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
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