The situation across the Taiwan Strait has become unstable and everyone knows who is to blame, Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) Vice Chairman Hau Lung-bin (郝龍斌) said on Wednesday to the only audience likely to listen to him, much less agree: KMT members and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) officials and flunkies.
Hau named no names in his speech to the 10th Straits Forum in Xiamen, China, but he did not have to with that audience. They would all know to whom he was referring, just as they would all be equally incapable of acknowledging that the situation could be due to their own parties’ actions.
Hau mentioned the 23 cross-strait accords that were signed during then-president Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) KMT administration, calling them “solemn promises made by both sides of the Taiwan Strait to their people ... and indispensable preconditions for Beijing’s ‘31 incentives’ designed to promote cross-strait economic and cultural exchanges.”
Missing from his myopic paean to a cross-strait family was any recognition that it was Ma and the KMT’s attempt to ram the last of those 23 accords, the service trade agreement, through the legislature that triggered the Sunflower movement’s occupation of the Legislative Yuan in 2014 and ignited a groundswell of opposition that cost the KMT the Presidential Office and its legislative majority in 2016.
Also missing from Hau’s speech, or the one by Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Chairman Wang Yang (汪洋) blaming the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) for thwarting the development of a peaceful cross-strait relationship, was any recognition that it was actually the CCP’s actions, especially Chinese President Xi Jinping’s (習近平) efforts to eliminate China’s fledgling civil society and its continuing flaunting of its constitution, that have made a majority of Taiwanese averse to the parties’ unification dream.
Xi and the CCP are the bulls running amok, not the DPP or Taiwanese demanding a say in their own future, unwilling to embrace one that means giving up everything they have gained in the past two decades.
Hau also failed to add to his repeated mentions of the so-called “1992 consensus” that the KMT has always insisted that its purported agreement with the CCP included each side having its own interpretation of what the “China” in “one China” means, showing that he lacks the bravery to acknowledge that even within a family, there could be disagreements.
Of course, in Beijing’s view it is the DPP that has been running amok. It would be funny — if it were not so tragic and the potential repercussions so dire — how oblivious Chinese bureaucrats can be to their hypocrisy, as the Taiwan Affairs Office showed once again when it complained about President Tsai Ing-wen’s (蔡英文) message on Monday on Facebook urging China to address the injustices of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
After saying that the “leader of the Democratic Progressive Party authority” and the DPP “have no qualifications to make irresponsible remarks” about China’s development, it proclaimed that the DPP “harps on about the same old thing year in, year out...They are out of tricks.”
Just like Beijing and the KMT harp about the same fake consensus year in, year out?
The office’s posturing was more inane than normal, because it was responding to the message Tsai posted in simplified characters on a social media platform that Beijing bars the people in its own country from accessing.
However, the office also ignored a Facebook post by Ma, who wrote that unification cannot be discussed until the injustices of the Tiananmen Square Massacre are redressed, and asked why the CCP cannot face its own history as Taiwan has.
A very good question indeed.
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