Ahead of China’s planned celebrations of the 80th anniversary of Taiwan’s so-called “retrocession” today, National Security Council adviser Alex Huang (黃重諺) said that without true freedom and democracy, there was no “liberation,” and only when people become their own masters can there truly be a “retrocession.”
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) definition of “peace” is different from that of people who live in a democracy, Huang wrote on Facebook on Thursday.
It loves to lecture Taiwanese that they should be grateful for the “war of resistance against Japan” and Taiwan’s “retrocession,” or they would have become “colonial” or “imperial” subjects, he said.
Photo: CNA
This attitude prevents the CCP from even observing international commemorations of the victory that ended World War II and its spirit of unity defeating aggression, Huang added.
The blood shed by Chinese showed their determination to resist the Japanese invasion, and yet after such a hard-won victory and people’s expectations of peace and democracy, they were instead confronted by an even bloodier civil war — the so-called “liberation” of China initiated by the CCP, he said.
The CCP’s “liberation” of China in 1949 resulted in the deaths of at least 1 million Chinese, and its victory brought not democracy, but tens of millions more deaths through its “Three-Anti” and “Five-Anti” campaigns, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, he wrote.
On the other side of the Taiwan Strait, Taiwanese, who had become the colonized people of a foreign nation because the Qing Dynasty lost to the Japanese, were looking forward to becoming the masters of their own country and implementing the concepts of human rights and democratic government, Huang said.
Instead, they saw the ushering in of a five-decade-long autocratic government, including 38 years of martial law, he said.
China’s sense of superiority over Taiwan rings hollow, as it is neither democratic nor free, Huang wrote.
China oppresses its people — the martyrs who helped them win the war and who should be the masters of the state, he wrote.
Urging Chinese to view history with greater humility, Huang wrote: “Taiwanese do not owe the Chinese anything,” and “Taiwan is for the people of Taiwan, and is also the world’s Taiwan.”
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