Taiwan is a nation with its own government and a legislature elected by its people. Other nations might deny that fact, but they cannot avoid the Taiwanese government if they want to get anything done in Taiwan. When they meet with opposition parties, they only engage the major ones.
However, China is an exception. It prefers to find political “vagabonds” who are in no way representative of Taiwan’s political voices. These “vagabonds” typically support China’s view on Taiwan’s sovereignty in exchange for financial help.
While working with “the enemy’s enemy” has always been a classic move of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) under its “united front” strategy, a look at the people the party has been working with shows that Beijing has become incredibly desperate.
It is happy to form an alliance with anyone it can find, many of whom are neither important nor enemies of Taiwan, but are parrots that simply repeat what the CCP wants them to say.
With communist parties nearly extinct around the world, the CCP can barely find other communists to hold meetings with. Its solution was to pretend that was not the case by holding a “Dialogue With World Political Parties.” The US’ representative was neither a Republican nor a Democrat, but a chief financial officer of a US communist party that exists only nominally.
Having learned from the 228 Incident, Taiwanese have fought hard to build a democratic political system and have freed themselves from the colonization of foreign powers.
While Taiwanese have taken control of their own fate, China is still pretending that the Taiwan Democratic Self-Government League — a group formed by communists who fled Taiwan during the Incident — is a real Chinese political party and that it could represent Taiwan, even though they have nothing to do with Taiwan.
In addition, Beijing has been using Taiwanese who have moved to China after marrying Chinese nationals as puppets, promoting them as representatives of “Taiwan Province.”
The New Party, which cannot even secure one seat in the legislature, has a chairman who is even more autocratic than Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平). This chairman visited the US with his “China-trained” party members and promoted his China-leaning ideology. He said that if his party is voted into power, Taiwan would refuse to buy arms from the US.
While China is against US arms sales to Taiwan, the New Party is against Taiwan buying arms from the US. One dog barks and the other wags its tail.
Although the chance of the New Party ruling Taiwan is less than that of the moon colliding with the Earth, following their remarks, the party chairman was soon invited to Beijing to meet Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Chairman Yu Zhengsheng (俞正聲).
Xi, who was a party committee secretary in Fujian Province, is known to be an expert on Taiwan. Nevertheless, being an autocrat makes a person stupid — and obviously, the more autocratic someone is, the stupider they become.
James Wang is a media commentator.
Translated by Tu Yu-an
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