Democracy key to diplomacy
Two weeks and various Ministry of Foreign Affairs statements later, I am still confused about Taiwan's decision to preemptively sever diplomatic ties with Nauru. This bafflement continues even after your interview with Minister of Foreign Affairs Eugene Chien (
Chien reiterated the point that, unlike China's, Taiwan's diplomacy is mainly prompted by a genuine wish "to give back to the global community" and to bring genuine benefit to the recipient countries. Chien emphasized the uniqueness of Taiwanese aid. But who really knew what type of aid Taiwan was providing to develop Nauru? And how many even knew where Nauru was before this debacle?
The reality is that this need to give back to the global community has never been a central tenet of Taiwanese diplomacy -- not now for Nauru and certainly never in the past. It was not so long ago that Taiwan maintained, in good conscience, diplomatic relations with the apartheid regime in South Africa. Not to mention that Taiwan had diplomatic ties with the military governments of El Salvador and Guatemala during their bloody civil wars in the 1980s.
Financial diplomacy remains where it has always been: at the core of Taiwan's foreign policy. Only those countries with little trade with China can "afford" their diplomatic ties with Taiwan. And only those that have been financially disappointed by China turn to Taiwan for a better aid package.
Beyond money politics, Taiwan will pay a significant price for this diplomatic hypocrisy. The key to international recognition for Taiwan is not a game of numbers involving small countries like Nauru. It will not be discussed within the context of "diplomatic allies" or be based on the amount of foreign aid that the country disburses.
The key to the thorny issue of recognition for Taiwan lies within our transformation from a society under martial law to a democracy. The existence of a democratic Taiwan alone rebuts the claim made by the Chinese leadership that democracy and human rights are Western values that are not compatible with the Chinese tradition. Democratization has already carved out diplomatic space for the existence of Taiwan -- space in which Taiwan's security and national dignity can be discussed.
Chien was right to say our largest comparative advantage lies in our democratic system of government. By continuing to remain on our diplomatic and rhetorical high-horse, however, Taiwan will be unable to fully capitalize on this comparative advantage by effectively mobilizing international public support for our existence.
Bonny Ling
Taipei
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,
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) caucus whip Fu Kun-chi (傅?萁) has caused havoc with his attempts to overturn the democratic and constitutional order in the legislature. If we look at this devolution from the context of a transition to democracy from authoritarianism in a culturally Chinese sense — that of zhonghua (中華) — then we are playing witness to a servile spirit from a millennia-old form of totalitarianism that is intent on damaging the nation’s hard-won democracy. This servile spirit is ingrained in Chinese culture. About a century ago, Chinese satirist and author Lu Xun (魯迅) saw through the servile nature of
The National Development Council (NDC) on Wednesday last week launched a six-month “digital nomad visitor visa” program, the Central News Agency (CNA) reported on Monday. The new visa is for foreign nationals from Taiwan’s list of visa-exempt countries who meet financial eligibility criteria and provide proof of work contracts, but it is not clear how it differs from other visitor visas for nationals of those countries, CNA wrote. The NDC last year said that it hoped to attract 100,000 “digital nomads,” according to the report. Interest in working remotely from abroad has significantly increased in recent years following improvements in
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
RSS