last month, investigators and prosecutors searched the residences of New Party spokesman Wang Ping-chung (王炳忠) and three other New Party members. This is reminiscent of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Central Policy Research Office director Wang Huning (王滬寧), who was instrumental in including “socialism with Chinese characteristics in the era of Chinese President Xi Jingping (習近平)” in the nation’s constitution at last year’s 19th National Congress of the CCP, and how he has been an architect of the plan to bury Taiwanese democracy.
At the end of 2005, Wang Huning proposed a political strategy against Taiwan to then-Chinese president Hu Jintao (胡錦濤). For Wang Huning, the CCP had already achieved considerable influence over Taiwan through long-term infiltration and united front tactics, and he believed the party could take further advantage of Taiwan’s democratic system by establishing a legitimate political organization in Taiwan.
In his book The Taiwan Crisis, exiled Chinese writer Yuan Hongbing (袁紅冰) said that in June 2008, the Chinese Central Political Bureau passed its “political strategy for settling the Taiwan issue” and listed organizing a political party in Taiwan as its most important united front tactic.
PEACEFUL UNIFICATION
Wang Huning targeted more than 20 Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and Democratic Progressive Party political figures who had been marginalized by their party and invited them to serve as party organizing central committee members. Given that the project was already well-developed, it is likely that the CCP had been working on the idea for some time.
A spokesperson from China’s Taiwan Affairs Office expressed “great concern” about the search of Wang Ping-chung’s and other New Party members’ homes, and condemned authorities for “wantonly suppressing and persecuting the forces and people who advocate peaceful unification of the two sides of the Strait.”
The New Party chairman said that “White Terror cannot be done this way.”
“This is political persecution and the authorities are forcing people to revolt,” the party’s vice chairman said.
Academic and Broadcasting Corp of China chairman Jaw Shaw-kong (趙少康), who is also a political pundit, asked whether there was any difference between arresting New Party cadres and stigmatizing them by accusing them of liaising with the CCP, and the approach taken by the then-government in the White Terror era.
‘WARTIME CONTROL’
Former TVBS news anchor Lee Yen-chiou (李艷秋) said that it would have either a chilling effect or create strong resistance.
Media personality Clara Chou (周玉蔻) said in the political commentary program New Taiwan Refueling that as far as she knows, the New China Youth Association — which was established and is chaired by Wang Ping-chung as an extension of the New Party — and the China Revival Society at National Taiwan University, established by New Party member Huo Han-ting (侯漢廷), are organizations espousing political ideas similar to those of the CCP.
A team doing training similar to that of the military has also been set up with the goal of “wartime control.”
Could the CCP and the New Party’s agenda of “working together toward the peaceful unification of the motherland” have already started? Is it perhaps even bearing fruit?
Li Dao-yong is director of the City South Culture and History Studio.
Translated by Lin Lee-Kai
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