At midnight last night, in a flutter of flags, the final curtain came down on five hundred years of European colonialism in Asia. The symbolism of this event, coming at the end of the millennium, naturally has invited a deeper significance to be read into it as some kind of historical watershed for the region, especially its behemoth, China.
Of course, such speculation is hardly being done justice by the reality of the event's importance. In contrast with the transfer of Hong Kong, which had become such a symbol of capitalism that its takeover by China seemed a major milestone in China's own embrace of the market economy, Macau carries little special resonance.
Yet this is probably a major reason why the propaganda about how Macau is a stepping stone to Taiwan has been able to gain some currency. If the event itself is little for Chinese to cheer about, the process of which it is supposedly a part -- reclamation of "lost" Chinese territory -- can be counted on to drum up nationalistic enthusiasm.
This paper has already noted the insipidness of such reasoning, especially the part that Macau would somehow be "more" useful as a model for Taiwan than Hong Kong: to the extent that it is distinct from the British colony, it is, if anything, less like Taiwan.
But, looked at in another way, there is something valuable that could come out of the Macau handover celebrations. China could use the occasion as a last hurrah in its reclamationist (its neighbors might well read expansionist) campaign. With the last colonial power gone from its soil, it might be persuaded to reconsider its claims in the South China Sea and Taiwan Strait -- or at least its intended methods of staking those claims.
One of the primary psychological drives of China's reunificationist ambitions has always been the perception of the Chinese people that they have been victimized by the West. For China, the cry "centuries of humiliation" is what "Versailles" was for Germany. Now that the last of the colonizers has left for good, it is time for China to change its tune. The handover celebrations are a suitable occasion for China to start to rewrite its version of history, painting over the stain of humiliation as an era that has been overcome successfully. With past grievances behind it, China's hypersensitivity to perceived slights to its dignity would no longer be necessary.
If China can gain a measure of self-confidence in this way, it will go a long way toward easing tensions in the region. Perhaps even more importantly, it would enable the Chinese people to stand up for themselves as autonomous individuals, rather than mere cogs in the project of national unification.
Unfortunately, there is a darker possibility, that the regime in Beijing will continue to need to invent external enemies in order to prop up its legitimacy. The "Taiwan next" propaganda ominously fits this hypothesis -- it seems expressly designed to artificially extend the era of unresolved humiliations into the indefinite future.
Along with the rest of the region, we hope that China will be mature enough to draw a line under the past and start to build a "normal" society. Today would be a good day to do it.
Monday was the 37th anniversary of former president Chiang Ching-kuo’s (蔣經國) death. Chiang — a son of former president Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石), who had implemented party-state rule and martial law in Taiwan — has a complicated legacy. Whether one looks at his time in power in a positive or negative light depends very much on who they are, and what their relationship with the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) is. Although toward the end of his life Chiang Ching-kuo lifted martial law and steered Taiwan onto the path of democratization, these changes were forced upon him by internal and external pressures,
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In their New York Times bestseller How Democracies Die, Harvard political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt said that democracies today “may die at the hands not of generals but of elected leaders. Many government efforts to subvert democracy are ‘legal,’ in the sense that they are approved by the legislature or accepted by the courts. They may even be portrayed as efforts to improve democracy — making the judiciary more efficient, combating corruption, or cleaning up the electoral process.” Moreover, the two authors observe that those who denounce such legal threats to democracy are often “dismissed as exaggerating or
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