Could any opener better summarize Taiwan’s current situation than the immortal words with which Charles Dickens started his novel A Tale of Two Cities: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”?
The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and all who sail with it still insist on looking backward, whereas more progressive people are trying to look forward.
Taiwan is emerging from a tragedy to welcome the dawn of a new political era. The KMT, the architect of Taiwan’s tragedy, still believes itself to be the party that could save the nation amid the current political crisis.
If Taiwan was a normal, democratic country, should not the principle of political parties taking turns to hold the reins of power actually facilitate the country’s development along the road of democratization and normalization?
Is that not how things should be?
However, from the first transition of political power after the 2000 presidential election, the KMT has been blatantly against this principle, showing that it has never really abandoned the mindset that it is entitled to govern the country.
This mindset is a result of the party-state nature of the KMT regime. It has meant that the People’s Republic of China wrestling control of China away from the Republic of China (ROC) government was a zero-sum game, where the winner took it all. The reason for China not being able to develop a normal transition of power between parties on different ends of the political spectrum — as it is done in Europe — is that Beijing, too, is haunted by this rather outdated concept.
Between 2000 and 2008, the KMT did its best to use its power to frustrate the Democratic Progressive Party administration. The tension and fighting between the government and the opposition came from the KMT’s belief that the ROC belonged to the party and that the ancestral concept of the ROC had primacy over the actual country.
The transition of power in 2000 gave the KMT an opportunity to reinvent itself, an opportunity to shake off the party-state mindset and turn itself into a democratic political party. Evidently, it had no intentions of doing such a thing. The KMT presidential candidate at the time, former vice president Lien Chan (連戰), in his capacity as party chairman, joined forces with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) — which had previously overthrown and ousted the KMT and is still trying to annex Taiwan as part of its own territory — in the misguided and pernicious hope that he could harness the CCP’s power to deal with his political rivals at home.
Then came President Ma Ying-jeou (馬英九), who brought the party back to power, but did not make use of this new opportunity either. After gaining power, he rather disingenuously embarked on a policy of getting even closer to China, and the political, economic and cultural difficulties he has brought on Taiwanese due to the excessive links with Beijing have brought his own party close to collapse.
The cries that are being heard in Taiwan — saying that all will be lost unless the KMT folds — demonstrate that the colonial party-state system of the KMT is, indeed, falling apart.
Taiwan has at last reached a crossover between the fortunes of party-state domination and the country working to rebuild itself. This is the “golden cross” moment where Taiwan stands up to the KMT.
It is time Taiwanese set sail and left the KMT and its reactionary ways behind. This is a historical imperative.
Lee Min-yung is a poet.
Translated by Paul Cooper
Wherever one looks, the United States is ceding ground to China. From foreign aid to foreign trade, and from reorganizations to organizational guidance, the Trump administration has embarked on a stunning effort to hobble itself in grappling with what his own secretary of state calls “the most potent and dangerous near-peer adversary this nation has ever confronted.” The problems start at the Department of State. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has asserted that “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power” and that the world has returned to multipolarity, with “multi-great powers in different parts of the
President William Lai (賴清德) recently attended an event in Taipei marking the end of World War II in Europe, emphasizing in his speech: “Using force to invade another country is an unjust act and will ultimately fail.” In just a few words, he captured the core values of the postwar international order and reminded us again: History is not just for reflection, but serves as a warning for the present. From a broad historical perspective, his statement carries weight. For centuries, international relations operated under the law of the jungle — where the strong dominated and the weak were constrained. That
The Executive Yuan recently revised a page of its Web site on ethnic groups in Taiwan, replacing the term “Han” (漢族) with “the rest of the population.” The page, which was updated on March 24, describes the composition of Taiwan’s registered households as indigenous (2.5 percent), foreign origin (1.2 percent) and the rest of the population (96.2 percent). The change was picked up by a social media user and amplified by local media, sparking heated discussion over the weekend. The pan-blue and pro-China camp called it a politically motivated desinicization attempt to obscure the Han Chinese ethnicity of most Taiwanese.
The Legislative Yuan passed an amendment on Friday last week to add four national holidays and make Workers’ Day a national holiday for all sectors — a move referred to as “four plus one.” The Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and the Taiwan People’s Party (TPP), who used their combined legislative majority to push the bill through its third reading, claim the holidays were chosen based on their inherent significance and social relevance. However, in passing the amendment, they have stuck to the traditional mindset of taking a holiday just for the sake of it, failing to make good use of
RSS