Taiwanese bakery and beverage shop 85°C landed itself in hot water after declaring on Wednesday that it supports the so-called “1992 consensus,” and that Taiwan and China are “one family.”
The assertion that the two nations are one family has been a source of great controversy since Taipei Mayor Ko Wen-je (柯文哲) said it at the twin-city forum between Taipei and Shanghai on Aug. 18, 2015.
Other politicians, including former Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) chairwoman Hung Hsiu-chu (洪秀柱), have made similar statements and in December last year, a cross-strait baseball tournament held in Shenzhen, China, came under fire from the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) for flying a banner proclaiming a cross-strait “family.”
Calling China and Taiwan a family is understandably offensive to Taiwanese who do not wish to be associated with China — a nation that incessantly blocks Taiwan’s attempts to participate in the global arena. However, the statement essentially means little except for placing companies in the position of alienating those who identify as Taiwanese — as opposed to Chinese — in exchange for access to the Chinese market.
Ko on Sunday last week said that his idea of a “cross-strait family” does not pertain to politics, but rather to economic and cultural exchanges. By this logic, all nations that share close economic ties might call each other “family,” and some do.
Former US ambassador to Canada Bruce Heyman wrote in a June 1 piece for the Guardian that “We [the US and Canada] are family. Millions of Americans and Canadians are related to each other by blood or marriage. Thousands cross the border every day — visiting relatives, doing business, celebrating holidays.”
The difference is that Heyman had nothing to gain by making this statement and was not coerced by Ottawa into professing it. Rather, he was making the statement to criticize his own president — US President Donald Trump — for hitting long-term ally Canada with tariffs.
Unlike economic arguments, which are easily quantified, defining family on cultural terms is problematic, because culture itself cannot be objectively defined. The Oxford dictionary defines culture as the “ideas, customs, attitudes and social behavior of a particular people or society.”
However, no one would argue that all people in a society share the same attitudes and ideas on all issues. Customs cross national borders — such as how Christmas is celebrated across the world, or how weddings are held in churches in many nations.
Even in a nation such as China, by no definition of “culture” are the people in all its regions culturally the same. An old Chinese proverb says of China: “Praxes vary within 10 li [5km], customs vary within 100 li” (十里不同風, 百里不同俗). Anyone who has traveled throughout China knows this very well.
That is not to say that one cannot come to certain conclusions or generalizations about a nation as a whole, but these are subjective observations.
Hong Kong writer Lo Wing-hong (羅永康) was quoted in an editorial on Jan. 24 last year as saying: “While Chinese treat everyone like a thief, Taiwanese try to provide a sense of security which allows people to be free from fear. Believing that people are inherently good, Taiwanese are not always suspicious of others ... the idea that the two places are culturally similar is absurd.”
Lo’s observations demonstrate that people might have different subjective experiences in China and Taiwan, based on some definition of “culture.”
In democratic Taiwan, a company or individual should be free to irrationally define China and Taiwan as “one family,” but they should also prepare to be criticized by a citizenry who disagrees with them.
Jan. 1 marks a decade since China repealed its one-child policy. Just 10 days before, Peng Peiyun (彭珮雲), who long oversaw the often-brutal enforcement of China’s family-planning rules, died at the age of 96, having never been held accountable for her actions. Obituaries praised Peng for being “reform-minded,” even though, in practice, she only perpetuated an utterly inhumane policy, whose consequences have barely begun to materialize. It was Vice Premier Chen Muhua (陳慕華) who first proposed the one-child policy in 1979, with the endorsement of China’s then-top leaders, Chen Yun (陳雲) and Deng Xiaoping (鄧小平), as a means of avoiding the
As the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) races toward its 2027 modernization goals, most analysts fixate on ship counts, missile ranges and artificial intelligence. Those metrics matter — but they obscure a deeper vulnerability. The true future of the PLA, and by extension Taiwan’s security, might hinge less on hardware than on whether the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) can preserve ideological loyalty inside its own armed forces. Iran’s 1979 revolution demonstrated how even a technologically advanced military can collapse when the social environment surrounding it shifts. That lesson has renewed relevance as fresh unrest shakes Iran today — and it should
The last foreign delegation Nicolas Maduro met before he went to bed Friday night (January 2) was led by China’s top Latin America diplomat. “I had a pleasant meeting with Qiu Xiaoqi (邱小琪), Special Envoy of President Xi Jinping (習近平),” Venezuela’s soon-to-be ex-president tweeted on Telegram, “and we reaffirmed our commitment to the strategic relationship that is progressing and strengthening in various areas for building a multipolar world of development and peace.” Judging by how minutely the Central Intelligence Agency was monitoring Maduro’s every move on Friday, President Trump himself was certainly aware of Maduro’s felicitations to his Chinese guest. Just
On today’s page, Masahiro Matsumura, a professor of international politics and national security at St Andrew’s University in Osaka, questions the viability and advisability of the government’s proposed “T-Dome” missile defense system. Matsumura writes that Taiwan’s military budget would be better allocated elsewhere, and cautions against the temptation to allow politics to trump strategic sense. What he does not do is question whether Taiwan needs to increase its defense capabilities. “Given the accelerating pace of Beijing’s military buildup and political coercion ... [Taiwan] cannot afford inaction,” he writes. A rational, robust debate over the specifics, not the scale or the necessity,
RSS