During a visit by Harvard professor Joseph Nye Jr, cofounder of the neoliberal school of thought in international relations, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) said cross-strait relations were improving because of Beijing’s “soft power,” while Nye suggested that Taiwan was using “smart power” — a combination of soft and military power — to maintain its security. However, both the renowned professor and the president seemed to miss one critical point: As Taiwan buddies up with China, Taiwan’s soft power is increasingly being tarnished by the association.
Beijing is undoubtedly an economic force to be reckoned with. Many countries look to Beijing to acquire manufactured goods and they want to maintain good relations to tap into that vast market. Taiwan is no exception and benefits from its status as a neighbor with a similar culture to China. However, economic power does not translate into soft power.
Under the Ma administration, Taiwan, in its sprint to cement economic ties with Beijing, has acted against some of the values underpinning a soft power strategy that the nation has used with great effect for years, most notably support for human rights, freedom of expression and democracy. The government seems afraid to demonstrate its core values on the international stage — it was unwilling to invite Uighur activist Rebiya Kadeer to Taiwan to attend a screening of the film The 10 Conditions of Love, with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs at one point labeling her associates as terrorists; Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama was snubbed instead of being invited with open arms as in the past; Ma’s speeches on the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre were toned down, while after Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo (劉曉波) was named as the Nobel Peace Prize winner, Ma’s exhortation that China “solve major human rights incidents with honesty and confidence” was disappointingly — if not embarrassingly — tame.
Silence on China’s human rights abuses is not the only point where the government is departing from the foundations of Taiwan’s soft power. Taiwan’s stand for democracy and the rule of law has served it well, too. However, elements of these have been hollowed out as evidenced by what appears to be the government’s outright refusal to allow a referendum on the Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement, the curious timing of the final verdicts in former president Chen Shui-bian’s (陳水扁) cases right before municipality elections and the fact that some in the government spoke so strenuously against the not-guilty verdicts, raising the question whether the executive branch had influenced the judiciary’s guilty verdicts.
While the foundations of Taiwan’s soft power erode, China’s hard power looms over its soft power. Chinese Communist Party officials appear to think economics trump everything and that they can do whatever they want because the world relies on China’s factories and access to its market. Meanwhile, which countries in the world, besides Myanmar and North Korea, want to emulate China’s political system? China has become synonymous with repression no matter how many Confucius Institutes it builds or Confucius Peace Prizes it awards and Taiwan does itself no favors by proclaiming itself a friend of such a regime.
Taiwan is slowly becoming more vulnerable as it buddies up with China, allowing many of its core values to be muddied by close relations with one of the world’s worst human rights offenders. Smart power relies on an adequate balance of soft and military power. Taiwan’s military power is already well below that of China, while the contamination of the sources of its soft power poses risks to the nation’s ties with the one country that stands as its military benefactor — the US.
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
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
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
RSS