Based on recent comments by President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), it would seem that the cross-strait “diplomatic truce” he initiated soon after coming to office either enfeebles the mind, or cannot be explained by anything other than contradictions.
During a roundtable on Monday, Ma was all wisdom when, channeling ancient Chinese philosopher Mencius (孟子), he said the best means by which two countries can get along was for the smaller country to be smart and flexible in dealing with the bigger one.
By smart, we can conclude that Ma meant keeping a low profile, being conciliatory and willing to compromise and not rattling the diplomatic cage — all things that his administration has managed with considerable success.
Just as the churning waters in the Taiwan Strait looked like they might be pacified by Ma the wise, however, the president on Wednesday told visiting Japanese academics that the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) signed in late June was not a treaty signed between two states. The reason?
“We do not recognize China as a state, so our relationship with each other is not one of country-to-country,” Ma said.
So in Ma’s alternate universe, former presidents Lee Teng-hui (李登輝) and Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁) — who both recognized the existence of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as a sovereign state — were “troublemakers,” and yet the man who would deny Beijing’s legitimacy, and the government of its 1.3 billion people, is somehow a “peacemaker.”
Only in the hallucinatory world of Ma’s cross-strait politics could insulting the larger neighbor by denying its existence be equated with wisdom and peacemaking.
It was under Lee, who like Ma was from the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT), that the Two-State Theory was formed, while under Chen relations were seen as falling under the “one country on each side” principle, which grants de jure recognition of China as a country. Yet Ma is Beijing’s man, while Lee and Chen were the object of its hatred.
Ma’s comments further beg the question: Who, exactly, is the “we” that he refers to? Just about everybody in Taiwan agrees that the PRC is a sovereign country that meets all the requirements of a Westphalian state — it has a government, a constitution, a currency, an army, relations with other states and (with the exception of irredentist claims), it has clearly defined borders. Whether one is of Chinese descent or one of the many different ethnic groups living in Taiwan, no one questions the legitimacy of China as a state or the considerable accomplishments of the Chinese people in consolidation of their state, through sweat and blood, over the decades.
Ma’s “we,” therefore, cannot claim to represent the 23 million people in whose name he is ostensibly speaking, including the great majority of KMT supporters who voted for him. It is, rather, the voice of a tiny retinue of old-guard politicians who have failed to modernize with the times and would take us back to the 1950s and 1960s, when Chiang Kai-shek (蔣中正) sought to reclaim China.
Their view stems from the by now largely discredited illusion that the Republic of China (ROC) remains a valid political entity representing the whole of China. It is, furthermore, predicated on an illusion that freezes us in time and that threatens the very existence of democratic Taiwan by sucking it into the vortex of an unsettled — but certainly avoidable — battle. There is no future for the KMT in a “reunified” ROC that encompasses the Chinese Commuist Party. It is a dead-end street, one that can only lead to political suicide and the end of Taiwan.
The president’s comments are not only an affront to the Chinese people, they equally denigrate decades of hard work and sacrifice by Taiwanese to create a modern, democratic state of their own, one that is built on its own idiosyncratic history.
With very few exceptions, “we” in Taiwan recognize China and seek to coexist peacefully and prosperously with the giant next door. It is “they,” with a few exceptions, who deny Taiwan’s right to exist. By turning the tables, Ma seems to be attempting to create a moral equivalence in the Taiwan Strait that simply does not stand up to scrutiny and that trivializes the tremendous challenges facing Taiwanese today.
History has a long line of infamous politicians who, rather than look to the future, chose to revisit the past. More often than not, this resulted in catastrophe. Given Taiwan’s fragile situation, it cannot afford a leader who would turn to an atrocious, unsettled past to build our future.
J. Michael Cole is deputy news editor at the Taipei Times.
In 2020, then-US president Donald Trump’s administration banned Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co and Samsung from manufacturing advanced chips for Chinese companies on the Entity List such as Huawei. Last year, US President Joe Biden’s administration announced that exports of high-performance computing chips from the US to China require approval; sales of semiconductor manufacturing equipment to China that can be used to produce logic chips at or below the 14/16-nanometer technology node, DRAM chips with a half-pitch less than or equal to 18 nanometers and NAND chips with 128 or more layers also require approval; and all US citizens or permanent
The Twenty-Four Histories (中國廿四史) is a collection of official Chinese dynastic histories from Records of the Grand Historian (史記) to the History of the Ming Dynasty (明史) that cover the time from the legendary Yellow Emperor (黃帝) to the Chongzhen Emperor (崇禎), the last Ming emperor. History is written by the victors. These histories are not merely records of the rise and fall of emperors, they also demonstrate the ways in which conquerors embellished their own achievements while deriding those of the conquered. The history written by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is no exception. The PRC presents its
In August 2013, Reuters reported that Beijing had been gaining soft power with investment commitments and trade with countries in Latin America. However, instead of jumping on the chance to make new allies, China stalled requests to establish diplomatic relations with the countries to avoid galling Taiwanese voters. Beijing was also courting then-president Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), and the tactic left China with a trump card if cross-strait relations turned cool. China had rebuffed at least five countries’ requests to switch diplomatic recognition to Beijing, the report said, quoting a China analyst. Honduras could become the ninth diplomatic ally, and also the fifth
OpenAI has announced a major upgrade to the technology that underpins ChatGPT, the seemingly magical online tool that professionals have been using to draft e-mails, write blog posts and more. If you think of ChatGPT as a car, the new language model known as GPT-4 adds a more powerful engine. The old ChatGPT could only read text. The new ChatGPT can look at a photograph of the contents of your fridge and suggest a dinner recipe. The old ChatGPT scored in the 10th percentile on the bar exam. The new one was in the 90th. In the hours since its release,
RSS