Beware of complacency
Complacency is often more dangerous than evil itself.
Why do I get the feeling at times that the democracy movement in Hong Kong has more legs than the democracy movement in Taiwan? Of course Taiwan is already democratic, but since the election of President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), democracy has been under attack from Beijing from the outside and Ma and his minions from the inside. The trouble is that unless the Sunflower movement or others like it can become a “perennial” fixture in society until the day Taiwan is indeed Taiwan, the nation’s masses will still tend to be complacent.
Complacent means not voting for someone who has the word “independence” in their vocabulary (never mind whether they have it in their policy) for fear Taiwan will actually take a step toward the future. These same people will cheer any time Taiwan is mentioned in international media, or by Ang Lee (李安) or Angelina Jolie, as though Taiwan is a word or a concept only, not a country or a people group.
Complacent means voting for the party that keeps “stability,” defined as “not rocking the boat.” Unfortunately, these people have turned a blind eye to the fact that the boat has been drifting inexorably for the past six years and more toward Beijing, where “stability” is spelled o-p-p-r-e-s-s-i-o-n. They believe Ma and his party are better at maintaining the employment rate, but they refuse to understand that the Chinese Nationalist Party’s (KMT) platform basically involves allowing the complete consolidation of the economy and society with China, eventually decimating it.
Taiwan is already invisible on many world stages, in part a result of Ma’s utter surrender of the notion of the nation’s “sovereignty” to his handlers in Beijing. Complacency means assuming the US will rush to the rescue should China become adventurous, but sitting on the sidelines (“my boss won’t let me leave work early” to join the demonstration) when it comes to showing the US that Taiwanese care deeply about not becoming part of China (like recent demonstrations showed for Hong Kongers).
Left to the likes of Ma and US President Barack Obama, Taiwan could disappear and neither would blink an eye. Yes, there is also complacency in the US government about such things. However, there are many in the US government who are very active in support of Taiwan.
The children are our future. No child born in Taiwan can truly consider themselves a “mainlander” no matter the brainwashing they undergo. It is giving our children the feeling they have the right to determine their fate and the fate of their nation that will carry Taiwan safely toward the future.
However, many parents teach life lessons in complacency: “Don’t get involved” is the key principle.
In the face of such evil repression and hegemony on the part of China, we can no longer remain complacent. There is no longer a choice in the matter. People must either be for Taiwan, or for becoming one of the billion under the Chinese Communist Party’s dominion.
Complacency, as can be seen, is sometimes more dangerous than evil itself. To stamp out evil, we must first stamp out complacency.
Lee Longhwa
Los Angeles, California
After Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文) met Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing, most headlines referred to her as the leader of the opposition in Taiwan. Is she really, though? Being the chairwoman of the KMT does not automatically translate into being the leader of the opposition in the sense that most foreign readers would understand it. “Leader of the opposition” is a very British term. It applies to the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy, and to some extent, to other democracies. If you look at the UK right now, Conservative Party head Kemi Badenoch is
From the Iran war and nuclear weapons to tariffs and artificial intelligence, the agenda for this week’s Beijing summit between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is packed. Xi would almost certainly bring up Taiwan, if only to demonstrate his inflexibility on the matter. However, no one needs to meet with Xi face-to-face to understand his stance. A visit to the National Museum of China in Beijing — in particular, the “Road to Rejuvenation” exhibition, which chronicles the rise and rule of the Chinese Communist Party — might be even more revealing. Xi took the members
A Pale View of Hills, a movie released last year, follows the story of a Japanese woman from Nagasaki who moved to Britain in the 1950s with her British husband and daughter from a previous marriage. The daughter was born at a time when memories of the US atomic bombing of Nagasaki during World War II and anxiety over the effects of nuclear radiation still haunted the community. It is a reflection on the legacy of the local and national trauma of the bombing that ended the period of Japanese militarism. A central theme of the movie is the need, at
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on Friday used their legislative majority to push their version of a special defense budget bill to fund the purchase of US military equipment, with the combined spending capped at NT$780 billion (US$24.78 billion). The bill, which fell short of the Executive Yuan’s NT$1.25 trillion request, was passed by a 59-0 margin with 48 abstentions in the 113-seat legislature. KMT Chairwoman Cheng Li-wun (鄭麗文), who reportedly met with TPP Chairman Huang Kuo-chang (黃國昌) for a private meeting before holding a joint post-vote news conference, was said to have mobilized her
RSS