On Saturday, President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九) met with his “old friends” John and Doris Naisbitt in his office. Being a so-called “futurist,” John Naisbitt was expected to predict Taiwan’s trends for the president and Taiwanese people.
Naisbitt likes predicting trends, especially when invited by powerful people to do so. He once wrote that for many years he was plagued by regrets, afraid of missing the most precious opportunities in life, until finally in 1996 “one of the most powerful people in the world, the [then-]president of China, Jiang Zemin [江澤民]” asked him to “tell the story of China.”
Having such a strong desire to curry favor with authoritarian power, Naisbitt would never miss the chance to please the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). His book China’s Megatrends: The 8 Pillars of a New Society did not disappoint the party.
In the book, Naisbitt predicts that China has a bright future because its current political and economic systems are unique and superior to those in Western countries. He displays a tendency to believe everything the party’s top leaders say about China’s future in their speeches, government reports and party propaganda, and he quoted these in his book as the sole source of evidence to support his argument.
The book obviously lacks first-hand materials, in-depth analysis and serious thinking. Academics have said that the book is “merely another type of party propaganda material under the name Naisbitt” and that “in terms of quality it was roughly the same standard as that of the lowest-ranking party cadre.”
Even worse, Naisbitt coined the term “horizontal democracy” to describe China’s authoritarian, power-centralized system. In his book, “horizontal democracy” is one of the “eight pillars” that facilitate the sustainability of the virtually authoritarian country.
Naisbitt eagerly embraces the powerful CCP, praising its “achievements” at every turn and supporting the party’s authoritarian rule with his twisted logic.
For Ma to invite such a person to Taiwan as an honored guest is surely an absurdity. Naisbitt took the opportunity to offer advice on the future and to predict Taiwan’s “megatrends.”
“In the next 10 years, the world will be dominated by the US and China” and “Taiwan should really and truly join the world,” Naisbitt said.
However, with Asia rising and Europe and the US in decline, “joining the world means [Taiwan] making mainland [China] your best friend,” Naisbitt said.
Ignoring the universal values of democracy and human rights, Naisbitt said “nations should now adopt the mentality of operating companies if they want to strengthen their international competitiveness.” In his view, China is a good teacher, but “the Western nations, including the US, are reluctant to learn anything from China because they think they know it all already.”
What does Naisbitt expect the Western nations and Taiwan to learn from China? In his speech in Taipei, he implied that “China’s one-party system has enabled the country to push through economic policies effectively, while Western democracies have become bogged down in political point-scoring by rival parties,” which he likened to a company with two competing boards of directors.
Being an educated citizen from a democratic nation, Naisbitt should be clear about the difference between the public and private sectors, and he must understand what “all political authority belongs to the people” actually means. Despite this, he chose to dissemble and obfuscate when it came to these basic concepts, perhaps because he wants to be or was instructed to be a “propaganda cadre” promoting CCP ideology in Taiwan.
Taiwan is democratic, so people are free to hold the same anti-democratic views as Naisbitt (or the CCP). There is also nothing inherently wrong with Ma striving to “take every chance to improve relations with China” in the non-political realm.
However, Taiwanese should be aware of the implications behind Ma’s statement in his official meeting with Naisbitt that “the political barriers between Taiwan and China are diminishing.”
Was Ma trying to convey to Naisbitt and the CCP that he no longer opposes the authoritarian politics of China? Or perhaps that he intends to gradually reform Taiwan’s polity toward “horizontal democracy” after winning next year’s presidential election to be better able to guide Taiwan in the direction of “China’s megatrends”?
If such educated guesses are true, then Taiwan’s democracy, achieved through the blood and tears of generations of Taiwanese, is in jeopardy.
Zaijun Yuan is a political scientist based in Hong Kong.
In their recent op-ed “Trump Should Rein In Taiwan” in Foreign Policy magazine, Christopher Chivvis and Stephen Wertheim argued that the US should pressure President William Lai (賴清德) to “tone it down” to de-escalate tensions in the Taiwan Strait — as if Taiwan’s words are more of a threat to peace than Beijing’s actions. It is an old argument dressed up in new concern: that Washington must rein in Taipei to avoid war. However, this narrative gets it backward. Taiwan is not the problem; China is. Calls for a so-called “grand bargain” with Beijing — where the US pressures Taiwan into concessions
The term “assassin’s mace” originates from Chinese folklore, describing a concealed weapon used by a weaker hero to defeat a stronger adversary with an unexpected strike. In more general military parlance, the concept refers to an asymmetric capability that targets a critical vulnerability of an adversary. China has found its modern equivalent of the assassin’s mace with its high-altitude electromagnetic pulse (HEMP) weapons, which are nuclear warheads detonated at a high altitude, emitting intense electromagnetic radiation capable of disabling and destroying electronics. An assassin’s mace weapon possesses two essential characteristics: strategic surprise and the ability to neutralize a core dependency.
Chinese President and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Xi Jinping (習近平) said in a politburo speech late last month that his party must protect the “bottom line” to prevent systemic threats. The tone of his address was grave, revealing deep anxieties about China’s current state of affairs. Essentially, what he worries most about is systemic threats to China’s normal development as a country. The US-China trade war has turned white hot: China’s export orders have plummeted, Chinese firms and enterprises are shutting up shop, and local debt risks are mounting daily, causing China’s economy to flag externally and hemorrhage internally. China’s
During the “426 rally” organized by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party under the slogan “fight green communism, resist dictatorship,” leaders from the two opposition parties framed it as a battle against an allegedly authoritarian administration led by President William Lai (賴清德). While criticism of the government can be a healthy expression of a vibrant, pluralistic society, and protests are quite common in Taiwan, the discourse of the 426 rally nonetheless betrayed troubling signs of collective amnesia. Specifically, the KMT, which imposed 38 years of martial law in Taiwan from 1949 to 1987, has never fully faced its
RSS