While Taiwan’s national identity has matured after the Sunflower movement, a lopsided pro-China policy — that has made the nation economically dependent on China and politically confined Taiwan to the “one China” framework — calls for the rewriting of a constitution that conforms to the political reality and the public will, Academia Sinica’s Institute of Taiwan History associate research fellow Wu Rwei-ren (吳叡人) said yesterday.
Wu made the comments on the topic of “sovereignty and national status” at the Youth Constitutional Forum in Taipei, against the backdrop of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) recent talk this week about the “one country, two systems” policy and “peaceful unification” as Beijing’s solution to the “Taiwan problem.”
Wu said Taiwan is a de facto independent state, but the existing Constitution is highly controversial because its territorial claims are at odds with the regions that it rules.
The content of the Constitution is outdated and needs to be amended, he said.
Wu added that the ambiguity in the present Constitution suits the administration of President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) political discourse on the so-called “1992 consensus” and “one China with different interpretations,” which has placed Taiwan and China in a relationship framework that remains unclear.
The government’s cross-strait policy lacks a development strategy for Taiwan’s economic autonomy and has given China leverage on Taiwanese politics, Wu said.
It has also allowed Beijing to exert external pressure, with some political parties willing to play the “China card” and showing their loyalty to the Beijing government during presidential elections, he added.
If Taiwan is not able to rewrite its Constitution or amend it to delink it from the “one China” framework, its future is not promising, he said.
Citing examples from this year — the Sunflower movement and former Democratic Progressive Party chairman Lin I-hsiung’s (林義雄) hunger strike in protest against nuclear power — Wu said that these events and others had shown that Taiwanese national identity has grown substantially over the past two to three decades.
Dissonant opinions still abound in Taiwan, but “time is on our side,” he said.
Wu urged people to seriously consider the possibility of rewriting the Constitution to secure the nation’s survival and development.
Taiwanese paleontologists have discovered fossil evidence that pythons up to 4m long inhabited Taiwan during the Pleistocene epoch, reporting their findings in the international scientific journal Historical Biology. National Taiwan University (NTU) Institute of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology associate professor Tsai Cheng-hsiu (蔡政修) led the team that discovered the largest snake fossil ever found in Taiwan. The single trunk vertebra was discovered in Tainan at the Chiting Formation, dated to between 400,000 and 800,000 years ago in the Middle Pleistocene, the paper said. The area also produced Taiwan’s first avian fossil, as well as crocodile, mammoth, saber-toothed cat and rhinoceros fossils, it said. Discoveries
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