Political reforms have been sacrificed in China as leaders in Beijing trumpet their "stability above all" policy, President Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) said in a statement yesterday.
Chiou I-jen (邱義仁), secretary general of the National Security Council, read the president's statement at a conference entitled "Challenges and Prospects of Democratization in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong" hosted by the Friends of Hong Kong and Macau Association, The Foundation on International and Cross-strait Studies and The Taiwan Foundation for Democracy.
"The most important task for China, Taiwan and Hong Kong is not a timetable for unification, but a timetable for democratization ? The issue affects not only people's lives in the three places but also future stability and development of the Asia Pacific region," said the statement.
Chen originally planned to deliver the opening speech for the conference, which was attended by academics, officials and senior journalists from here and Hong Kong, but he declined to do so because he reportedly did not want to inflame cross-strait tensions.
The president said in the statement he had hoped for political reform in China after the 16th National Congress of the Communist Party in China decided at the end of 2002 that Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) and Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) would respectively take over the presidency and premiership.
"It is regrettable the expectation for political reform died soon afterwards ? Taiwan's democratic achievement and Hong Kong's pursuit of democracy are seen as threats to China's political system and stability rather than a driving power for democratization," the statement said.
Chen noted in the statement that democracy is neither a monster nor a threat. "The loveliness of democracy is that it embraces people and trusts people's judgment. It lets people be their own masters," the statement added.
As a panelist discussed the prospects for Hong Kong's political reform, Chen Ming-tong (陳明通), former vice chairman of the Mainland Affairs Council, said the recent row over Hong Kong's Basic Law cast a negative light on China's "one country, two systems" policy.
"Hong Kong turns out to be a negative example of how `one country, two systems' works. It would be difficult for Taiwan and the international community to buy this formulation now," Chen Ming-tong said.
Chen Ming-tong admitted Taiwan has been cornered by the "one country, two systems" policy for decades after China sold the approach in the international community as a framework that would allow Taiwan to preserve its autonomy if it would agree to eventually reunify with China.
He said China promoted "one country, two systems" so successfully that it even convinced former US President Bill Clinton.
Wang Ying (王英), a Hong Kong-based political commentator, said press freedom is the key for keeping the democracy movement alive.
Over the past year, freedom of speech in Hong Kong has been oppressed because of Beijing' s political maneuvers," he said.
"Press freedom and people's access to information are signs of whether the `one country, two systems' model can operate successfully in Hong Kong," Wang added.
A group of Taiwanese-American and Tibetan-American students at Harvard University on Saturday disrupted Chinese Ambassador to the US Xie Feng’s (謝鋒) speech at the school, accusing him of being responsible for numerous human rights violations. Four students — two Taiwanese Americans and two from Tibet — held up banners inside a conference hall where Xie was delivering a speech at the opening ceremony of the Harvard Kennedy School China Conference 2024. In a video clip provided by the Coalition of Students Resisting the CCP (Chinese Communist Party), Taiwanese-American Cosette Wu (吳亭樺) and Tibetan-American Tsering Yangchen are seen holding banners that together read:
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