China bears the same responsibility as Taiwan for maintaining peace and stability across the Taiwan Strait, but it is under less pressure than Taiwan to do its share, partly aided by demagogues who consistently play along with Beijing — shamelessly — at the expense of Taiwan’s interests.
A recent survey conducted during a workshop on China’s impact presented by the Academia Sinica’s Institute of Sociology found that 50 to 60 percent of respondents in all age groups were in favor of maintaining compulsory military service. The highest proportion, 70 percent, was in the 30-to-39 age group, while the support rate in the 20-to-29 and 40-to-49 age groups was 62 percent.
The findings surprised many politicians, including Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Legislator Lin Yu-fang (林郁方). He appeared to be suspicious of the results, as he dared Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) Legislator Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴), who publicized the survey, to make maintaining conscription a key tenet of her party’s presidential campaign, apparently because he believes the policy would scare away voters.
Lin’s views on the nation’s development are typical of KMT members, who believe that Taiwan has no choice other than to rely on China, and that its trade and economic cooperation with China is conducive to easing the potential of a cross-strait military conflict.
Such views have blinded them to the public’s growing concerns as China continues to beef up its military power and tighten its grip on Taiwan’s external relations, while the KMT administration has downplayed controversy over the nation’s sovereignty and status and curtailed investment in building the nation’s defense capability.
Last week, the DPP released the results of a poll which found that more than 60 percent of respondents disagreed with KMT Chairman Eric Chu’s (朱立倫) description of cross-strait relations as “two sides belonging to one China” at his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) in Beijing. Chu later said in Taiwan that he meant the “one China” to refer to the Republic of China (ROC).
In an apparent effort to refute the DPP’s claims, the Mainland Affairs Council the next day published the results of a poll which indicated that 53 percent of respondents supported the government’s push for cross-strait policies based on the principle of the so-called “1992 consensus,” wherein both sides recognize “one China,” with each side having its own interpretation of what “China” means.
While the two polls might seem contradictory on the surface, they are not. The implicit assumption underlying the two surveys might be that, in terms of political identification, the ROC is the common denominator of the Taiwanese populace, but people were not oblivious to the KMT’s wishful narrative that “one China” is recognized as the ROC, but not by the People’s Republic of China.
The reality that a sense of Taiwanese national identity is steadily growing could have prevented the deterioration of divisive domestic politics that have continued to put the nation in a politically vulnerable position with respect to negotiations with China, but the problem is that the cross-strait policy adopted by the KMT administration has been overly attuned to Beijing’s sensitivities.
It is no wonder that the newly drafted version of China’s national security act — which stipulates that Taiwan shares the same duties as all “Chinese people” to safeguard national sovereignty, unification and territorial integrity — and the latest Pentagon report that examined potential Chinese attacks on Taiwan were each regarded by the KMT administration as a matter of no importance.
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