taiwan was involved in the “dissolution and reconstruction of national identity,” he said.
On the road to building a full-fledged democracy, the problem of a divided national identity that continues to haunt Taiwan needs to be resolved thoroughly, Lee said.
Lee said the idea of “new-era Taiwanese” that he put forward in 2005, when political infighting followed Taiwan’s first handover of power in 2000 and China began to use a united front strategy to divide Taiwanese, aimed to boost national identification with Taiwan.
“There was no distinction between ‘new’ Taiwanese or ‘old’ Taiwanese. Regardless of ethnicity, all 23 million people in Taiwan are ‘new-era Taiwanese,’” he said.
Many people in Taiwan who had considered themselves Chinese because that was how they were educated have now come to the realization that this was “a fictitious notion inconsistent with history and reality,” Lee said.
“Over 400 years of Taiwan’s history, Taiwan was ruled by [China’s] Qing Dynasty, Japan, the Netherlands and Spain. If China’s claim that Taiwan is part of its territory made sense, why couldn’t the other regimes make the same claim? British people would never say that the US is part of the UK,” he said.
Taiwan is a society of immigrants, and people in such a society have the right to establish their own government and country, Lee said.
Taiwanese need to develop civic awareness and exert their free will to break out of ethnic boxes, to get rid of the “fictitious notion” that they are Chinese and break away from imperial mindsets so that they can build up identification with Taiwan to ward off anti-democracy elements and Chinese authoritarianism, he said.
Lee said the future of democratic consolidation in Taiwan would also be closely related to whether the country has a capable leader.
Taiwan needs a leader who insists on defending Taiwanese, who has strong convictions about democracy and who is impartial and not concerned with the interests of any particular individual, party or minority, Lee said.
A national leader must also listen to the opinions of opponents and the needs of people with a humble and calm attitude to resolve problems in people’s lives, Lee said.
“They don’t resolve people’s problems by engaging in political infighting every day,” he said.
FALSE DOCUMENTS? Actor William Liao said he was ‘voluntarily cooperating’ with police after a suspect was accused of helping to produce false medical certificates Police yesterday questioned at least six entertainers amid allegations of evasion of compulsory military service, with Lee Chuan (李銓), a member of boy band Choc7 (超克7), and actor Daniel Chen (陳大天) among those summoned. The New Taipei City District Prosecutors’ Office in January launched an investigation into a group that was allegedly helping men dodge compulsory military service using falsified medical documents. Actor Darren Wang (王大陸) has been accused of being one of the group’s clients. As the investigation expanded, investigators at New Taipei City’s Yonghe Precinct said that other entertainers commissioned the group to obtain false documents. The main suspect, a man surnamed
The government is considering polices to increase rental subsidies for people living in social housing who get married and have children, Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰) said yesterday. During an interview with the Plain Law Movement (法律白話文) podcast, Cho said that housing prices cannot be brought down overnight without affecting banks and mortgages. Therefore, the government is focusing on providing more aid for young people by taking 3 to 5 percent of urban renewal projects and zone expropriations and using that land for social housing, he said. Single people living in social housing who get married and become parents could obtain 50 percent more
DEMOGRAPHICS: Robotics is the most promising answer to looming labor woes, the long-term care system and national contingency response, an official said Taiwan is to launch a five-year plan to boost the robotics industry in a bid to address labor shortages stemming from a declining and aging population, the Executive Yuan said yesterday. The government approved the initiative, dubbed the Smart Robotics Industry Promotion Plan, via executive order, senior officials told a post-Cabinet meeting news conference in Taipei. Taiwan’s population decline would strain the economy and the nation’s ability to care for vulnerable and elderly people, said Peter Hong (洪樂文), who heads the National Science and Technology Council’s (NSTC) Department of Engineering and Technologies. Projections show that the proportion of Taiwanese 65 or older would
Democracies must remain united in the face of a shifting geopolitical landscape, former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) told the Copenhagen Democracy Summit on Tuesday, while emphasizing the importance of Taiwan’s security to the world. “Taiwan’s security is essential to regional stability and to defending democratic values amid mounting authoritarianism,” Tsai said at the annual forum in the Danish capital. Noting a “new geopolitical landscape” in which global trade and security face “uncertainty and unpredictability,” Tsai said that democracies must remain united and be more committed to building up resilience together in the face of challenges. Resilience “allows us to absorb shocks, adapt under
RSS