Lively debate has followed former UMC chairman Robert Tsao's (
Tsao's enthusiasm and his preparedness to buy ad space in the local media may be somewhat helpful for the newspapers' business, but for all that, his suggestions are hardly feasible.
By placing the ad in Taiwan rather than in China, and by pleading to the two main local parties, Tsao makes it seem as if the problem lies in Taiwan, when in fact China is the problem. As a result, China will not pay much attention to Tsao's ad.
China has deployed almost 1,000 missiles targeting Taiwan along its coast. It is making unification a premise for discussing direct links; it has passed an "Anti-Secession" Law threatening invasion of Taiwan; and it suppresses Taiwan's international space. It is also a dictatorship. These are the reasons Taiwanese don't want to be ruled by China. China is the problem.
Tsao suggested that the DPP and the KMT cooperate to solve the cross-strait impasse by passing a peace and coexistence act. The problem with this is that the governments on both sides of the Taiwan Strait must want to resolve the conflict for such a law to be of any use. What use would such domestic legislation be if China ignored it completely or even decided to act on its "anti-secession" law?
Tsao also suggested a unification referendum, but how could Taiwan today hold such a referendum with the differences that exist between the political systems and the political atmosphere on each side of the strait? Even if conditions on both sides improved, there would be no need for a peace and coexistence law since a unification referendum could be organized based on the Referendum Act (
Although Ma advocates eventual unification, he is not so naive. He knows that it is China that is threatening to use military force and that is why he's demanding that China remove its missiles. He also knows that a domestic law is of no use, and that peace requires negotiations between the two governments to build a consensus. Peace can only be guaranteed if both sides sign a peace agreement.
Neither clearly rejecting nor approving the suggestions, Hsieh takes a flexible approach and says he respects the right of individuals to make suggestions and that he is willing to enter into peace negotiations on an equal footing with China.
Taiwan is small and weak compared with China and is thus at a disadvantage. It must avoid impulsive actions based on immature ideas lest its options deteriorate further.
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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